Of Brands And Naming

Brand naming is extremely important.  Many of you are probably working with brands that already have been named, but in case you are not, here are a few pointers on naming brands:

•People only refer to a person or product using one, or at the most, two names. For instance a car is either a Taurus or a Ford Taurus. People say, “I drive a Honda” or “I drive a Honda Accord.”  Few say, “I drive a Honda Accord EX.”  People occasionally can remember three levels of names – but rarely more.

Saturn is simple. Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue and Oldsmobile Cutlas Sierra are less easy to remember (and can anyone remember what company makes these cars?)  How is a Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue different from a Chrysler New Yorker Salon?  How is an Oldsmobile Cutlas Sierra different from an Oldsmobile Cutlas Supreme or how are both of them different from an Oldsmobile Toronado or an Oldsmobile 88 Royal?  It gets very confusing very quickly.

•Products that run into trouble are those that have multiple levels of names. For instance, Hallmark co-produced social expression software with Microsoft.  Greetings Workshop was from Microsoft and Hallmark Connections (in some cases, this was a sub-set of another suite of products from Microsoft with additional names). What did the consumer remember?  What did they ask for?  Did each consumer use the same name? It might have been easier to call it “Hallmark Greetings Workshop (brought to you by Microsoft)” or “Microsoft Greetings Workshop (featuring Hallmark cards).”

•Coined names (such as Xerox, Kodak, The Blake Project etc.) are preferred if you have sufficient resources to build their meaning.  Coined names are distinct and can be designed to be easy to read, write and pronounce. It is unlikely that any other brand will be confused with yours if yours has a coined name.  Because coined names require significant communication over time to build their meaning, they are best reserved for parent brands or other brands that are extremely important to the organization and that will be around for a very long time.

•Many organizations opt for associative descriptive names, which may be partly descriptive and usually allude to a key brand benefit.  Examples include Amazon, Sir Speedy, Road Runner, Lean Cuisine, Sprint, Die Hard, Aris Vision Institute.  These names tend to work quite well and deliver the added benefit of immediately alluding to the brand’s benefit.  If you want to get into a product or business quickly with a name that helps reinforce the product’s or business’ primary benefit, while still maintaining some level of uniqueness, this is the preferred naming option.

•Generic or descriptive names are least desirable. They are not distinctive in consumers’ minds and they can’t be protected legally.  Interestingly, many online companies with generic names have gone out of business, like Auctions.com, Buy.com, Computer.com, eToys.com, Food.com, Furniture.com, Garden.com, Mall.com, Mortgage.com, Pets.com, Stamps.com, etc. (Source: The Wall Street Journal as quoted in emarketing magazine’s April 2001 issue, page 52.)  (So much for all those once exorbitantly expensive URLs!)

•Generic descriptors are frequently used for sub-brands, when you want most of the credit to go to the parent brand. For instance, at Element K our branding structure featured generic descriptor sub-brands because  (a) Element K was a new brand that we needed to build quickly, (b) our resources were too limited to build multiple brands and, most importantly, (c) we were touting a blended solution across all of our products and businesses:

In summary, coined names are used for products and services that are distinctive, that provide sustainable competitive advantages and that will receive substantial marketing support over time.  Associative descriptive names are used for important products or services, but primarily those that need to have their meaning built quickly or that will not receive the sustained level of marketing support required of coined names.  Generic or descriptive names are reserved for non-mission-critical sub-brands.

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Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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