There is nothing really high tech about tile. It just sounds that way at Internet Tile Inc.
The Murray company used to be called J.T. Tile, after owner John Trujillo. It has had that name for most of the dozen years Trujillo has been installing ceramic tile and marble around the valley.But earlier this year Trujillo incorporated his business and brought in a son as a partner.
Time for a new name, he figured, and before you can say "Just what is hypertext markup language?" he'd hit on Internet Tile.
"We needed a flashy name," Trujillo said. "I figured `Internet' Tile would be a household name anymore. You watch TV and you hear that name every day."
Trujillo is not the only no-tech business owner linking up to the high-tech hype.
A painting company, a carpet business, several real estate firms and a remodeling business all have technological twists to their names.
Building image through association is nothing new in the business world, though.
In the '50s when uranium mining boomed in the West and atomic weapons marked military might, there were lots of "Atomic" cafes and motels. Moab, for instance had an "Atomic Motel" (now the Kokopelli Motel) and even a "Uranium Club."
By the time the United States landed a spacecraft on the moon in 1969, businesses named "Apollo" touched down on Main streets everywhere. Of course, it was also the flower power decade, so names drawn from the Zodiac - like "Aquarius" - were popular, too.
Drew Bedford, creative director at The Summit Group in Salt Lake City, said corporate merger mania of the '80s spawned names that were highly impersonal.
But now in the '90s the Information Age has dawned, with its Information Highway, World Wide Web, Windows, cyberspace, icons, modems and mouse
"People realize the cyberworld is changing the consumer landscape and they want to cash in on it," Bedford said.
The trend is to do that by bestowing a high-tech related name on a business and tapping into what they call in the advertising business "primary and secondary reads".
Take Lucent, the new name for AT&T's hardware division.
"It has a nice sound, it doesn't sound imposing," Bedford said. "But Lucent also has a secondary impression that makes people think in terms of being lucid, intelligent, in the know."
In 1994 when The Summit Group helped Vasilios Priskos come up with a name for his new commercial brokerage firm, it hit on the name "Internet Properties, Inc."
As a small commercial brokerage trying to compete with larger firms, Priskos wanted a name that sounded familiar and was easy to remember. The term "Internet" is widely publicized and yet a lot of people don't really know what it is or how it works, Priskos said.
"It was really appealing to me because it has national recognition and is in the newspapers daily," Priskos said.
He also liked the fact that "Internet" stands for "international network," since he emphasizes a networking approach in his own business. The name worked.
"I have people call and say `Oh, Internet Properties, I've heard of you'. But, really they haven't. They have just heard the term," Priskos said.
It's just that sort of gut familiarity and solid image Robert Myers and Vali Mahak hope to bring to their remodeling business when it dons a new name in September.
After eight years as "Myers and Mahak Remodeling," the Salt Lake firm is about to become "Icon Remodeling," a name drawn from computer terminology.
Icons, in geek speak, are little symbols that represent files and programs stored in a computer. Myers thinks "Icon" sounds interesting and implies quality service and the ability to deliver on time, which is important in the construction field.
It sounds solid and, in addition to its new techie coinage, has an older more established meaning: anything devotedly admired.
"It's more or less an attempt to get more of an appealing name, something that might be current, upbeat," Myers said. "It's something that everyone seems to be aware of that is engaged with computers."
Besides, computers are now as much a part of the remodeling business as they are of any other enterprise.
"It's something we're dealing with in our business and we're becoming fairly high tech. We feel we're in more of a computing business," Myers said.