Contrary to Shakespeare’s contention in “Romeo and Juliet”, there is a lot in a name when it comes to advertising. A memorable and meaningful name is a way to stand out from the crowd and this came to mind when my attention was brought to a new Silicon Valley mobile payments company called “Pago”.
Apart from the rather obvious connection with payments (“pago” means payment in Spanish), there’s also a good phonetic side to the word conveying an impression of convenience and speed i.e. “pay and go”. This is just the sort of distinctive message that a payments service needs these days as there are so many similar services competing for the mobile user’s attention and custom – my guess is, given Pago’s location (Mountain View), this is particularly important.
But it goes deeper than that. According to Pago’s founder and CEO, Leo Rocco, one of the advantages of his service is that users can “skip the line” (another speedy metaphor), or in English “avoid the queue” (not so vivid a word, but still appealing). This highlights an often overlooked area where a payments service can differentiate itself and which is gradually coming to the fore under the term “mobile ordering”, particularly in the restaurant sector. It’s that middle ground between remote mobile ordering/payment for goods and services where you could be hundreds of miles away from the retailer and the very close interaction of paying for your purchases using your NFC-enabled phone at the retailer’s EPOS. This is all about “avoiding the queue” when you are in the restaurant or fast food chain waiting to order your meal, or paying for it when you are finished. Time spent waiting in queues doesn’t feel like time well spent – hence the attraction of mobile ordering services. Of course, the retailer has to be suitably equipped to handle the mobile ordering requests or we simply move from a physical queue to a virtual queue, but given a good implementation, the queue could be a thing of the past for the mobile consumer.
I’m sure we will see a variety of these middle ground payment services coming to market in the future and not just in the hospitality sector – but without a good name, no one will know …
Actually Pago is a GREAT name, which is why Oi – the Brazilian carrier started using it over 5 years ago as Oi Paggo (Portugese – diff spelling same meaning). Not suggesting it was stolen – different geography but surprised that the article doesn’t mention it. Oi Paggo spent $100 million on advertising using the Brazil soccer player Ronaldinho (when he was good) and had very little to show for it. Paggo is now spun out of Oi and being run by a great mobile money innovator named Masayuki Fujimoto. Let’s hope that Pago and Paggo never overlap in the same market.
Hi Dion – Yes I totally agree, Pago is a good name. Maybe I wasn’t clear – it was Shakespeare who was saying that it didn’t matter what the name was
Thanks for the pointer to Oi Paggo.