Brand Naming - A Good Brand Name is a Good Investment
Nikita Baid
Founder - Moonshhot | Ex- Marcom Head Goodwyn Tea | Ex- PR Manager X-Factor PR & Events
A few years ago, Ron Marshall, owner of a small marketing firm in Springfield, Missouri, decided to count how many brands and ads he saw in a single day. That morning, he woke up to his Sony alarm clock, got dressed and put on his Nike shoes, and drank a cup of Folgers coffee. After making note of those brands—and 484 others—he gave up counting. That was before he’d finished breakfast.By most estimates, we see thousands of brand names every day. The brands may vary in different parts of the world—Li-Ning instead of Nike, say, or Nescafé instead of Folgers—but the pattern is the same. Next time you open your medicine cabinet or kitchen pantry, try counting, and you’ll start to get an idea of just how inundated we all are.
And yet, most of us rarely think twice about the origins or meanings of brand names. What (or who) is a Sony, Folgers, or Li-Ning? How and why were these names selected? What do they mean? Does it even matter?
For those of us who work in the fields of naming, branding, and—more broadly—marketing, it can matter a great deal. According to Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney, brands are “enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product[s] of a thousand small gestures.” A name is one such gesture—it matters because it’s one of many opportunities to convey the important ideas, attributes, or characteristics that make up a brand. And brands, when built and conveyed well, are good for business.
What Makes a Good Brand Name?
Leading naming firms like A Hundred Monkeys and Catchword each present their own lists of the half-dozen qualities they feel define effective brand names. You’ll find similar lists in famous branding books, from Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap to Alina Wheeler’s Designing Brand Identity. Search online, and you’ll find countless articles by marketers or entrepreneurs—with varying degrees of naming expertise—on the three, five, or seven things every great brand name must do. These lists can be useful, but they’re oversimplifications. What makes a name good depends on the context and underlying strategy.
Strategic Qualities of Good Names
Creative Qualities of Good Names
Technical Qualities of Good Names
Few Good Names
To further explore the factors that contribute to the strength of a name, let’s take a look at a few of the best brand names out there:
Often cited as a brilliant company name, Apple apparently came to Steve Jobs when he “had just come back from the apple farm.”16 He chose it because it “sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating.”17 It’s light on relevant meaning—although some say it’s meant to suggest simplicity—but it more than compensates with distinctiveness, standing out against its 1970s and 1980s-era contemporaries like Commodore, Microsoft, and IBM.18 Furthermore, it’s adaptable (as evidenced by Apple-branded products ranging from a streaming video service to a digital stylus), memorable, fun to say, and easy to spell.
This name for a Procter & Gamble mop was created by Lexicon, the Bay Area branding firm behind names like Pentium, Sonos, and Zima. Although it’s an invented word, Swiffer still carries some meaning thanks to onomatopoeia and associations between sw and everyday words like sweep, swish, and swoosh. It’s also a distinctive name when compared with competitors like ReadyMop, Turbo Mop, and Snap Mop (notice a trend?). Add the fact that, according to National Public Radio, it’s “easy to pronounce in any language,”19 and Swiffer seems to meet all the criteria outlined above.
Dating back to 1888, Kodak is a meaningless, made-up word. Founder George Eastman liked the “strong, incisive” nature of the letter k, and created—as described in a 1920 Kodak ad20 (Figure 1.2)—a “short and euphonious” name that was “likely to stick in the public mind” and “meet our trade-mark requirements.” The same ad notes that Kodak has been used for cameras and “other goods of our manufacture,” demonstrating the ability of the name to stretch beyond its original use. So, while it has no inherent meaning, the name was chosen because it sounds good, it’s memorable, it was legally available, and it’s adaptable. Well done, Mr. Eastman.?
领英推荐
What Makes a Bad Brand Name?
What is it about some names that cause them to draw such ire from the media and the public? The obvious way to understand what makes a bad name is to flip the characteristics of a good name. Some names, like International House of Pancakes (IHOP), aren’t adaptive and can’t stretch beyond their initial meaning. When the chain wanted to remind customers that they sell burgers in addition to breakfast food, the name became a limitation, leading to a much-derided campaign teasing a new brand name: IHOb. But brand names have other opportunities to fail, too. Even those that avoid these obvious, opposite-of-good problems can still fall flat in at least three additional ways:
Over time, successful names are imbued with many meanings, positive associations glomming onto them like dust onto an electrostatic Swiffer cloth. But a new name, as names are fond of reminding their clients, can only say one or two things.
