People often ask what “Tivix” means. It means nothing, actually (sorry, I’m sure you were hoping for a more interesting answer than that).

OK, so here’s an answer that may be a little more interesting to you: if you look at all the great brand names in history, most of them have been two syllables and meaningless. Kodak, Pepsi, Advil, Nike, Lego, Xerox, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Apple (those last three are words of course, but they are meaningless in the context of their business. Apple doesn’t sell fruit, the last time I checked).

So when we started our company we grabbed the name Tivix just because it was two syllables and meaningless. And that’s pretty darn valuable.

The main advantage of a meaningless brand name is that it doesn’t limit what kind of business you might evolve into. Many companies start out in one business and eventually evolve into something different. International Business Machines ended up changing their name to IBM because they no longer make business machines. Meanwhile Salesforce sort of has a problem right now because they are expanding into all kinds of software products that are pretty far afield from the sales force automation products that they started with (you’ll notice that they’ve branded their proprietary platform language as “Apex” which is – wait for it – two syllables and meaningless!)

There’s another reason why we chose our name – it’s very unique in a search engine world. If you Google “tivix” we are pretty much the only thing that comes up in the search results. From a branding perspective that’s pretty important – customers have no trouble finding us.

I wrote previously, for example, about a local musician acquaintance of mine whose name is Kevin North but his stage name is Kevy Nova. Because if you Google “Kevin North” you’ll get a thousand random results but if you Google ‘Kevy Nova” you’ll just find one. And the search results show his music on his website, his music on iTunes, his music on ReverbNation, his music on iHeartRadio, his music on SoundCloud, and more. That’s pretty powerful.

That’s branding, baby. And that’s why we’re Tivix.