Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Building With Sports Sponsorships

So the Charleston RiverDogs are offering naming rights to their new baseball stadium. Should you bite? Here are seven questions to ask about any deal with a professional sports team.

1. What’s the connective tissue?

Sporting events and teams certainly breed emotion, particularly at the local or regional level. That’s why the public will not only align itself with a team, but also with a venue and a sponsor. Research from the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science indicates that the “sponsor-event fit” and the perceived sincerity of the sponsor are the top determinants in generating a favorable response from a sports sponsorship.

So here is the simple litmus test: Will the average fan “get it?”

2. If you’re not the lead dog, how good is the view?

Sports teams will sell you sponsorships for just about anything associated with their business – from stadium naming rights to your logo on the team bus, from major billboard placements inside the stadium to your logo on beverage cups and napkins. Ask yourself what happens once average fans are saturated with high-profile sponsorships and logo placements.

Do they have any mental storage space left to associate your good name when it’s only splashed across the second floor atrium?

How Did Apple Computer Get Its Brand Name?

One of the many sidebars to media coverage of the death of Steve Jobs in October 2011 was an old question: Where did the name Apple Computer come from?

Lots of speculation has floated by:

• Jobs & Wozniak wanted their startup to be in front of Atari in the phone book.
• They wanted distance from the cold, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time – with names such as IBM, Digital Equipment and Cincom.
• It was a tribute to Apple Records, the music label of the Beatles.

For solid answers, it’s always a good idea to go to the founders.

In the just-published Steve Jobs biography, Jobs told Walter Isaacson he was "on one of my fruitarian diets" and had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded "fun, spirited and not intimidating."

Writing in his 2006 book iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon, Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak explains it this way:

"It was a couple of weeks later when we came up with a name for the partnership. I remember I was driving Steve Jobs back from the airport along Highway 85. Steve was coming back from a visit to Oregon to a place he called an “apple orchard.” It was actually some kind of commune. Steve suggested a name – Apple Computer. The first comment out of my mouth was, “What about Apple Records?” This was (and still is) the Beatles-owned record label. We both tried to come up with technical-sounding names that were better, but we couldn’t think of any good ones. Apple was so much better, better than any other name we could think of."

His concerns turned out to be justified. Apple Computer, Inc. was sued by Apple Records over trademark violations in 1989.

Brand Naming: Achieving Higher Recall

In the grand old comedy “The Sunshine Boys,” two aging vaudevillians are discussing comedy itself. One informs the other that words with K and P sounds are funny. Therefore, words such as chicken, pickle and porcupine are funny. But other letters and words – horse, lettuce and dog – are not.

What’s going on here? Language experts will tell you that we just react differently to certain sounds.

And the letters those old-timers were discussing? They were “plosives.” A plosive is a bit of language that pops out of your mouth and draws attention to itself. A plosive is a “stopper” that makes us pause for emphasis when we say it.

The letters B, C, D, K, P and T are all plosives.

Which is why someone once said that the old advertising agency name Batten Barton Durstine and Osborn (BBD&O) sounds “like a trunk bouncing down a flight of stairs.”

What’s especially interesting is that brand names beginning with plosives have higher recall scores than non-plosive names. Several studies of top brand names have made that point. Examples: Bic, Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Kodak, Pioneer, etc.

And a disproportionate percentage of brands today start with the same three plosive letters: C, K and P. Bottom line: It makes linguistic sense to start a brand name with a positive, potent plosive to achieve greater recall with consumers.

Contributed to BSI by: Steve Rivkin

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

More Marketers Embracing Brandverbing

“Google it.” “Did you Xerox the report?” “Please FedEx it.”

Once upon a time, using a brand name as a verb was verboten. It was behavior that would drive a trademark lawyer crazy.

But more and more marketers are deciding that the grand slam of branding is to become part of the language – in effect, having your trademark substitute in everyday usage for the type of action or service that your mark identifies. Could there be, they argue, any clearer expression of a brand’s leadership?

“Skype me when you get to Lisbon.”

“Did you TiVo the awards show?”

“Dad’s outside, Simonizing the car.”

In other words, just verb it!

The proper care and feeding of trademarks occupied an entire chapter in our 2004 book The Making of a Name (Oxford University Press). The International Trademark Association, for instance, advises never using a trademark as a verb: “Trademarks are products or services, never actions.”

The internet generation, though, is increasingly casual about naming protocols. Who other than a trademark attorney would say, “Let’s look it up on the Google brand search engine,” or “Let’s go in-line skating with Rollerblade in-line skates.” Get real.

Brand Naming And Consumer Behavior

In Buy Me!, his latest book, consumer behavior expert Marshall Cohen talks about how to retool your products and your marketing to one-up your competitors. Or as the book’s subtitle suggests, “new ways to get customers to choose your product and ignore the rest.”

Marshall Cohen is the chief industry analyst for The NPD Group Inc., a worldwide leader in market research and consumer behavior. He has followed retail trends for more than 30 years, and is a frequent contributor to broadcast and print media outlets.

We sat down with Marshall to talk about how naming can help – or hinder – the process of differentiating your brand and driving consumer choice.

Q: Marshall, when you look at everything that goes into selling at retail, how important is a name? Can a good name counteract bad strategy?

Yes, just look at the title of my latest book … Just kidding. Actually, what is in a name means a lot to a product. Sometimes it is the catchy name that gets the attention of the consumer. It may be because it stimulated an impulse or simply caught their eye.

