All The Good Names Are Taken
‘Who are we working with?’ I asked my manager. The year was 2005, and the few fluffy weeks I had sitting around the office were coming to an end, as I had just been assigned a new construction project.
‘We’re building for the University of Denver, their School of Hotel Restaurant and Tourism Management,’ she told me.
‘Blah…’ I said. ‘That’s a mouthful. Do we have to keep calling it that for the next year?’
‘They call it DU HRTM for short,’ she told me.
‘HRTM? Seriously? Sounds painful. If you were a new student, and you were trying to decide between business, law, or HRTM, would you pick the vaguely masochistic option?’
‘It’s got a wine cellar?’ she offered.
Residential development continues apace in our fair city of Melbourne, and it’s recently gotten me to thinking about property marketing. If you’ve ever marketed a property before, you’d know that there’s a lot more to it than a fancy sign board and an awkward display suite made out of a shipping container. You’ve got to think about who’s going to use your property, your target market, and what’s important to them. You’ve got to think about location, who that location speaks to, and why. The size, shape, price, colour — everything — about a place should be thought through in terms of the market, or they should be anyways. Amongst all this, a miniscule, often forgotten piece, is the name. All the big flashy bits like the advertising and website and such get all the attention and the name is left for naught, which is tantamount to forgetting to put a front door on your house. The name of your new property/facility/building is front and centre, the first impresssion that most people get of the place. Thus the reason that it is so important to give it the proper consideration. To follow are three things to think about when naming, which is a grand step in the right direction toward not bungling the name and failing at property marketing.
1. Addresses are boring. It was clear that this naming strategy was getting tired when I starting having completely underwhelming interactions with people in the building industry (well, more underwhelming than usual) who had taken to describing what they do using addresses.
‘What project are you working on?’ I would ask.
‘332 Exhibition Street,’ or ‘427 Glenlyon’, or ’19 Boring Way’ would be the response, along with no actual descriptors, as if it all meant something. Sure, you might get lucky and end up with something iconic like 101 Collins in Melbourne, which has come to be synonymous with overly posh stuffy offices occupied by well dressed blue and black coloured drones (the place has gone downhill since I used to work there), however you could just as easily end up having a building with an address, just like all the other buildings with addresses.
2. A duck is a duck. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, so the saying goes, which like many males I too bought into and gave my wife a lovely wedding ring adorned with an expensive sparkler. And she loved it and she said yes and we’ve been married 15 years and all that. So how would she feel if I revealed to her tomorrow that I couldn’t really afford a diamond all those years ago so just settled on a really nice cubic zirconia (and by-the-way you haven’t noticed yet so what’s the big deal?)? That brings us to the fabulously named Zirconia, pictured above: You too can live in fake luxury (you cheap bastard), or so their name is telling us. Zirconia has assisted in illustrating the second point: If you name your property after stuff, your property becomes inevitably associated with that stuff. Beware.
3. People names are risky. Naming your building with people names is like naming your dog Bob. Often times it just makes people giggle, but you run the risk of rooting your dog with the connotations that names come with. Mention of The Bruce, yet another outbreak of ‘Luxe’ apartments for grungy Brunswick, makes me think of this slightly shady guy Bruce from my old neighbourhood who drove around in a crusty brown car with an 8-track player inside, well after 8-tracks had been relegated to moustachioed outsiders, the 50+ set, and record store owners. Further let your imagination run with the website livingwithbruce.com.au. If this is what you want going on in a buyer’s head when they are contemplating your new development, by all means proceed with this strategy. We may be looking at a building occupied 100% by dudes.
Perhaps we have reached peak property name territory in Melbourne due to all the new development and all the good names have been taken, which explains the Zirconias popping up around the place. I doubt it, but in any case I do not envy those property marketers who must conjure up something memorable and fitting for each and every new bunch of residences which are essentially the same boxes save for a couple of tweaks here and there, and something which dovetails into the rest of the marketing plan. If nothing else, avoid naming your next building something that turns into acronym HRTM, unless of course your target market is into pain and suffering.
