June 17, 2010
Uprooting the Personal Bias in Brand Naming
Naming a company is one of the most challenging aspects of branding. A name is the most visible, least changeable brand element, and it’s entirely wrapped up in the collective personality of the people running the company.
But that explains only part of the challenge.
Underlying the selection of a name are personal biases and fears. Like weeds in the brand garden, these anxieties work to overtake the landscape, eventually overwhelming the very potential a company hopes to reap from its name. The trick is to uproot the anxiety weeds on the spot and examine them to prevent them from spreading—which they will do, if left unchecked.
Here are some of the most common varieties of weeds we’ve encountered in our many combined years of naming.
Variety 1: It has to explain what we do.
There’s comfort in the literal. Said another way, no one likes guesswork. It’s human nature. One of the first impulses in naming is to isolate only the names that offer an uninspired explanation of what a company does. Consider this: If we took this approach to naming children, we’d be left with an undifferentiated population of “Boy 1,” “Girl 2,” and so on.
Absurd, yes. But you quickly see the point. All names—including brand names—have contexts. Stated another way, names reveal themselves within a context. They don’t create the context.
When you limit your names to the most self-explanatory options, you’re missing the boat that carries brand names like Apple, Jaguar, Virgin, Sony, and the like. Each of these brand names has been invested with a positive market perception. The names alone did not generate the perception. But they stood out from the crowd, ensuring they were remembered.
Variety 2: We don’t want to alienate anyone.
Read the statement above. Give it some thought.
Now ask yourself, “Is it realistic to think a single name can make everyone happy?” And by everyone, we mean consumers, clients, employees, vendors, investors, partners, and board members—just to start.
The process of reviewing potential names invites subjective responses. When presented with an unfamiliar name—or a name that could be construed in many ways—these responses spring up like weeds, often trying to present themselves as objective flowers. In most cases, they’re just projections of our own subjective experience of the world.
Take these examples:
Virgin
“Consumers will find that inappropriate.” (translation: “I find that inappropriate.”)
Apple
“That has nothing to do with computers.” (translation: “I can’t make the connection.”)
Sony
“No one will know what that means.” (translation: “I don’t know what that means.”)
We take for granted that the names above have always meant what they mean to us now. But each in its turn was new, untested, and a potential risk. And by actively alienating anyone outside their designated target, they found a loyal consumer base. The names were invested with meaning according to how they were used and the contexts in which they appeared.
Variety 3: It will be too expensive to justify.
At first glance, this weed looks like a supremely rational flower. It contends that if a conceptual name is too ambiguous, it will require a significant investment in advertising and marketing to explain.
Let’s take the example of Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. Both are handheld digital devices that display text from books and magazines. You probably could have inferred that from Sony’s product name. It sells itself, right? Kindle, on the other hand, needs to be explained—and that means spending money on media. In reality, if the name and surrounding brand elements tell an engaging story, the company can actually save on advertising dollars. Besides causing a momentary double-take, the name “Kindle” begins to tell the story of how the imagination is sparked through the experience of the product, which is a conduit to the world of literature. It’s brand names that don’t tell a story that have to work hard to find meaning beyond the dictionary definition.
Then there’s the Helio pitfall. A joint venture between Earthlink and SK Telecom, Helio is a mobile phone service provider. The name, which evokes Helios (the sun god in ancient Greece) and has “hello” embedded in it, is loaded with potential and positive connotation. And it’s certainly memorable. But the company chose to pair the name with the advertising slogan, “It’s not a phone company,” which effectively took a conceptual name and made it cryptic—and easy to ignore. If it’s not a phone company, what is it? Given the average consumer attention span, it’s not likely to be solved by anyone on the spot. Conceptual names require a communications balancing act. The less literal the name, the more direct the surrounding communications should be (take for example “Virgin Atlantic Airways” and “Virgin Radio” and “Virgin Mobile”).
Variety 4: It has to tell the whole story.
This weed is a close relative to Variety 1 (“It has to explain what we do”) but is far more difficult to suppress. It’s rooted in the need for a name to be self-explanatory, but its demands threaten to overtake the entire brand garden—and leave nothing behind.
A client recently asked us to name a family of products. Their criteria were: (1) the name has to be short, about 6 characters or less, (2) it has to “speak to” its target audience, (3) it has to convey both emotional and functional benefits, (4) it has to work for additional products, as yet undeveloped, and (5) it has to make sense and/or be translated for markets in Europe and Asia. And, of course, it has to be memorable.
The nature of the request was not unusual. But satisfying all five criteria equally was never going to be possible. We understood the rational side of the client’s expectations, but we saw the irrational side as well: No word, real or invented, in human language could possibly do what was being demanded of this name. Nor should it.
Therein lies the power of this pernicious weed. It demands extraordinary attention as the brand potential around it withers and dies. In the quest for a perfect name, all other viable candidates—which can deliver beautifully on one or two brand attributes—are likely to be discarded. A more realistic approach is to prioritize criteria for the name, then develop options for which a context can be created.
In branding, knowing how to identify and uproot anxiety weeds before they take hold is the surest way to create a highly productive naming process. Use behavioral insights as your industrial-strength weed killer. And when you embark on your next naming effort, remember that the garden that surrounds the flower—or the context you give your name is as important as the flower itself.
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