Mondelēz, the company behind Oreo, Cadbury, and other snack brands, is a clumsy mashup of monde, Latin for world, and delēz, meant to convey deliciousness. Together, the parts of the name supposedly evoke a delicious world. And then there’s that line over the e (a macron), which the company hopes will remind you to say mohn-dah-LEEZ.
Like a Double Stuf Oreo, the final name is overfilled. Trying to pack too much meaning into a name, especially by claiming each syllable represents a discrete idea, can result in a Frankenstein’s monster—hideous and, most likely, doomed.
2. Inside jokes and secret codes
Names don’t work when they rely too heavily on esoteric information or nonpublic knowledge. Amateur namers will often pull words from their own areas of expertise—which is great, but can go too far. Just because you know that myelin is a substance that insulates nerve cells, don’t assume anyone will think Myelin is a clever name for a home insulation company. Avoid obscure references, irrelevant jargon, and too-cute metaphors when creating names.
3. Trend chasers
Since at least the early 1900s, every era has come with its share of brand naming trends, from names ending in o—like Jell-O in 1897, Brasso in 1905, Brillo in 1913, and Mentos in 1932—to today’s seemingly never-ending list of names ending in ly—Bitly, Insightly, and Optimizely, just to name a few.22 Unless you want a soundalike name that’s timestamped with the era in which it was created, steer clear of trends.
Few Bad Names
Just as we used Apple, Swiffer, and Kodak to highlight the factors that can help strengthen a name, let’s do a postmortem on some of the all-time worst brand names to see what we can learn about what did them in:
Widely considered one of the worst naming fails of all time, Consignia was the new name for Britain’s Post Office Group, launched in 2001. Post office leadership described the name as “modern, meaningful, and entirely appropriate.” The British public disagreed.
Chief among the name’s sins is the fact that it just sounds wrong—like a “Roman general” or “tummy bug,” according to one BBC reporter.23 The portmanteau of consign and insignia comes across as an awkward attempt to stuff too many ideas into four syllables—a pointless effort, given neither word has much relevant meaning, to begin with. (According to the post office, consign worked because it means to entrust to the care of, and insignia gave rise to “this kind of royalty-ish thing in the back of one’s mind.”) A mere 15 months after its announcement, Consignia was returned to sender, replaced by Royal Mail Group.
Remember Qwikster? If not, that’s probably because it never amounted to much more than a regrettable press release. In 2011, Netflix announced it would be splitting its business in two: Netflix would continue to provide streaming services, while a new subsidiary, Qwikster, would take over the DVD-by-mail business. A month later, Netflix reversed the decision after tens of thousands of customers expressed their outrage over the idea of having to create two separate accounts.
The business strategy behind this move was questionable, at best, but the name made things even worse. First off, it’s hard to remember which spelling is right: Qwickster? Quikster? Quickster? Secondly, this name combines a convenience store naming trope (e.g., QuikStop, Kwik Trip) with an early-2000s naming trend (a la Napster and Friendster). And finally, the only meaning the name conveys is speed, which doesn’t make a lot of sense given that, compared to streaming video, waiting for a DVD via snail mail is the slower option.
“Tronc to change the name back to Tribune Publishing after years of ridicule,” read one headline in June 2018.25 Short for Tribune Online Content, Tronc had a two-year stint as the name of Tribune Publishing, a Chicago-based newspaper publisher. Like Consignia, the biggest problem with this name is that it sounds like something unpleasant. In the words of Nancy Friedman, a naming expert who blogs as Fritinancy, it’s “silly at best, ugly at worst, a rhyming cousin of honk, zonk, bonk, and honky-tonk.”26 It also looks bad (a garish, all-lowercase logo didn’t help). And, as many abbreviations do, it takes a meaningful, albeit jargon-laden, phrase—Tribune Online Content—and strips it of meaning for anyone other than the few who remember what it stands for.
Thanks for Sharing!?NIKITA BAID