What's in a name?

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet

True, but it probably wouldn’t fly off supermarket shelves around Valentines day, or command a price premium against flowers perceived as more humble.

Forgive the flourish but I’m trying to find an attention grabbing way to convince you to think more about product names, and descriptions.

In the last 2 years at vypr I have seen or been involved in thousands of tests to predict the performance of NPD concepts and as such can state confidently:

• Product Names and Descriptions have a significant effect on product performance
• Many (probably most) individuals and organisations don’t think enough about them

In my experience product descriptions, especially for Retailer Branded products, typically come about because they are:

• An accurate description of the product ingredients
• Made to sound ‘better’ by introducing some provenance or speciality ingredients
• Arbitrarily decided by a small panel of experts

Rarely are they based on accurate Insight to determine what the impact of the possible names and descriptions may be on sales!

It is self evident that every descriptor you add can either increase, decrease or have no effect on product performance. It would therefore seem sensible to try and work out which is which!

It is also common for the descriptors to come at a price, often from using more expensive ingredients. If these genuinely improve product quality then they may be justified, but even then you may not want to advertise it on pack unless you’re clear on the effect (Does All Butter mean better quality or less healthy in this context?)

I’m afraid context matters enormously, by product (not just category), tier, brand and occasion, so I can’t give you any specific advice but I can assure you that it is generally a very good idea to test these things before you launch!