Sometimes I wonder if marketing is really my calling.

A few months ago, I was at the Citrix Synergy show.  The booth next to ours was a company called “Extra Hop” that provides performance analytics.  Their booth was busier than ours, but the whole time I kept mumbling to myself (and to any of my colleagues who would listen)

“Extra Hop?  That’s a terrible name!  It sounds like you are adding latency to a network.”

Not two weeks later they got $41M in Series C funding.  Clearly their marketing team understands something about their customers that I don’t.

At VMworld, we were near an IT security company named Thycotic.  Yes, Thycotic.  At first I thought it sounded like a thyroid disorder.  Then someone said it out loud and it got worse.

“Why would you name your company something that sounds like “psychotic” with a lisp?”

But apparently they are one of DC’s fastest growing tech companies.  They’re on the Inc 500. Their name is not holding them back.  (Nor, by my cursory research, is their name purposely ironic.)

It goes to show you that marketing is subjective.  “Good” marketing is determined by the market, not by critics or outsiders.  Put another way, the proof is in the pudding.  Here are 11 examples of companies who changed their slogans.  Not all the ‘after’s seem better to me, but the market felt otherwise.