I just got off the phone with Richard, who is starting a new business, “Quick Sale Express,” a business buying and selling homes. This was a difficult one to find a good number for because he’s focusing on generic terms in a crowded industry and needs a decent number because of the type of advertising he’s doing (mostly display advertising). It’s even harder when they’re starting a new advertising because they don’t usually have many good lines or creative slogans or really have the message of their advertising down yet.

We tried each of the terms Sales, Express, Quick, as well as the related terms like Sell, Buy, Buyer, Fast, Cash etc. We tried putting his state initials in front of the terms. We used the Keyword Lookup to see what additional phrases it could find. We even tried his name and the city name he was in. We essentially tried or considered almost all of the typical things to search for vanity numbers.

Sometimes you have to be more creative

The only thing left was to reach further outside of the box. This tends to push people outside of their comfort zone and I admit it isn’t easy. People also tend to assume that the obvious first choices are always better than the more creative and fanciful ones, (even though they haven’t thought of any more creative ones). It takes a lot of work to get to the really creative ones, but they often turn into the most exciting and valuable options.

The real answer was that we really needed more creativity and one of the best ways that I like to do that is to look for crazy slogans. Crazy in this context means the extreme of creative, things that make you nervous and you probably couldn’t say. You don’t have to actually use them, but thinking of really crazy things helps to unleash your creativity and then you can always tone them down. It’s easier to tone things down than it is to increase the creativity.

I felt bad at the end of that call as I do sometimes, because I essentially told him he had to go back to the drawing board and be more creative. He had to find a theme or a slogan to help him stand out and give it more personality, and more uniqueness. We talked about just using some premium nice numeric numbers as a backup but the best solution was clearly to add more creativity to the concept.

UPDATE: As Paul Harvey would say, Here’s the rest of the story!

He called back two days later very excited. He had just activated 888-DR-BUY-SELL and had also reserved DrBuySell.com and was having a new logo made up with a home with a stethoscope around it. He was using a theme of the home medic, and it sounds like a great combination. It’s a good example of having to stretch a little to get away from the generic most obvious terms and turning that into a unique brandable concept.

You won’t be able to use his exact terms or his twist but you get the idea that you do have to give your own concept a twist. That extra twist can wind up giving you a great new flavor that makes your business really work much better. It takes some work but this is your business and your baby, so don’t hold back. Setting the right direction in the beginning is much easier than changing it later after learning the hard way.

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