Brand name and length

In many articles written about brand naming there is a mistaken piece of guidance along the lines of “a brand name should be short.” Why should a brand name be short? What is the rationale? Short according to whom? A short name means one thing for a Venezuelan artist named Fernando Enrique Carrillo Roselli, and something quite different for a South Korean, in a country where half the population has a surname shorter than four letters.

Looking at a name’s shortness purely by letter count is also one of the biggest mistakes made. For example, when we write “superpants,” the mind does not read the “super” and “pants” parts as “s-u-p-e-r-p-a-n-t-s.” It simply combines these images it has already seen hundreds of times. Every word is at the same time an image. That is exactly what allows us to read. But if we are talking about a meaningless word, or one that is meaningless in our target market, things change.

On the other hand, when part of the name is made up of certain language patterns, perception of the name also speeds up. These are the suffixes specific to certain languages that have globalized over time — “tion, ious, able, ting” and so on. On the shelf, this is even more eye-catching.

  • Facebook – 8 letters
  • Foursquare – 10 letters
  • Instagram – 9 letters
  • WhatsApp – 8 letters
  • Aston Martin – 11 letters
  • Mini Cooper – 10 letters
  • Accenture – 9 letters
  • Continental – 11 letters

There are other examples too.

  • Salesforce – 10 letters
  • Stradivarius – 12 letters
  • Volkswagen – 10 letters
  • Schwarzkopf – 11 letters
  • Head & Shoulders – 14 letters + &

I am not trying to declare a long name a criterion for success. What I want to say is that using the phrase “a brand name should be short” is not, on its own, correct. Just as a short brand name can provide an advantage, a long brand name can be advantageous too. As for which is easier to remember, we have no scientific data. We can only take it into account when choosing among alternatives. Someone with a very long name, like Lin-Manuel Miranda, has not been forgotten because of it, nor has he succeeded because of it; everyone remembers his name the moment they hear his songs. What is more, while a short brand name may have been an advantage in the past, it is now something of a disadvantage, because far more identical or similar results are listed in Google searches.

Which name will work best changes according to some technical matters:

  1. Where will the brand name be applied? Will the name be written vertically on a tall bottle, or will it be a store and go on a sign? Or will it be none of these, doing business only online? If Coca-Cola were entering the market today, it might not choose the long name it was forced to write vertically on its tall cans. Or it could have stacked the letters, the way some brands do, and — despite plenty of criticism — stood out on the shelf by a wide margin.
  2. Who will say the brand name? People do not buy a product whose name they cannot say. If you have such a name — a name that is hard to pronounce — you need to favor audio communication channels to break that barrier. Whoever your target audience is, you need to give the brand a name they can read and say. There is no rule that this name must be short.
  3. Competitors’ brand names. What names do the competitors operating in the market use? What category descriptor do they use? Sometimes expressing the category reference at the end of the word can be a better solution. For example, for a brand that wants to operate in the spreadable-chocolate market, adding an ending like “Ella” or “Elle” to the name it comes up with speeds up how the brand is perceived. But depending on the name, it can also strip away its power to stand out.
  4. Registration, domain, and social-media accounts. The short names that first come to mind will most likely be the ones that cause registration problems. That is why you may need to alter them or combine them with other words. Today, finding a four- or five-letter “.com” domain is almost impossible. Under today’s conditions, finding a name whose social-media accounts are unclaimed and whose domain is available is essential.
  5. Its meaning around the world. If your target market is not just your home market, you need to research the name’s meaning in your target markets, or in markets that could become targets. Starting with a Google search is enough. You need to make sure the name you find is not a porn star’s name or, say, slang for a male organ in Spanish. If that is the case, altering the name or evolving it with a prefix or suffix can be a solution.

The most correct thing is to decide on a brand name after weighing all of these conditions. Saying by rote that “a long brand name is wrong” is the thing that is actually wrong.