The Name Is the First Quote

Founders often ask us: does the name really have to be a foreign one?

It depends who is listening.

Let me put our view up front. A name is the first quote. It decides the posture in which the other side listens to you. Why? Because in Europe the name is the first translation. People remember what they can pronounce, and only what is remembered leads to a second meeting. A name that has to be sounded out first adds a toll to every introduction. The toll is low, but it is charged every time.

Do the small sum. An introduction at a first meeting runs about thirty seconds, and saying and spelling the name takes three of them, exactly a tenth (figures illustrative). Three seconds sounds worthless. But we do twenty or thirty mandates a year, half new and half returning clients, and the new half repeats that introduction a few hundred times in Europe. What is saved is not three seconds. It is the patience the other side still has to keep listening.

So We Use Two Names

Our legal entity in Europe and our going-global service brand are called Grande Cygne, and the international site is grandecygne.com. The Chinese site is glacier.mba, with four more Chinese mirror domains carrying identical content. Six entrances, one version.

Cygne is French for swan, a word a local recognises at a glance and pronounces correctly in a second. It does not explain who we are. Its only job is to start the conversation.

And what does the Chinese name carry? Where we come from. "Gengxin" is taken from Gengshen and Xinyou, the sexagenary years in which Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus, and it sounds close to Glacier. Grande Cygne translates literally as great swan. A swan flies a long way. The name remembers where we came from, who we go abroad for, and what kind of manufacturing stands behind us.

So would keeping just one name be simpler? It would not. Drop one and you have one more end to explain. The two names each take one end: the French name is the other side's entrance, the Chinese name is our root.

After the Name Comes the Account

In naming, what we care about is not how it sounds but what coordinates it sets for us. Setting coordinates means every later trade-off has to answer one question: is this worthy of the name. Slogans on a wall fall off. A constraint written into the name does not fall off easily.

There is another layer, the arithmetic of the capital markets. What a company is really like cannot be described in words; decision-makers need an anchor, so "who it resembles" stands in for "what it is". The name, the bearing, the way you appear all answer that question for you. Only once someone says your name easily do they have the attention to look at your production line.

But the name only solves the first second. From the second second on, people look at delivery, at response time, at who is on site when something breaks. Brand equity is the part other people remember for you. It is useful. As things stand it also expires: firms at their peak when we entered the industry were nowhere to be seen on site a few years later. The name was still there. The people were no longer at the table. So a name buys the chance to be heard, not the result of being trusted.

Can anyone travel a stretch on the name alone? Of course. Just not far.

We are fairly sure of this one: a name that is easy to say can press the cost of a first meeting close to zero. The rest of the cost cannot be reduced by a penny. So in hanging out this name we also take it as a constraint. However easy the name is to say, the delivery has to hold up just as well when it is spoken.

(For the full statement on the domains and the two characters "Gengxin", see questions one and six of the Archive's "Official standard answers".)