Personal Branding & Brand Naming
Formula for Success.
Do your homework first. Brand naming is extremely important. Many marketers are probably working with brands that already have existing names, but in case you are not, or in case you are starting a new business, blog, or website – here are your survival tools for choosing a business name.
- People only refer to a person or product using one, or at the most, two names. For instance, I am either Robin or Robin Hale. No one calls me Robin Marie Hale. It’s too hard to remember and simply unnecessary. Likewise, a car is either a Camry or a Toyota Camry. People say, “I drive a Ford” or “I drive a Ford Explorer.” Few say, “I drive a Ford Explorer EX.” People occasionally can remember three levels of names – but rarely more. Saturn is simple. Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue and Ford Mustang Mach III are not.
- Brand naming tactics 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 brand 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 Yahoo, Twinkie, Wii, Purina etc.) are preferred if you have sufficient resources to build the meaning of a brand name. Coined names are distinct and can be designed to be easy to read, write and pronounce. It is unlikely that any other brand name 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 long time.
- Many organizations opt for associative descriptive names, which may be partly descriptive and usually allude to what the product or company can do for you. Examples include Sir Speedy Printing, Photoshop, Lean Cuisine, Pop Tart, Die Hard Battery. These brand 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 method of choosing a brand name or choosing a business name.
- Generic or overly descriptive brand or business 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: Auctions.com, Business.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, April 2001) So much for all those once exorbitantly expensive URLs.
Did you know?
Suggestive brand names assist with recall of brand benefits suggested by the names but inhibit recall of other advertised brand benefits. This may explain, for example, why the old ‘out of business’ Jack-in-the-Box restaurants found it impossible to establish a more adult, product-focused, healthy image, and Old Spice aftershave, Oldsmobile automobiles, and John Hancock financial services have struggled to create more youthful images that could lead to doubling or tripling their sales figures. What youth is going to choose Old Spice, with it’s 50-something imagery, over Axe, the hot girl magnet?
To sum things up–if you are choosing a business name, be creative, be suggestive, be memorable…Don’t be generic…Don’t be dumb.
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Excellent article – so true. I have experimented with titles on blogger – where it’s free and noticed some titles definitely rank higher than others. My Offgrid-living shows up high on Google when someone types “offgrid living” Which is about 100 people per day. I just need to get that # up to 10000 per day. And monetize. Then I can retire – writing about my passion. Solar, wind and geothermal energy.
Offgrid’s last blog post..Solar Pool Heating
Diana: regarding titles like The Knitting Blog. I agree. With me it conjures up images of a sub par site without much to offer, maybe off track from time to time as the blogger takes pictures of her cat laying on her afghan, etc. lol
These are fantastic tips, as always. It can be very difficult in blogging to come up with both a memorable name and brand it. I’ve noticed this specifically in my own niche, book blogging, and in craft blogs. They can be either way too creative (not even closely linked to the subject at hand and thus hard to remember for a new reader) or so boring it hurts. Example (that I don’t think is actually real) “The Knitting Blog.” I’ve always been rather put off by really boring titles…maybe it’s because of my writing education and the whole “Your Title Should Not Be An Afterthought,” brainwashing I was subjected to.
Diana’s last blog post..Books that Will Mess Up Your Kids