What’s in a name?
Brand Naming is Just the First Step.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” This famous line by Billy Shakespeare comes to mind after reading John Colapinto’s recent engaging New Yorker article “Famous Names” on David Placek and his company Lexicon.

In the world of business, marketing, and advertising we pay a great deal of attention and money to how companies, products and services are named. Brand names are important. Brand names help us remember and help us associate a good or bad experience with a product, service, or company.

But where do successful brand names come from? Colapinto illustrates how David Placek and his company came up with the name BlackBerry for Research In Motion. Placek’s staffers interviewed commuters riding the ferry from Sausalito to San Francisco. The company also conducted mind mapping brainstorm sessions, generating hundreds of word associations. They dismissed words that contained mail or email references as not being joyous enough. One word that made the final cut was blackberry. Lexicon’s word smiths and linguists felt black evoked the color of high-tech devices, and the oval keys looked like drupelets of a blackberry.

Colapinto points out that not all successful brand names are professionally developed. He notes that Google came out of a misspelling of googol, which is defined as the number 10 raised to the 100th power. I suppose that it was one way of expressing infinity. Coca-Cola was devised by an accountant who thought the two C’s looked good in advertisements. Many companies, from Hewlett Packard to Grant Marketing simply name the company or product after the founder. However, naming is just the first step.

This brings us back to Shakespeare’s question, “What’s in a name?” Bernd Schmitt, marketing professor at Columbia Business School, asks in the New Yorker article, “Would Amazon be just as successful if it was called Nile?” The answer is likely, yes, just as a rose by any other name would likely smell as sweet.

What makes BlackBerry, Amazon, and thousands of other brand names successful is not just the name itself, but the product and company that stands behind that brand name, and the brand strategy and marketing strategy that brings that product to the minds of the consumers who will buy the product.

BlackBerry is successful because of the technology that made it easy for consumers, many of whom were business people who needed to rely on instant communication with their associates and customers. The BlackBerry name set it apart from the generic names of cell phones or mobile phones, and made the device a brand that stood alone. Alone that is until competition from I Phones, Androids, and the like.

Whether a brand name is developed by name branding professionals like Lexicon, or from the mind of a business owner, an accountant, or company research department, there are a few fundamental steps a company should perform before bringing the brand name to market.

1. Have the name, along with some other name possibilities, reviewed and critiqued within the company

2. Connect the brand name to some kind of association with the product, no matter how vague. Recall the “Blackberry” explanation.

3. Test the name through focus groups or survey of existing and prospective customers

4. Research the name through a trademark search to be sure there are no conflicts with existing names that would be close in appearance, application, and would cause confusion.

Once a brand name is determined, then move forward developing a brand and marketing strategy that will make that name resonate in its marketplace like Google, Amazon, Apple, and BlackBerry.

For more information or questions regarding branding, contact us at info@grantmarketing.com or call 617-796-0186.

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