Determining a brand name is becoming an increasingly difficult process, one that draws more and more on expertise.
So what do you need to watch out for when determining a brand name? Finding the right brand name is work that requires expertise. There are several methods used in naming. One long-standing, widely used method is to give the brand the person’s own name — or a relative’s — so as to tie the brand to its creator. Mercedes, Ericsson, Ogilvy, Nestlé, Bosch, Ford, Disney and many other brands either are, or are derived from, the first names or surnames of their company owners (or their relatives). Although giving your own name or surname to a brand is an old custom, it still works today as a way of making people a point of brand connection and a source of trust — especially when the business is directly tied to the individual. Many designers, advertisers and artists prefer to commercialize their own name as a brand. But what the name or surname actually is matters. For example, if someone whose surname happens to be “Barber” opens a hair salon or transplant clinic, they should go right ahead and use it; but if that same surname sat above a bakery, they might want to think twice — you don’t want a brand name that leaves people’s imaginations to fill in the wrong picture. If you are looking for a brand name, get in touch with us now.
Just like other creative work, finding a brand name has its non-negotiables. Let’s lay them out.
The Formula for Creating a Brand Name
1. Brand Name and Meaning
To create a good brand name, you first have to decide whether the brand will be meaningful — and if so, in which languages it will carry meaning and what it will evoke. Through its short- and long-term goals, the brand’s vision forms an important foundation for finding the name. Names that evoke the category make for easy recognition in the market, but in the long run other brands are likely to build names around the same words. This is the first thing that comes to mind with naming. One of the clearest examples is the wave of streaming services built straight from the category word: the many “…TV” names (Apple TV, YouTube TV, Pluto TV) that arrived within a few years of one another, all serving a similar purpose and all easy to confuse.
2. Brand Name and Category Association
Brands that enter a market first generally see using category-evoking names as an advantage. But that same logic can leave you facing many other brands that want the very same category link. For instance, if a dairy brand builds its name around the word “Milk,” it can end up competing with a crowd of similar names — MilkCo, MilkMax, Milkana and so on. By that logic, such a name isn’t a perfect choice; yet that doesn’t stop a well-run dairy brand from becoming the market leader. A brand’s success is not delivered by its name. A good brand name can make a good strategy easy to grasp, but creating a good brand name is not the single key to success — just as it is with us human beings.
In naming work, using the category reference at the end of the word is a better method. A good example is Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola (Pepsi removed the word “cola” from its brand name in 1962). When this brand-new product was introduced, having a name on the packaging that stated what was inside — set large, as the brand name — must certainly have helped.
3. Brand Name and Brand Strategy
The ideal thing for naming is for the name to feed off the brand’s promise; a category reference is essentially used for this purpose too. Creating a brand without using a category reference or hinting at the brand promise makes explaining it to people a little more laborious. If you create a milk brand and name it “Sip,” you’ll need to do at least some work for people to link “Sip” with milk — but your chance of standing out as a name in the category is higher.
One of the best naming methods is to use an indirect reference: rather than the sector, the benefit, or the material the product is made of, using a related concept can be a good solution. Dove is a good example — a dove evokes gentleness and purity, which suits a personal-care brand perfectly without naming the product directly.
4. Brand Name and Meaninglessness
Another alternative is a name that is nobody’s surname and evokes nothing — which can be more efficient. When you create a meaningless brand name, the first advantage is that you create a word that did not exist in people’s minds before and load it with meaning, which makes standing out easy. But, as I said above, in that case it takes a bit more effort to explain the brand and what it does. On the other hand, such a name is also an advantage online. For example, if you open a new e-commerce site and call it “FashionCentral,” it can take months to climb to the top of Google searches. But if you give it a meaningless name like “Zappos,” you’ll be on the first page from the very start — though now you’ll need to explain what “Zappos” means.
In the past, some brand names were not put through global research, so they could carry negative meanings outside their home country. Names written or pronounced the same or similarly can mean different things in different languages. A classic example is the car that was reportedly a hard sell in Spanish-speaking markets because its name read like “doesn’t go” — a reminder that a name innocent in one language can be a liability in another. So when creating a brand name, we have to make sure it does not take on negative meanings in target markets.
5. Brand Name and Morphology
A brand name matters in its form, too. The morphology of the brand name is the foundation for the brand’s logo. How many letters, syllables and words it will consist of should be thought through from the start. The morphology of a name and logo is judged by where the logo will be used. For example, if a beverage brand is being created, the name should preferably be shorter than five or six letters and consist of a single word (unless you have been in the market for 125 years). Because when you try to write a long name on a tall, vertical package, either the name ends up too small, or part of it is hidden on the shelf, or the brand name has to be set vertically on the can.
A brand name can also show, through its morphology, that it belongs to a brand family. For example, nearly all of Apple’s products feed off the same “i” — iPhone, iPad, iMac. Sub-brands that come out of a strong master brand are more exposed to any harm the master brand suffers: everything in Apple’s “i” family feeds off that “i,” but any negativity arising from one can touch them all.
Sometimes the category’s name and the brands that enter the category first start a naming jargon in the sector and shape brand morphology. Naming in the spreadable-chocolate market is a good example. It is obvious that many spreads went down a path that imitates Nutella’s naming. Today the “-ella” / “-elle” ending has come to reference the chocolate-spread category itself. This actually supports visual elements like the logo and emblem — a bit like a music shop using a treble clef in its logo. Personally, if I were a small spreadable-chocolate maker without a huge budget, I would pursue naming that uses this category reference — while never forgetting that, to some degree, this method makes standing out harder.
Being able to write a name as it is pronounced is an advantage, but sometimes signalling the brand’s origin within the name provides an even greater one. The “é” specific to French tells you that L’Oréal was born in France. In the same way, a name carrying your country’s characteristic letters can be an advantage in markets where your nation’s brand image is strong — much as Italian styling lends cachet to a design brand. But that kind of meaning is more sustainable when it is tied to genuine category cachet, because relations between countries can shift, and a name resting only on national sentiment can become a liability.
6. Brand Name and Genericization
The most feared nightmare of successful brands is genericization. Although many people might see it as a mark of success, it is not really such a good thing. Some brands became generic because they were first in the market and were the ones to introduce the product to consumers — that is, while building the brand name they also had to voice and teach the name of the product or category. The moment brands start being spoken of together with the category, though, instead of enjoying it they should start looking for solutions that will set them apart from competitors.
Another importance of naming is that, since the invention of writing, the brand name has come to us as both a visual and an auditory brand element. When a brand name is turned into a logo or written as text it becomes visual, and that visual code itself sends us a message. Names using masculine, hard, unvoiced letters like K, T and Z are generally preferred for more masculine, harder brands, while names containing soft letters like o, s and y — feminine in the way they are spoken — are preferred in gentler fields that appeal more to women. On the other hand, when a brand name is voiced by a person, that reading plants the name in the mind through sound. A brand name lives not only visually but also aurally.
Think of the names of dishes you cannot pronounce… Wouldn’t you hesitate to order food whose name you can’t say? Sometimes voicing the brand name is essential to learning it, because people in the target market may not speak the same language and may not know how to pronounce it. One of the best-known examples is The Laughing Cow (La Vache Qui Rit) — normally very hard for non-French speakers to read, but the brand has largely solved this through years of investment. To overcome a pronunciation problem, brands should favor channels where the name is spoken, and should even build communication specifically around it.
Finally, a good brand name should be memorable. Ideally that memorability is supported semantically, visually and aurally all at once: the name should evoke the brand promise, be aesthetically pleasing in writing, and carry an auditory harmony when read aloud.
