If it's hard to say, it must be risky

Some new research in Psychological Science from The Association for Psychological Science, tells us that human beings tend to find unpronounceable product names risky. As the recent MPI meeting and tonight’s ISES meeting is on branding, it got me thinking.

My first company was a mystery dinner theater and we went through all sorts of names including the one that still makes me laugh, as my partner was named Frank, so Frank n’ Steins, was a top contender before we chose The Mystery Café. Now, 22 years later, we know the naming/branding was just right.

With TeamBonding, it was another name that said what we do and we recently trademarked Teambonding as it has become a great way to distinguish our offerings from other team building providers. We’ve had similar success with Recipe for Success and TrainingPath but our first spin-off from Teambonding, Scaventures has always been a challenge to pronounce.

Does that make it scary? Will our clients not use us because they can’t pronounce it? Scaventures was a word we created by combining the words Scavenger with Adventure to take the run of the mill scavenger hunt to the next level. It has proved to be a great word in our vocabulary as we can describe a new hunt by just adding the word to it like our Cell Phone Scaventure or our Urban Scaventure or our Limousine… yes you guessed it, Scaventure.

The same study says that if something is familiar, the thinking goes, it is comfortable and safe. So consider Scaventures a word that you can pronounce and is familiar. Just for the record, you can pronounce it anyway you like.

Check out the Scaventures Home Page