Brand Name – 8 Points To Consider Before You Name Your Product Or Service
Although household name brands invariably have distinctive visual identities – for example, Coca-Cola’s bottle shape, and Nike’s swoosh – the primary sign through which any brand is identified is its name.
It is worth thinking about your name carefully given that it is what you will be using to answer the phone, and to promote and advertise your business. It’s also what your customers will use to recommend your product or service.
This quote, from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, demonstrates just how much faith can be placed in a name alone.
“It had always been a girlish dream of mine to love someone whose name was Ernest. There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence.”
Undoubtedly, a name can evoke certain reactions and emotional responses. It can give customers an idea or feeling about your business from the outset, before they have even experienced working with you. Therefore, choosing a name for your brand is an important task that should not be taken lightly. Here are 8 points to bear in mind:
1. Choose an appropriate name
The name you decide to brand your company under should be well thought-out in order to ensure you pick the name that suits what your product or service is trying to do. When choosing a name, think: what is unique about the brand I am trying to create? Who is my target audience? How do I want to make people feel?
2. Find a name that people will easily associate with your product or service
The big household names that have built such solid reputations have generally based their brand on something they believe suits that which they are trying to create.
Talking about Google’s name, co-founder Page stated in Business Week, “We spent a lot of time on the name … because we figured that it would be important for people to be able to remember it” Google’s search engine was originally called BackRub, but the company decided the name was unsuitable, and Google was then settled on. The name originated as a play on the word ‘googol’, a mathematical term for the number 1.0 × 10100, to reflect the search engine’s ability to sort through a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
‘Apple’ is similarly not just a name given to the tech-giant without any forethought. Apple is currently the world’s most valued brand, and is known for its sleek designs and good-quality products and the very name of the company helps to create this image. In Jobs’ biography, written by Walter Isaacson, he explained that he was coming back from an apple orchard when he thought the name sounded ‘fun, spirited, and non-intimidating’. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, in his book iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon explained that “We both tried to come up with technical-sounding names, but we couldn’t think of any good ones. Apple was so much better, better than any other name we could think of”. And like the name itself, the company and the brand became much more innovative and forward-thinking than previous technical companies.
3. Make sure your name translates into other markets
Not only should a name accurately reflect your business, but it must also be something that works in different countries as well. There are many examples of company owners who have not realised that their chosen name in one country might have a completely different meaning in the next. For example, Chevrolet launched its Chevy Nova car in Spain under the same name, which translates as ‘Does not go’. American Airlines advertised the luxurious aspect of flying business class to its Mexican customers by focusing on the leather seats, using the slogan ‘Fly in Leather’, which translates as ‘Vuelo en Cuero’ in Spanish. The Spanish dictionary neglected to inform American Airlines that the phrase ‘en cuero’ is a slang term for ‘in the nude’. Unsurprisingly, there was little demand for mile-high naturism among Mexico’s business flyers. The beer-maker Coors discovered that its slogan, ‘Turn it loose’, translated into Spanish as ‘Suffer from diarrhoea’.
4. Get legal title to your brand by registering your trademark
The name does much more than carry the goodwill of the brand. Some people equate trademarks with goodwill, but they’re not the same thing. Goodwill is a term used by accountants to refer to the customer base a business develops.
Trademarks can protect goodwill, but they do far more than that. The reason you need a trademark isn’t to protect your goodwill, which is protected anyway, but because a trademark is a tool to capture the economic potential in your business. When you register a trademark you get legal title to your name so you are better placed to control use of the name by third parties. You can then monetise the business by granting licences, and extend the brand to other goods and services if you are successful.
5. Be aware of the value an appropriate trademark creates
As the business develops and expands, so its name will increase in value, and evoke a reaction in its target consumer which then enables the brand to charge a premium for its product or service. For example, people are willing to pay significantly more for an item of clothing made by Louis Vuitton than they would pay for a similar-looking item made by an unknown designer. The value of one item of clothing over the other is purely down to the name and so the brand is what adds that extra value.
6. Bear in mind that the name could be a most valuable asset, but only if you choose well
Also, when a company is being sold it is the brand, as well as the goodwill associated with the name, that the purchaser is buying into. Therefore, it is important to begin any project by realising that the name you choose for it is potentially one of the most valuable assets the business will generate if it succeeds. It should be treated as such and appropriately protected.
7. If the name you like is not legally available find another
A name must be protected. Given that the value of a brand lies in its name, it’s no good to just focus on coming up with a catchy, memorable name if this name is not protected. If, once you have conceived a name and have gone on to have designs and branding produced, someone claims you are infringing on their trademark, nobody is going to care that the name is ‘just perfect’ for you. For a name to really be perfect for your business, it must be legally available, and hence be suitable from both a marketing and a legal perspective.
8. Do your research before you start using a name
Apple v. Apple Corps – Although Jobs decided that Apple was the most suitable name for his company and that it would work well from a marketing perspective, the name has proved less suitable from a legal perspective. Apple Inc was locked into legal disputes from 1978 to 2006 over the name with Apple Corps, the record company owned by the Beatles.
Once the initial dispute was settled by agreeing that Apple could use the name on the basis that it would not expand into the music industry, there were problems on several subsequent occasions when Apple’s business expanded to cover the iTunes store and the iPod product. The dispute caused several losses for Apple, first preventing it from launching a computer with recording software installed on it, and then leading to the Beatles’ music initially not appearing on the iTunes music store.
The dispute has now been resolved between the two companies, with Apple buying the rights to use the name in all industry sectors and allowing Apple Corps a licence to the name. However, this resolution should not be seen as something most businesses could achieve. The process proved extremely costly and time-consuming. Such problems would have forced less well-resourced companies to rebrand. This is why the legal aspect of names should never be lost sight of.
Conclusion
Names are an important way in which the law protects a business against various unfair practices that tend to arise when a business succeeds. So, make sure the name you have invested so much time and effort in creating and around which you have built your good reputation, is one that can remain exclusively yours.
