William Shakespeare was a literary genius, but an indifferent marketer.

We know this about him from his play Romeo and Juliet, in which he delivered a line that would make any marketing professional groan.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” Shakespeare wrote to convey the idea that the name of things is irrelevant.

Today, companies spend big money hiring marketing firms to come up with names that capture our attention.

So sorry, Will, but names matter.

The Hull Group, which purchased Leigh Mall in 2019, has announced a new name for its development. We do not know if the company hired a marketing firm or used focus groups to help them with this. Probably not, given the outcome. If a marketing firm was hired, let’s hope the fee was modest.

So, without further ado, we give you….Columbus Place.

It’s quite possibly the most generic, uninspiring option you could land on.

You imagine company officials sitting around a boardroom trying to find a name for the property.

“Well, it’s in Columbus, so maybe we could do something with that,” someone offers. The room falls into perplexed silence until someone says, “Look, we’ve got to come up with a name for this Columbus place.” More silence.

Finally, the big boss sighs, then says, “To hell with it. Let’s just call it Columbus Place.”

Leigh Mall got its name from the Leigh family, which sold the land where the mall was built more than 50 years ago. And while we don’t necessarily think it needs to keep the Leigh name, there is some familiarity associated with it.

But if there has to be a new name, we would hope it would be a name to capture our imagination. Milan has its Galleria Vittorio Emaneulle II. Bangkok has its Siam Paragon. Istanbul has its Grand Bazaar. Closer to home we have The Arboretum (Austin, Texas), Saddle Creek (Germantown, Tennessee) and The Renaissance (Madison). Midtown Village is in Tuscaloosa and The Summit is in Birmingham. Heck, even elsewhere in Columbus, we can find shopping areas named Littlewoods, Windchase and The Crossing.

Folks will travel quite a distance to visit at a Galleria or a Paragon or a Bazaar. Who doesn’t like a good Arboretum? A Renaissance has been known to get people off the sofa.

It’s not uncommon to see a shopping center name jazzed up with the use of “shoppe,” an archaic spelling of “shop.”

But a Place? Why would anybody go to any trouble to visit a Place? They are already in a place. Everywhere you point to – the bathroom, a pasture, a ditch, your neighbor’s garage – is a place, and every square inch of Columbus can be correctly identified as a Columbus Place.

While Leigh Mall has suffered a few black eyes in recent years, the development is a keystone property in Columbus and its success would lift the entire community. That’s why we believe it needs a more creative name than Columbus Place.

With that in mind, we encourage the Hull Group to revisit the naming effort, hopefully finding one that inspires shoppers to believe the property has something more to offer than just being a Place. Maybe invite the public to submit their name suggestions. Let your future shoppers get invested in this and come up with a name that draws attention and traffic.

Ultimately, the Hull Group has every right to name their property anything they like, of course.

But in our view, Columbus Place is neither imaginative nor does it represent the collective hope the community has in its rejuvenation.

Of course, nobody asked us.

We kind of think they should have.

The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.

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