This article is from WeChat official account:Weixizhibei (ID: weixizhibei), author: Wei Xi, title figure from: vision China
Let’s start with the conclusion: I’m not targeting Didi, Xianyu, Dingding and SF, I mean—All names with homophonic or polyphonic sounds are not good names.
Now these names are already well-known products, but please remember that in the early days of their birth, people who heard these names and searched for them were not at all, but more likely to be “didi” and “salty”. “Fish”, “Ding Ding” and “Downwind”.
To correct these natural results, the cost of these products has always been ignored.
Homophonic naming is an important genre of naming. Many brands are still complacent with this “unique” and “pun” name, but from the perspective of communication and conversion efficiency, this extremely inefficient method of naming.
The core reason is that it will increase the cost of communication.
one
A product, whether it is an Internet product or a physical product, is widely accepted on the premise that it is widely disseminated, and verbal expression and search are very critical and important links in the process of dissemination.
In the “attention-interest-search-purchase-share” model, the premise of being able to search is to know what to enter, and the direct disadvantage of polyphonic or homophonic characters is that they cannot be search for”.
Loyal users ambitiously Amway your product, but after being heard by Amway people, they don’t know what he is talking about. A second confirmation is required, and the cost of dissemination increases suddenly.
This drawback has beenIt has been largely ignored by the industry.
Be aware that even if this communication cost only increased by 10%, it would mean a 10% increase in promotion costs, which could have been completely avoided.
two
Let’s look at two renamed cases——
At the beginning, Didi Taxi was not called Didi, but Didi. In May 2014, Didi officially changed its name from Didi to Didi.
So, why should it be renamed?
The direct reason was that it was sued by a company called Miaoying Electronics Hangzhou. Miaoying Electronics is an intelligent transportation system software development company. Its core products include taxi-hailing software. The company reported to the trademark as early as March 22, 2011. The bureau applied for the “DiDi” trademark, which was successfully registered on May 21, 2012, before the birth of Didi.
This is a common trademark case, but Didi’s name change process is very interesting:
With Cheng Wei’s determination and style of play at the time, buying the trademark Didi was definitely an option at the time, but why was it changed to Didi in the end?
Because Cheng Wei discovered from the data point of view that about 30% of media and 70% of users write Didi as Didi, so Cheng Wei took advantage of the trend and changed Didi’s name to “Didi.”
three
Coincidentally, the travel website Mafengwo has also undergone a name change process.
When it was born, its name was “ant honeycomb”, and “ant bee” is actually a word that doesn’t exist. Perhaps it is a combination of “ant” and “bee”. In short, the founder was very hot-headed. Just fancy these three words.
As a result, this non-existent word will inevitably have obstacles in all aspects of product development, from advertising to SEO, from search to ASO.
Because any normal person enters “mafengwo” in the input method, the result must be “horse honeycomb”, and changing from “horse honeycomb” to “mafengwo” means to switch the text selection twice.
horse nestThe number of users means how many users have overcome this cost. And those lost users who fail to overcome this obstacle will not tell the company—”Oh, sorry, I lost because your name is so weird. “.
Finally, on February 6, 2018, Mafengwo was renamed Mafengwo, and it has been 12 years since the birth of Mafengwo. Although the open letter of the name change is very literary, the intuitive feeling I read is-“We It used to be silly, now we have changed it!”
I have personal experience myself: I used SF Express for the first time when I was studying in 2009. At that time, my classmates strongly recommended that I could use SF Express if I wanted to send it soon, and I could arrive the next day.
At that time, PC was still the mainstream platform, I naturally typed “Shunfeng Express” in Baidu. Although Baidu’s result was ranked first by SEO, “SF Express”, but I had to call my classmates , To confirm that the tailwind he said is actually SF Express.
This is the cost of acquiring new users.
S.F., can I claim the phone bill that year?
four
Another disadvantage of multi-tone homophonic names is the low recognition rate in voice scenarios, that is, your name cannot be recognized by the machine.
The deterministic trend today is: the importance of voice platforms is increasing——
1. The shipment of smart speakers has grown at a rapid rate of more than 70% per year in the past three years. According to Strategy Analytics, global shipments reached 147 million units in 2019, the fastest growing in the consumer electronics industry One of the mainstream subdivision tracks, whether it is the international giants Apple, Google, Amazon, or the domestic giants Ali, Huawei, Xiaomi, Tencent, Baidu, etc. are all investing heavily.
2. Another rapidly emerging voice scene is the smart car system. There are indeed many scene problems with voice interaction in public places, but the car voice scene is a very user-friendly application track. The current car ownership in China is 270 million Two, the United States is 250 million two, the current penetration rate of in-vehicle voice systems is still relatively low, even if the penetration rate only reaches 30% in the future, it is still an extremely significant active user group.
3. TWS(The rise of true wireless Bluetooth headsets) will also lay the foundation for the popularization of voice scenarios. According to Counterpoint data, global TWS headset shipments will be 120 million units in 2019, and Canalys’ latest forecast shows that by 2021 The volume will exceed 350 million units respectively.
Driven by these three factors, and with the promotion of 5G to the Internet of Things, a large number of smart devices will be connected to the Internet, and the penetration rate of voice interaction will inevitably increase significantly.
This process may not come soon, but the basic trend is almost certain. In this context, the new names of polyphonic characters and homophonic characters will be encountered in the process of speech scene propagation and circulation. The sense of blocking, thereby affecting growth.
In the voice age, it is very important to have a name that the voice assistant can understand.
Five
Bytedance’s products are very good in naming.
From the point of view of the results, the other star products of Byte-Today’s Toutiao, Douyin, Watermelon Video, Understand the Car Di, Volcano Video, Connotation Duan, Pippi Shrimp, Tomato Novel, Feishu, and more Flash……. When you hear these names, you will not think of other Chinese characters.
So why can byte beating avoid this pit?
The reason is that, as an APP factory, byte naming is also data-driven: After a new application is born, a standard process is to take multiple names and put them in the application market for testing, and then test the conversion funnel of each name. , Pick the one with the highest conversion rate.
Under such data inspection, the conversion problems caused by polyphonic and homophonic characters can be avoided to a large extent.
Zhang Yiming’s original words are “Even if you are 99% sure that a name is better than others, what does it matter if you take a test?”
A case can verify this idea in a sense-Byte once had a stock app called “Sodium Magnesium Stock”, which has recently been renamed “Dolphin Stock”.
six
Someone may say: “Wei Xi, you are too worried, now the input methods are smart, IEnter’logical thinking’, it will naturally come out’Luo Ji thinking’, the problem you worry about does not exist. “
Is this correct?
Of course not, this is a typical inversion of cause and effect.
Yes, The current input methods and speech recognition are indeed very smart, but behind this intelligence requires countless data training.
Yes, you can now directly type “Luo Ji thinking”. The price behind this is that Fatty Luo emphasized that “it is the Luo with the surname Luo” countless times in the video. It is because countless people have already The result of this wrong way of homophonic input means that Luo Pang has already paid a lot for this name.
It’s Di. Today, the input method can easily type “DiDi, SF, Xianyu and Dingding” because these products have been successful, but please remember that when these products were born, the input method It must be “Didi, Shunfeng, Salted Fish and Tintin”.
For a cold-started product, all users are new users. The cost of this is extremely high. If you can’t understand the cost, I will tell you a story of my own——
seven
My official account “Wei Xi Zhi Bei” has an article at the end of 2018 called “Thinking about YouTube Skipable Ads” was made into an audio program by Luo Zhenyu and Luo Fatty Luo Ji Thinking” Issue 626 “What is Advanced Control? “.
At the end of the program, Fatty Luo recommended my official account-“You can follow Wei Xizhibei”. Fatty Luo’s influence is still very large. The audio program with more than 700,000 views is mineThe official account brought about 19,000 fans. (Thanks to Fatty Luo)
So how do you evaluate the efficiency of this recommendation?
In fact, it is difficult to evaluate, because there is no comparison of similar data, but the only thing I can be sure is——If my official account is not called “Wei Xi Zhi Bei”, this time it is recommended The increasing efficiency of the powder will definitely be higher.
Why?
Now everyone sees the text description “Weixi Zhibei” is very clear, but in fact what users hear is-“You can follow Weixi’s public account Weixi Zhibei”.
Many users are stunned to hear this. If he wants to follow, he must go to the manuscript of the audio program and confirm that it is “Wei Xi” instead of “Wei Xi” or “Wei Xi” in order to follow successfully.
Going through the audio transcript of the program is actually a very costly action, and some people don’t even know the existence of the transcript.
If there is a better name, I expect to increase at least another 10,000 fans. You know, I had only 50,000 fans in total.
This is a particularly vivid lesson.
eight
Since the homophonic polyphonic characters have such drawbacks, why are quite a few people still willing to take homophonic names?
The main reason is that people like the coincidence effect brought about by this “pun”. After explanation, it will indeed cause a pleasant feeling.
But please note that this kind of pleasure is recognizable-for example, in text reading scenes, text ads, image ads, and TV ads with subtitles are all fine, homophonic ads Words are also one of the most commonly used methods by advertisers:
For example, “Wrigley chewing gum, one arrow fell in love”, “Go to Tmall, just buy it!”, “It’s good to be a woman”, “So life can be more beautiful”, these premises are that the audience knows what brand you are. So you can directly understand the beauty of this pun.
Puns with simple names will lose this effect and increase the difficulty of communication.
Remember, never give up focusing on the essence in pursuit of the uniqueness of the surface!
Wei Xi, a science and technology columnist, specializes in writing long articles, focusing on analyzing the underlying logic of the Internet and social sciences
This article is from WeChat official account:Weixizhibei (ID: weixizhibei), author: Wei Xi