They’re as zany or exotic as they come. How often have the names of e-commerce ventures in India foxed you? What could Jabong and Kyazoonga possibly mean?
Kyazoonga, which sells tickets to various events and sports merchandise, owes its name to ad man Prahlad Kakkar, who suggested something even wackier like Kazakazoonga, says Neetu Bhatia, Co-Founder and CEO. At a conference call, someone didn’t catch the first part of the name and said, “ Kya zoonga?” and it stuck.
“There are two ‘o’s in the name, and we hoped it would catch on, like Google and Yahoo!,” says Bhatia, who points out that the Internet world is full of nutty names.
Jabong sells fashion online; Wikipedia tells us jabong is another name for the pomelo, a large citrus fruit (famous as
“As a sub-tropical, evergreen plant, the origins of the name aligned with our corporate ethos,” says Arun Chandra Mohan, Co-Founder.
None of the businesses wanted a name that reflected the merchandise they were selling. So nothing that spoke of tickets or fashion or clothes. Says Richa Kar, CEO of lingerie portal Zivame: “We didn’t want the usual French names luxury brands tend to have … we wanted it to be experiential, not product-led.” So they chose the Hebrew ' ziva ', which connotes ‘bright’, and ‘splendour’, and added ‘me’ to it so that it would stand for ‘Radiant Me’. Zivame’s call centre gets a lot of calls for Zevan, Zivani, Zivaam, the confusion compounded by the stylised logo. The e-tailer often mulled changing it, but decided to retain it so that there will be a funny tale to recount later, laughs Kar.
Baby products Web site Hoopos named itself after hoopoe, the bird with a distinctive black-and-white tipped crest, considered lucky. Vijay Jumani, CEO, says ‘hoopoe’ was already taken up as a domain name. This is also why many Web sites have unusual names — domain names for a .com extension are simply hard to come by, he explains. It’s another story that design limitations forced Hoopos to adopt Ollie the Oyster in its logo.
“The idea is to credit the consumer with some intelligence,” says Kyazoonga’s Bhatia, “not make it too obvious so that it’s attractive and memorable.” It should be easy to spell, and not limiting if the business decides to expand or diversify. Now there’s one theory why jobs portal Monster.com became so big!