One-name-fits-all

Naming anything is one of the hardest things you can do in life. And naming a business is no different.

It's especially hard because everyone is looking for a degree of differentiation. Not simply from a market perspective, but also from a legal one. And it's the latter that's the really tough part, because the vast majority of names have already been taken. In fact, according to a CNN report that I quoted as part of this article I wrote for B&T as long ago as 2003, 98% of the words in a typical dictionary have already been registered by one company or another.

As I outlined in the article, there's a whole range of pitfalls when it comes to naming, but here I want to focus on the question of differentiation.

In particular, I want to focus on a curious example of an entire industry where differentiation is almost absent when it comes to the name.

British pubs.

From the King's Head to the Queen's Arms. The Red Lion to the White Horse. There's an endless list of pubs with either exactly the same name, or at the very least ones that are very similar.

Maybe it's a quirk and the rules don't apply here. Maybe it's a problem, and that's why dozens of pubs are closing each and every month.

If we were to believe one of my favourite authors, George Orwell, then the name doesn't really matter so much. That is, just so long as it's called "The Moon Under Water" – the name he gave his ideal pub in a 1946 article he wrote for The Evening Standard. He may well have been right, and given that he was labelled "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture" by none other than The Economist (and as recently as 2008), it seems only fitting that the final word should go to Orwell.

"And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms."