I have been involved with branded or named companies in every decade since the 1980’s and can tell you that naming has become exponentially more difficult over the decades! We now live in a world where people and businesses squat on domains hoping for a payday and an industry has been created selling and reselling these domain names. We also live in a world where SEO is closely tied to owning the dot com version of your company name, so .io, .cloud, .biz just doesn’t cut it. All the good names are taken….or so it sometimes appears!
When we set out to rename and reposition SoftNAS we sought a name that best reflected our vision for the company as a data performance company, we wanted a descriptive name that talked to the explosion in data in the cloud. We looked at hundreds of names from made up names, to compound words to misspelled names and we found Buurst, spelled with two U’s and many people’s first reaction might be why choose a name misspelled with two U’s?
Why does this matter? Something I learned very early in life was taught to me by Lee Iacocca, an American automobile executive best known for the development of Ford Mustang, while at the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s, and for reviving the Chrysler Corporation as its CEO during the 1980s. I met Lee at a conference and he told the story about how he named the Mustang. He didn’t seek a name that everyone liked, he knew that a familiar name that half the people loved and half the people didn’t meant that everyone would be talking about it and the name would stick. I believe the Ford Mustang name still in use 50 years later was a genius move!
My CMO, Alex Rublowsky and I thought that this was opportunity for something special. Earlier in my career, I spent 13 years at Citrix whose name and logo was defined by duplicate letters in the name. The name Citrix worked, in part, because of the two I’s. The two I’s stand out when it is typed, but truly punched when you oppose the I’s in the Citrix logo.
We saw this as the inspiration for the embedded U’s in the Buurst logo. The two U’s make Buurst interesting, but the embedded U’s in the logo make it Buurst!
There are many things about Buurst that remind me of the exciting earlier days at Citrix….We are betting on the same trajectory! Those in favor say “I”.
