Monday, July 19, 2010

What’s in a name….well……..A LOT!!

For an entrepreneur, forming a company is like a dream come true. And this dream brings with itself the contours of the whole branding exercise. So when the founder of our company took the big entrepreneurial leap, the first task at hand was to decide upon a name for the venture. NAME – an innocent simple four lettered word…hmmm…can just say that the Widescope team now no more gives it the tag of simplicity, atleast!

Naming your company could be a real tricky affair. You would want the name to be unique, creative and yet memorable. All in all, a PERFECT NAME! So the quest for ‘the perfect’ name began. To start with, each member of our team jotted down couple of attributes that he or she felt the name should bear. `It should be original and distinctive…It should convey a message…Why not make it jazzy? Let’s keep an acronym…No way, it should be descriptive ….’ The list went on and then there was Big Boss -`You should be able to remember it after hearing it once – simple yet classy’.

Keeping all these inputs in mind, we put on our brainstorming hats – pens/pencils, notepads, dictionary & thesaurus (in both physical and online avatars), laptops and big coffee mugs at position. The first one to get an entry into our “Hall of Name” was IRIS Media Pvt Ltd. Turned out that it was already a registered company based out of the land of maach – bhaat (read West Bengal). Other names of similar fate were Marvel Media, ICON Media, PRIME Media and Transent Media– already there though in varied versions. Someone suggested TCE Media, TCE for The Complete Entertainment. But the response was `logic toh achcha hai…par naam nahin’ (logic is good but not the name). One of our young guns proposed E3 Media – Excellent Entertainment Everyday!..Wow, a readymade tagline free! But a segment of the team vetoed the idea – No numeric names please! Next in line was XENT Media, as in eXcellent ENTertainment. Hmmm…not bad…cool…sounds good. But our director gave us an objective response. `Xent gives an impression of a small exclusive specialized company catering to the needs of a niche segment. We need an umbrella name for a much wider audience’. Point duly noted. 

Moving on, someone put forth the name Paradigm Media. Now here we came to realize a common but often overlooked fact of life. One of the veterans in the team said that the ‘aam aadmi’ (common man) may not be able to pronounce the word correctly. We are a global entertainment company and our products and services would reach the masses. The whole nomenclature exercise goes futile if the name itself is lost in skewed pronunciation or translation or whatever. So basically a name should sound linguistically natural and should be easy to comprehend. Done.

The next name to find a palpable acceptance was GEN –Global Entertainment Network. Gen in its normal form could also refer to all `gen’-erations seeking entertainment. Fine. But there is a slight hitch when you work for a company that stands by the book. Global, Universal, Worlwide -  however good these words may be, the race to get these names approved is delicate, the procedures complicated and the rules quite stringent, to say the least. So we decided upon keeping a name that involved lesser `complexities’. Though we maintained that the scope of the name would still be the same, something global and universal. An entity with higher ambitions, greater aspirations and wider horizons. Something that calls for a wide scope of creating a piece of work. And there we were, we had our name!

The name... WIDESCOPE MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK PVT LTD.

Phew! So with all those permutations and combinations, moments of intellectual highs and lows, puns intended and unintended, the mission was finally accomplished. A name with a global reach and we are so proud of it!

Well, to wind up this blog, all I can say is – All the Best for your naming endeavours!!

4 comments:

  1. Even Shakespeare might regret his saying ‘what’s in thy name’ if he were to survive in marketing 3.0 era. Like cinemascope which was used to change shoot in wide scope, lets hope we’ll get the same revolution in marketing/branding and other media functions. Offering a kaleidoscope of services across various verticals, it sure seems that there was ‘some’ thinking involved for the name of the company. And is that any indication of the author’s writing panache or company’s dedication to details, at the end of the day the reader is enlightened..:). And i do hope its for both. Cheers to everyone..and to Widescope.

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  2. its been really a nice practice man , infact a "creative fight" for namimg the company but thanks to the team !!!
    Finally with wide thinking you people would be providing many scopes :)
    best of luck!!

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  3. well it seems dat u hv put a real brain storming session into words. such incidents when put into words make ppl understand dat dere is no rocket science required for branding. u just hv to be clear in ur thoughts what u want... nd result is dere

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