Eat My Words - The Kitchen Sink

On the Radio - Alexandra Explains Money Making Marketing Method

Alexandra's latest appearance on PR 101 Radio had her discussing how to monetize your company name and how to avoid costly naming mistakes. (Listen here).  She spoke at length about one of Eat My Words favorite naming clients, "Spoon Me" and how they have very creatively and successfully used their name to, as Alexandra puts it, "have the customer pay you to advertise your company". 

The reason this works so well for Spoon Me is the rich wordplay surrounding the name. They have Spoon Me baby clothes, shirts and our favorite - pajama's. When they were preparing to open, instead of the usual banner saying "Opening Soon",  theirs said "Spooning Soon".  Other uses are the "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Spoon" signs in their stores, the "Spoon the Chef" barbecue aprons and bumper stickers that say "If you are riding this close you may as well Spoon Me".  The value of all this free advertising and increase in brand awareness is staggering.  While monetization will not work for all businesses, those in the retail and service industries can benefit from this unusual Money Making Marketing Method.  Certainly t-shirt sales should not be the primary test in deciding on a name, but potential monetization and free advertising can be considered a lucrative fringe benefit.

Spoon Me, Baby!

The frozen yogurt chain we named "Spoon Me" is enjoying phenomenal success... check out how wildly popular it is...

This BS Brand Didn't Bear Up

Our friends at Cake Financial (a company that Eat My Words named), have a post on their dishy blog concerning the recent bad news about Bear Stearns.  (While on the subject, we are enjoying "The Slice", Cake Financial's weekly market summary video starring Steve and Sven that is funny and destined for Internet immortality.) The Bear Stearns financial fallout resulted in a reduction in market cap from the 52 week high of $21.7 billion on April 25, 2007, to a low of $386 million on March 17, 2008 .

What ultimately will happen with the firm started by  Joseph Bear and Robert Stearns in 1923 is not yet clear, but it is safe to say it will not ever recapture it's prominent position on wall street, it's market value, or (the ultimate point of this post), it's brand value.

As recently as the third quarter of 2007, Corebrand ranked Bear Stearns #429  in it's regular BrandPower Rankings ( Between US Bancorpand Deutsche Bank, to put it in perspective).  According to Corebrand, BrandPower is "a single-score measure of the size and quality (familiarity and favorability) of a company’s reputation.  It’s a measure of brand equity presented in both historical and competitive context. " 

Our guess is that it will most likely (O.K., for sure) drop off the list altogether next time CoreBrand does their rankings.

While this is an extreme example, a significant portion of the aforementioned market cap freefall can be attributed to the intangible value of Bear Stearns which includes its "brand".

Perhaps Bear Stearns will take the time honored path of changing its name to distance itself from its own past, or just quietly fold into the paternal hands of its savior, JP Morgan.  If you want to change your name and rebuild a new brand, Bear Stearns, we're here for you.  Eat My Words specializes in creating names that score immediate (to use CoreBrand's words) familiarity and favorability.  We're all about helping a company build its brand from the start with a name that creates buzz, which creates publicity, which creates business, which creates revenue, which creates brand value. 

To put it mathematically:

EMW = ROI