Doom Bar is the name of a sandbar at the mouth of the River Camel in Cornwall, England. I mention it here as it has lent its name to one of the biggest brands in the UK. This is an example of a local entrepreneur naming his new product after a local landmark and not having to get an expensive marketing consulting company in to ‘brainstorm’ a name. Other examples of this are a spicy sauce from Worcestershire and a car named after the Italian ski resort of Cortina, there are countless more.
This led me to some research to find out what Gulf brands were also named after places or things and I came up with the following: Amwaj, which is Arabic for wave. There is a famous food company from Kuwait named after America, and the huge retail company named after the Arabic word for pearl.
The thing is though that most Gulf brands are named after the founding families. We just have to look around us to see Almoayyed’s, Kanoo’s and Al Futtaim’s all over the place. This is not just a Gulf thing most of the famous brands in the world are named after their founders. Is this a good thing? When I was setting up my first business my father gave me some sound advice. He said “never put your own name on a company” so my first company was called Craigforth Construction, and like Doom Bar it was named after a local landmark. My current company in the UK is called Dilmun Services.
Why then should you not name a product or company after your own name? Well the obvious reason is if it goes bust then it is not tied to you. Another reason is that if your name is splashed all over the place then it can give rise to all sorts of unwanted attention, every cold caller and financial salesman in the world will be on your phone.
When naming products that are going international you have to be very wary of what an innocent word in one language may mean in another. There was the Vauxhall Nova car and in Spanish nova means “no go” A Persian company wanted to let you know their wash powder would get your clothes as clean and white as snow so they called it their word for snow which is “barf” And there is Ghana’s favourite beverage “Pee Cola”. However for sheer inventiveness, hairdressing salons must take the prize for some of their names. “Curl up and dye” “Hairport” “Facelook”. Not too sure I would go into “Blood Sweat & Shears”. But my favourite has got to be “Bushwhackers”.
We have another category here and that is the shop sign which has been written by someone whose command of English is not as good as he thinks. Examples are: “Majic Dress”, “Hot & Spacy” “Smart Beby Saloon” and the very descriptive “Sale of Chicken Murder”.
I am all tensed up now from writing this so I am off to Juffair to the “Thai Message Parlour”.