I agree with Kim: the new name for the now privatised BBC Broadcast is simply daft.
“Red Bee Media“, as it will now be called, is a hopeless marketing and rebrand attempt. It’s all too reminiscent of when PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ consultancy arm tried to rebrand into “Monday”. It was so much of a failure they even tried to pretend it was a windup.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2035803.stm
Ben,
The biggest problem with naming any new company – not including the obvious ones such as trademarks – is that the domain name also needs to be available. Pretty much all of the 25,000 English nouns had been registered as domain names by 1998. Even today, trying to find a good combination of adjective/noun or noun/noun is hard as many have been snaffled by scumbag companies that would like one to pay USD100s for the privilege.
Back in April I was researching names for a new project and did the usual searching with Internic’s whois database and the name I had chosen (one adjective, two nouns, similar to the Beeb’s new offspring). Having satisfied myself that it was free I left it for a couple of weeks before registering it. Guess what? It had been grabbed soon after I checked availabilty and it was now ready for purchase for USD500…
The interesting thing about the Red Bee thing is that EVERYONE’S first reaction is disbelief. I’m sure there’s a marketing term for it but the result is that
a) people are talking about how bad a name it is
b) people will remember the name
So choosing Red Bee has produced the desired result!
RED as in socilist and BEE as a busy body, all this disguising the purchasers’ – investment funds and a bank.