What's in a name?

Posted by on 14th April 2011 / 2 comments

News broke this morning that Mark Borkowski, founder and CEO of the Borkowski PR agency had ‘grown disillusioned with the traditional consultancy model’ and had left the agency with immediate effect.

MB plans to start a new agency in his own name, whilst Borkowski is to rebrand as Beige. The announcement has certainly got people talking, with #beige even trending on Twitter in the UK. Most of the discussion seemed to be around:

1) Whether the whole thing was a stunt of some kind. It’s certainly possible, the whole story seemed a little strange as only around 20 per cent of the tweets when #beige was trending were about Borkowski. And MB has previously worked with entertainer Lenny Beige on a spoof video - clue or coincidence I couldn’t say.

2) Whether Beige was a good name for a PR agency.

It is the second point that got me wondering, how important is the name of a PR agency and indeed any business?

We agonised for ages when naming Rise PR and it was only about 14th on our list – the others were either already registered with companies house or we would have been saddled with a shonky ‘.euronet’ web address. For a pre-dominantly tech PR agency ‘rise’ doesn’t scream hi-tech and when naming it we already had vague ideas about moving to Portsmouth and it doesn’t really resonate with that either.

But ‘rise’ does have positive connotations as a word and people have mostly said nice things about it so I guess we did ok. I think it looks good written down too. But you do wonder how much it all matters. There are some dreadfully named PR agencies out there (I’m not, er, naming names) that are hugely successful, so do people really care? Would a PR agency name put off / attract a prospect?

And Beige, why not? The irony thing may wear a little thin after a while but as long as the work is good then I think it could work.

Tagged: PR agency name

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PaulieA

19 March 2013

That's a good point and a sign of things to come I'd think. That said, bigger agencies have tended to not include 'PR' in the name, its smaller peeps like me that have to spell it out! Or maybe we don't, but felt like it when we named Rise PR anyway. Wonder why 'beige' should trend though? The tweets seemed to be a fairly disparate collection earlier on.

Ben Matthews

19 March 2013

And losing the term 'PR' in the title = disassociation from PR and the blurring of all marketing practises? A Twitter search on 'Beige' only has around 5% of tweets about Borkowski: http://twitter.com/#!/search/Beige