A new study out today by Clutch, a Washington, DC-based research firm, whose domain name is Clutch.co, shows that 41% of newer, venture-funded startups have invented names, almost three times the amount of invented names in comparison to other high growth companies.
“The influx of invented names could be in response to the desire for a dot-com domain extension. Clutch’s data showed that 88% of startups have .com domain names.”
“However, with various alternate domain options, some emphasize that a company should instead focus on developing a strong, memorable name for their brand.
The data comes from an analysis of 700 companies:
The first group contained 350 companies from the 2015 Inc. 500 list; all of these companies were founded before 2012 and had a minimum of $2 million in revenue in 2014.
The second group contained 350 companies that were identified through the CrunchBase database; all of these companies are venture funded startups that were founded after 2012 and received a minimum of $3 million in venture funding in 2015.
The data collected for each company included: the name, the name type, the construction of the name, the domain name, the domain extension, and the industry the company resides in.
Clutch then compared the name types of companies founded before 2012 on the Inc. 500 list to the venture funded startups that were founded after 2012.
Clutch used Zinzin’s naming criteria for our name type analysis. We analyzed whether a name was primarily descriptive, experiential, evocative, or invented.
- Descriptive – “Names that are purely descriptive of what a company or product does or its function”
- Experiential – “Names that map to the experience of using a product or a service, or to what a company does, or to an aspect of human experience.”
- Evocative – “Names that map metaphorically instead of literally to the brand positioning. They rise above the goods and services being offered and paint a bigger picture.”
- Invented – “The purely invented, the morphemic mash-up, and foreign words not widely known to the English speaker.”
Jay Jurisich, the founder and CEO of brand naming agency Zinzin is quoted as saying:
“We advise companies all the time not to let domain names dictate their choice of names, it’s far better to have a great brand name with a modified domain name, or a non dot-com top-level domain, than a weak name with an exact-match domain.
“The brand name should always have priority over the domain name.”
You can view the entire Clutch report here.
