There’s More to Naming a Company After Yourself Than Ego<br />Peter Thomas Roth, the founder and formulator of a cosmetics company<br />that bears his name, said he had realized when he was starting his company in the early 1990s that it could take a week to come up with a name and two to three more weeks to check with the Patent Office to see if it had already been taken.<br />“There are times people come up to me and say, ‘Alex, you and the band were great two weeks ago,’” Mr. Donner said.<br />“Today, if your name is Joe Steinway, people will think you know a lot about classical music and have this association with you that isn’t true.”<br />What a name can give a company is a story, which David Aaker, vice chairman of<br />Prophet, a branding firm, said companies needed to get their brand noticed.<br />“Facts don’t work,” said Mr. Aaker, who is also an emeritus professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
