Creativity Gone Wild: Beware of Punctuation Marks and Special Keyboard Characters in Business Names

by Marcia Yudkin

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Published on this site: March 11th, 2010 - See more articles from this month

Recently I tried to order a documentary DVD called “Young at Heart” from a wholesale publishing site. Typing in the title of the DVD in the site search engine brought up nothing. This puzzled me, because the movie had been shown in theaters and won several awards. And it wasn’t brand new. Scratching my head, I went away and tried again a month later. It still didn’t show up in the database. Then somewhere deep in the back of my mind, I had a dim memory that there was an “@” sign in the title. I changed the search term to “Young @ Heart” and now was able to place the order.

This incident illustrates the most serious danger of using symbols other than the 26 letters of the alphabet in product names or company names: People may not be able to locate the product or company in online searches.

Such symbols include the exclamation point, period, hyphen, apostrophe, &, #, $, *, @, and the symbols for degree or Euros (both of which I have no idea how to type).

Imagine someone trying to convey one of these names correctly over the telephone, and you run up against another serious problem: Many people don’t know what these symbols are supposed to be called. Let’s say the name in question was a law firm, Yang & Young. If the person trying to spell the name called the symbol an “ampersand,” which is correct, what do you think are the chances that the listener would know this word? If the speller called it the “and sign,” this might go down as “+” instead of “&.”

Memory is another challenge. Some people (like me) have auditory memories, so they’ll remember how something was pronounced (like “Young at Heart”) and not how it looked. Those with visual memories may remember a hyphen or two in a name but not its exact location.

The next problem is that many of these special characters are actually not allowed in domain names, which means that the official spelling of the entity on stationery, signage and web graphics differs from what needs to be typed into the browser bar to find the corresponding site or to send email. This leads to customer errors, frustration and confusion.

Likewise, some official databases belonging to national governments, states and provinces do not allow punctuation marks or special characters as part of a name. This assures you severe bureaucratic hassles. The same can happen with vendors and large companies you do business with, where they’ll have to search for your records by your zip code or some other identifier. You may find that some other software or web-based applications do not function correctly with symbols as part of a name input field.

When you get publicity, you won’t be able to count on publications spelling your quirky name as you prefer. The house style may forbid or be unable to accommodate your innovation. Then because these practical obstacles produce alternate spellings, the impact of media coverage and word of mouth across the Internet on your search engine rank gets watered down.

Often names containing symbols, punctuation marks or special characters look very cool. But don’t cripple your new name creation with them.

Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, a naming company that brainstorms catchy tag lines, company names and product names according to the client’s criteria. For a systematic process of coming up with a catchy, effective new name or tag line, download a free copy of "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line" at:
http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm.