Page 99 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com
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Most of the great brand names are unconfusable: People associate those
brand names only with the companies behind them. The names have no bad
associations created by their connection to something else with the same name.
We follow this principle when we name our children. We ruthlessly exclude
every name with any negative association. So after Nixon and Watergate,
Americans stopped naming boys Richard, just as parents everywhere stopped
naming children Adolf after World War II.
People’s minds are quick to make connotations. The smart service company
avoids any rub-off of negative connotations by developing unconfusable brand
names.
To speed up the building of your brand, choose an unconfusable name.
Brands and the Babysitter
Brands are for the rich, you say.
Not so—as the story of the baby-sitter shows. Kate Thurman is the future
president of a very successful company, but today, she is a high school freshman,
a baby-sitter, and a born marketer. Kate seeks out every neighborhood place that
parents frequent: the toy store, Gymboree storefront, day care centers, and
school summer camps. She convinces proprietors they are serving parents by
posting Kate’s signs for her service, “KATE ♥ KIDS.”
Borrowing the idea from local remodelers, Kate also creates a red, blue, and
white sign: “KATE ♥ KIDS—World Class Babysitting: 555-1111” and mounts it
on her old red-and-white rocking horse. On the lawn of every house where she
sits, Kate plants the rocking horse.
Kate’s uncle Frank owns the neighborhood video store—another marketing
opportunity. Kate convinces Frank to let her place her red, white, and blue ad in
the clear sleeves on the back of each video jacket. Kate pays for this with three
free nights of baby-sitting for Frank’s baby girl—whom Kate adores and would
happily watch for free.
Kate then becomes a baby-sitter temp agency. She lines up other girls to work
in return for 10 percent of their pay. Local parents know they will always get a
sitter through Kate, so they are willing to pay Kate a 15 percent premium for
eliminating their hassle of finding sitters, especially at the last minute. So Kate’s
employees make more per hour through Kate than they would earn on their own.
Naturally, savvy local sitters start going through Kate.
Kate has created a dynasty. Everyone in her ten-square-mile neighborhood
