Branded for Survival: Naming Effects on the Life Expectancy of New Companies

Abstract

Companies have short lives – most start-ups are no longer in business ten years after their foundation. Numerous studies have investigated the factors that have a life-prolonging effect. What has been ignored so far is the influence of the company name. It is one of the very first marketing activities, indispensable for registration, for finding investors, and for addressing customers, and it is also the most persistent element of corporate branding. Our study of some 1,300 new companies shows higher survival probabilities for firms with explanatory and/or easy to process names. This opens new perspectives for branding research, in which survival analyses have not yet found their way in.