Dimmer Switch

Diane Prange at NameWire reported last week on a baffling new business name: Dimdim.

You might expect it to be a social-networking site for C students. But you'd be wrong: Dimdim is a business-to-business company that provides free online meeting services. Its competitors include WebEx, LiveMeeting, and GoToMeeting.

And company honchos didn't just throw darts to pick the company name. As founder D.D. Ganguly explains in the Dimdim blog:

We sat down with 18,000 domain names and promised ourselves that we would not leave without naming our company. We set 5 simple rules:

1)      The dotcom domain name must be available

2)      The name must have high recall

3)      The name must be international

4)      The sound of the name must translate without ambiguity to its spelling

5)      The spelling must translate to unambiguously to its pronunciation¹

 

Five hours later we named the company Dimdim.

Diane Prange's comment: "Eighteen thousand domain names and they picked Dimdim?"

Ganguly defends the name, of course, saying, "There's nothing called bad publicity." It's the Thoof defense: "If you don't like it, too bad."

But let's take a serious look at those "five simple rules." Notably absent is any mention of "communicating what we do" or "expressing our mission" or "suggesting our primary function." Even if "Dimdim" had no pejorative connotations, it wouldn't have any positive ones, either. (Unless you consider sounding like a Filipino nickname a strength. Which of course is your prerogative.)

I can't help imagining being hired as a naming consultant for an ambitious young company that arranges free web business meetings. I do my research, I pound out thousands of names, and I arrive at the presentation and recommend ... Dimdim.

I'd probably get a bonus. And a standing ovation. Don't you think?

___

¹Sic, and no, I don't know what this sentence means.

 

Comments

[michael]

Funny.

I think #4 means 'must be easy to spell if you hear it" and #5 means 'must be easy to say if you read it."

...maybe.

But how do we know it's not dimmdimm or dimdimm or dimmdim or even dimndimn.

Damn.

[John]

I saw your post on this the other day, and it's obviously stuck with me, because I've come back just to leave a comment now.

No matter how I say it, I can't make "dimdim" sound positive. It sounds like a website for thick people. It sounds overwhelmingly negative. And it bears no relation to the service it offers.

I think they to have a rethink.