Catchy Name for Sale

There is an announcement today that uLocate has purchased the rights to the name Buddy Beacon from their client Helio… terms were not disclosed. uLocate had created the service for Helio and would now presumably use the Buddy Beacon name to turn around and market similar mobile friend finding applications under the same name using their WHERE platform. Without knowing the deal terms, some random off the cuff observations, none of which seem too positive for Helio…

MVNOs like Helio are almost certainly looking for ways to make any extra money they can these days, and given the meager amount of assets they own, is it possible that the most valuable thing they could dig up to sell, was the rights to a catchy name?

Typical MVNO don’t own much of anything, except their brand and the value adding marketing propositions they can create to acquire and hold on to customers. Buddy Beacon was seemingly one of those value adding services.

The MVNO business relies heavily on the ability to get customers to stick around long enough (and spend enough) to make back the cost that it took to acquire the customer in the first place and hopefully some extra. By selling off what seemed to be one of their more valuable assets Helio will now be just another provider with Buddy Beacon as a part of their service offering, effectively eliminating a reason to buy Helio specifically in the first place, and then also lowering a barrier to leaving for those Helio customers that did like the service.

A service such a Buddy Beacon will be so much more useful and likely to succeed if you could locate and interact with friends across any carrier, and uLocate will try to make that a reality I am sure. And for uLocate it seems smart to use all of that Helio marketing equity invested in the catchy Buddy Beacon name, to help give such a fledgling new service a running start.

In five years, I bet Buddy Beacon is alive and well… but I am not sure you could say the same thing for Helio.