Happily Unmarried. Petoo. Zoojoo.be. Bewakoof. No one can possibly be blamed for wondering who on earth came up with such names for companies. But start-up firms have their own logic, however quirky it might be.
One is to strike a chord with customers with increasingly catchy names in a highly competitive space. It’s not even necessary any longer to have a direct connection to the service line they operate in.
For instance, Faasos, the on-demand food service, is essentially an acronym, one many would shudder to expand.
“Fanatic Activism Against Substandard Occidental Shit” is what Faasos is. Founders Jaydeep Barman and Kallol Banerjee came up with this after being fed up of eating junk food. “This idea drove the founders to launch a brand that would provide tasty Indian food that can be consumed multiple times a day, unlike pizzas and burgers, and that’s how Faasos was born,” says Revant Bhate, marketing head of Faasos.
Zoojoo.be is another case in point. The name has nothing to do with what they do, which is being a cloud-based social wellness platform to help people form healthier habits through gamification. Avinash Saurabh, cofounder of Zoojoo.be, explains, “There is a famous Rajinikanth dialogue where he says ‘Yenna rascala, jujube’. The word Zoojoo.be is derived from the Tamil colloquial term jujube, which means ‘it’s easy’ and through Zoojoo.be we want to tell people that it is easy to adopt healthier habits and overcome wellness-related challenges.”
While Happily Unmarried and Bewakoof are into online sales of apparel and home decor, Petoo is a food-on-demand service. Petoo’s founder Sethu says he couldn’t think of anything beyond the stomach while naming his firm.
Most start-ups feel that more than focusing on a name that reveals the intent of the business, what really matters is how catchy the name is, to help the company create brand recall.
UrbanClap, a hyperlocal start-up, is going to roll out a brand campaign to reach out to more people. “The theme of the campaign is going to be rediscovering the joy of clapping ,” says Suhail Vadgaokar, vice-president, brand and customer experience of UrbanClap.
K Ganesh, one of India’s leading serial entrepreneurs, says, “In a B2C business, the brand name plays a crucial role as a part of overall brand identity. It is extremely important to have a name that resonates well with the brand proposition of what that company’s core offering is and it should be easy to remember and recollect as well,” adds Ganesh.
He also mentions that with increasing number of start-ups being launched in the online world, availability of domain name is another issue. For instance, Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and CEO of Grofers, wanted to name their on-demand delivery service Gofers instead of Grofers.
“The domain name for Gofer was expensive, but Grofers was available and relatively cheap, so we just picked that,” says Dhindsa. Ganesh says it is better not to reveal the intent of the business through the brand name, as it restricts them from venturing into categories.