I started pondering the importance of spelling when it comes to brand recognition because of my new domain name: paulmacp. I firmly believe that having a domain name that is short and easy to remember is helpful in establishing and identity a personal brand.
It is an easy contraction of my proper name Paul MacPherson. I thought about paulmac for a minute but the dot com domain was not available. I have been experimenting with dot net domains, and people just intuitively think dot com, and opted for the additional P and registered paulmacp.com. As an added bonus, except for YouTube and Delicious paulmacp was also available for use as a consistent social networking id (twitter.com/paulmacp, facebook.com/paulmacp, ca.linkedin.com/in/paulmacp, etc.), I had to use paulymacp for them.
Meanwhile, my CMS of choice, WordPress is often incorrectly written as two separate words: Word Press. In fact, if I recall correctly they even had a small forum post addressing the proper spelling and clarification, rightly advocating consistency in brand executions. People were confused, defended their right to misspell based on SEO, and wondered if management was being a little too uptight. However, there’s a reason why brand evangelists exist: even when it’s clearly written out what rules the brand must follow, many many people find a way to fudge it up.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
Is that a bad thing? For the brand owners, it does hurt us in a way. Web wise, it lessens the our SEO web juice when people inconsistently try to search for different terms. It divides the search results. In another, it will convey the wrong idea to a new audience. Visually, it is also inconsistent.
Is this the way we need to also address the reality of brand spelling and recognition? That, as long as people still identify you and still understand who you are, that it doesn’t matter as much if Coca-Cola needs that hyphen in between, or if it helps SEO, fine, let’s spell EE as “Expression Engine?”
At the end of the day, as long as you’re still recognized, and you yourself are consistent then even if others mistake it, as long as they know you exist in some form, is it okay? In my opinion, yes. However, I think it is always right to correct others when you do have the chance, and not to cry over the spilt milk if others still don’t follow suit.
Brand Nazi or Brand Savant?
What is your stance on naming? Are you more strict or are you more fluid? If strict, how do you enforce your naming? If loose, where do you let it go?
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