Another consideration is that the name is easy to remember and share with others, so word of mouth (still the most popular form of recommendation for products) becomes even easier or the name becomes so familiar that consumers jump on the popularity bandwagon. As in, “I’ve heard of that somewhere, so it must be good…I should buy it.”

Q: Do retailers know something about naming that would benefit other marketers?

Brand Naming: Don’t Be Afraid To Use Humor

Would “outlandish” work in your category?

Consider the rough-and-tumble moving industry, where independent carriers are proud of their reputation as tough guys who tackle any challenge. Some of their names push the envelope:

Hernia Movers in Wisconsin. (Tagline: “The potentate of totin’ freight.”) Check them out at www.herniamovers.com

Death Wish Piano Movers in Massachusetts. They tickle the ivories at www.deathwishpiano.com

College Hunks Hauling Junk. Begun as a summer project by two guys looking for a way to make money. It now has 30 owned or franchised locations: 800-586-5872

And then we have the story of George Boudreaux and the envelope he pushed.

Domain Naming Reaches New Heights

It’s a boom time for domain names as more people and more marketers flock to the Internet. Domain names have grown 7% in one year, with more than 41,000 new ones added each day, on average, last quarter. Online ad revenue in the U.S. is expected to reach $25 billion this year, according to reports from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

So we asked Pat Kane, Assistant General Manager for Naming Services at VeriSign, Inc., for the latest information on the boom. VeriSign with 2,200 employees worldwide, is the global registry operator for .com and .net, and is the leading provider of Internet infrastructure services.

With the company since 1999, Pat Kane is responsible for product development, marketing and management for VeriSign’s Naming Services business unit that includes all Top-Level Domains (TLDs) operated by VeriSign under contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as well as emerging domain name spaces.

Q: Pat, we understand domain names around the world have now passed a milestone -- the 200 million mark.

Correct. According to our latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, the third quarter of 2010 closed with a global base of almost 202 million domain name registrations across all TLDs.

Chinese Brand Naming Strategy

Someday, China will be the biggest consumer market in the world. No wonder marketers are increasingly interested in Chinese naming. 

With his training in classical and modern Chinese literature plus an advanced American psychology degree in bilingual memory research, Andy Chuang (pictured) is the first in his family’s 1,500-year history to master not only Chinese, but also English. 

His company, Good Characters Inc., founded in 2001 in Fresno, California, specializes in Chinese naming and linguistic and cultural evaluation. 

We sat down with Andy to talk about the rationale and the process of Chinese naming.

Q: Americans have a set of basic assumptions about how they name things. Is it true that the Chinese have a completely different orientation towards naming? 

Americans typically choose existing first names for their babies. For example, John, David, or Mary. However, the Chinese name their babies in the same manner you would name a company or a product. The Chinese pick some “good characters” and put them together to form a “good meaning.” 

Consider the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, as an example. Hu is his family name. His first name, Jintao, is the combination of two characters, Jin and Tao. Jin is “brocade” or “bright and beautiful.” Tao is “big waves.” By putting these two together, Jin-tao means “enchanting waves” or, metaphorically, “splendid success” since brocade is associated with richness and success and big waves are strong and unstoppable. 

Global Brand Naming Requires Deeper Thinking

Ahh, the perils and pitfalls of international branding.

Last year it was Russian energy giant Gazprom igniting a global firestorm of criticism when it announced a new joint venture in Nigeria. What went wrong, naming-wise?

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Nigerian counterpart signed a $2.5 billion deal to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Africa’s most populous nation. But they named the new firm Nigaz. It was intended to be a fusion of “Nigeria” and “Gazprom” and be pronounced “Nye-gaz.” But as the Reuters news service reported, that can be read phonetically as an offensive term for people of black African origins.

(Maybe energy companies are just tone deaf. A few months after this gaffe, BP's then- CEO called the Gulf of Mexico oil spill a “modest problem.”)

Now comes an innovative company primed for a global launch of a breakthrough technology brand under the name Hallelujah.

Exploring Technology And Pharmaceutical Naming

In the naming playground, technology and pharmaceutical firms are among the busiest performers. So we asked Mark Steiner, a nationally recognized intellectual property attorney, for his take on the good, the bad and the ugly in those fields. Steiner heads the trademark & copyright practice group at Townsend and Townsend and Crew in San Francisco. 

Q:   Mark, what’s your general advice to people who want to name companies and products in technology and pharmaceuticals? 

When it comes to trade name and trademark selection, it is important that the company make every effort to pick a name and mark which are appealing from a marketing standpoint and protectable from a legal perspective. 

As to the latter, we are looking for a mark which is distinctive. This means that the company should be creative and avoid the temptingly easy route of coming up with a mark which is descriptive of the products. The best marks are those which have no meaning whatsoever within the context of the industry: A fanciful, coined term which is a made-up word (think "Exxon" or "Kodak") or an English word which has no relevant meaning, such as "Apple" for computers. 

Such marks are most likely to be available when we conduct proper trademark searches and will afford the company broad and strong trademark rights. The mark will most likely be relatively easy to register in the United States and abroad and, if there are no other marks which are similar in appearance, sound and meaning in the industry, the company will be able to enforce its trademark rights against others who would dare come close. 

Q:   What are some examples of successful names in technology and pharma land? 

XIENCE, SurgRx and FlowMedica for medical and surgical devices are strong names and marks. They are distinctive, registrable and enforceable against third parties.