As people get to know you, or hear about you, they associate certain emotions and images with the collection of phonetic sounds that make up your name. That s why your name could mean different things to different people - and probably does. Your name is also one of the first things you tell strangers if you have any interest in interacting with them. Moreover, because how we think is so influenced by the norms of the society we live in, how our names sound, even how they look written, carry with them a certain feeling before we, the people our names are supposed to represent, even enter the picture. Yes, this means we are often pre-judged by the associations our names conjure up even before someone has met us.
Companies are also pre-judged.
Think back to the first moment you heard the name Verizon . You don t know what the company looks like. All you have to go on is the company name, those three syllables chosen for greatness out of 8,500 groupings of sounds. Companies are inherently different from people in three crucial ways that impact the naming process. Their names either capture their positions from early on, think IBM, or come to represent their positions, think Toyota.