We do a significant amount of Trademark work at the Firm. And over the years, one thing we have noticed is that a significant percentage of clients want to name their businesses and products with names that are either (i) very descriptive of what they do or (ii) comprised wholly of common words or phrases.
As an initial though, it is often very hard to register these marks with the Trademark Office, but that is for another post (and no doubt we have covered this topic before in the blog and on our website). However, there may be a even more compelling reason to stay away from descriptive or common names: they make you company or service very hard to find in common search engines like Google.
Case in point: there used to be a company in our building that I seemed to remember offered a service that we have an interest in obtaining now. I vaguely remembered their name: 24 by 7 or 24×7 or 24/7. I entered these various variations into Google along with the term “Colorado” to find them. I had no luck! It seems there are hundreds if not thousands of businesses in Colorado that use variations of this phrase on their respective websites to indicate that they are always available or open. The 24 by 7 name was just not serving this company well. After a few minutes I gave up and starting researching other companys that offered similar services.
The lesson: consider search engines when picking a name for your product or service. If the terms defining your product or service are too descriptive or commonplace, someone who knows of you because of other advertising or marketing may not be able to easily find you. In other words, pick a name or mark that when entered into Google, Live or Yahoo will bring your web site or other internet entries for your company to the top of the list.
