How Clever Is Your Name?

One of the best parts of my day is when somebody asks me about the origins of my company name. 

I get asked probably daily about TepFu. 

Where does the name come from? 

I get asked it all the time, it really amuses me. 

When I was creating the name, I remember I had so many discussions with people and some people said to me it was a good name, some people said to me they didn't like it, some people warned me and said you mustn't put your name in the company name. 

There were loads of things, but I knew in my heart and soul that it was a good name and it achieved what I wanted the brand to achieve, it came from the right place even if other people couldn't see the whole picture. 

And when people ask me about my name, I'm reminded that everything has value, everything has value in marketing. 

So I want you to think about your name, and I want you to think about if your company name starts conversations for you? 

Ultimately every part of your marketing should contribute to growth, even your name, perhaps especially your brand name because it's the one thing that people see more than anything else really if you think about it. 

Your name is king. 

There are four reasons why TepFu is called TepFu, so I'm going to share them with you now. 

The Tep bit is obvious, my name is Al Tepper, I hope that's obvious by now.

1 - Kung Fu Panda

The first is because I've had clients over the years before I'd even started TepFu tell me that they don't really understand what I do, that it's a bit like in the film Kung Fu Panda. Kung Fu Panda doesn't move, doesn't make any effort and yet there's a bun in his mouth. 

He always seems to be winning without lots of activity. 

And that was how they felt about me, they didn't understand how I got the result I got. 

They could see the result and they just saw me standing there not doing much and they couldn't understand why. 

And so one of the first reasons why I'm called TepFu is because I love the fact that what I believe we do at TepFu is an art form, it is like Kung Fu Panda, we have turned laziness into a model. 

Now when I say laziness, I mean efficiency but efficiency is not nearly as sexy a word as lazy.

Lazy gets your attention. 

Efficiency, not so much. 

So our philosophy of lazy marketing really is born out of Kung Fu Panda, I mean it's born out of 22 years of marketing experience and commercial and business experience, but if you want to imagine who our spirit animal is it's Kung Fu Panda, because without a lot of effort we get the bun, we get the result. 

And that's the point, why would you spend more energy getting a result, if you could spend less? 

For us that's super efficient and I want our marketing to always achieve that for us and for other people. 

But there are three other reasons why TepFu is called TepFu and it's all to do with the Fu bit. 

2 - Fu stands for Funnel. 

Everything in marketing should be building a funnel. 

Everything in your marketing should be funnelling people towards you and allowing you to nurture them and connect with them and talk to them and progress them as potential clients and eventually to turn some of them into customers. 

So funnels are a major part of that. 

3 - Follow-Up

Marketing is all about the follow-up. 

You create all this noise, 

You create all this activity, 

There's engagement, 

People come towards you, 

They talk to you, 

They send you messages, 

They go into your pipeline... 

...and then you do nothing. 

It's heartbreaking, it's absolutely heartbreaking. 

This is the reason why most marketing agencies won't work on performance related systems of payment. Because most of the time it's the client end that causes an issue. 

The marketing might work, but if the client doesn't follow up, they're just going to blame the marketing. 

But the reality is it's all in the follow-up; planning the follow-up, structuring, architecturing the follow-up into your business is vital. 

4 - F You

The last thing that Fu stands for is FU and this is why. 

In business we convert a fraction of our pipeline, we don't convert the majority into customers and that means that more people we speak to are no's not yes's. 

What we want our marketing to do is to help the no's qualify themselves out quicker, so we don't spend any of their time or our time growing a relationship that isn't going to happen. 

So ultimately we want the customer to give us the big FU, we want our non-customer to tell us to go away. 

We want them to be able to qualify themselves out easily, quickly, effortlessly without us spending time. 

The last thing we want to do is send a big pitch that we've worked on for weeks and weeks and weeks to somebody who's never going to be a client. 

It's a waste of their time.

It's a waste of our time.

Nobody wins. 

So that's what our brand name can create in terms of conversation. 

And it does every day start conversations with people. 

What does your brand create? 

What conversations does your brand create?