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Brand Naming

MORE THAN A NAME: BRAND NAMING IS A KEY CONTRIBUTOR TO COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

Branding decisions about your product or service are plentiful, but perhaps the most important one of all is brand naming.

Sure, a brand is more than its name. It’s the concept and the customer-benefit behind it. It’s (hopefully) a unique idea in the marketplace that will garner publicity and word-of-mouth from positive user experiences. That’s how great brands start. But brand naming, in the long run, is just as important as how different or unique the idea for your product or service was when it first rolled out into the market.

Why? Competition. All successful brands breed successful competitors. And over time, whatever that unique quality or innovation was will be copied ad nauseam. Take Xerox, for instance. They came out with the first plain-paper copy machine, and for a long time, Xerox salesman had one of the easiest jobs out there. All they had to do to sell a new Xerox 914 copier was demonstrate the obvious difference in clarity, cleanliness and readability between Xerox copies and ordinary copies.

But now, all copiers are plain paper, and when it comes down to it, aside from secondary features and functionality, they all use the same plain paper and pretty much do the same thing. Yet, Xerox still leads the copier category, and a huge reason for that is the brand naming.

Xerox. It’s short, quippy and unique while sounding very high tech. And today, even with other brand copiers, you make Xeroxes of the report for the meeting.

There are many examples in the marketplace similar to the Xerox story, yet so many marketers out there downplay the importance of putting a significant amount of time and effort into brand naming. Instead, for instance, they come up with names like Haloid PaperMaster or Canon Image Runner and hope for a similar degree of brand recognition. Or, they opt to simply use the company’s brand name and throw some meaningless numbers and/or letters at the end of it (Toshiba DP 6570 Copier).

Brand naming mistakes like this are so common because business is dominated by those who believe the development of superior products and services is the key to success—not the branding. The product versus the brand…it’s a time-honored boardroom battle.

Those in the product camp often win the argument with the crazy reasoning, “if the product isn’t good, it’s going to fail regardless of how good its name is.” But this kind of thinking is fundamentally flawed. Think about it. What brand names are universally thought of as “no good?” What makes a Xerox copier better than a Sharp? Is Canon better than a Ricoh? Sure, some people have strong loyalty to some brand names and don’t like others, such as Ford and Chevrolet truck owners. But how often are those feelings universal to the entire marketplace? Quite possibly never.

This “it’s the product, not the brand, short sighted” mentality has been responsible for many failed or underperforming products. And it’s not that there wasn’t a brand naming strategy; it’s just that it was such an afterthought compared to the time and energy that went into creating the product or service. Often, companies simply opt to brand a new product or service with the company’s corporate name. This practice is most rampant in the brand naming practices of East Asian companies such as Mitsubishi, Matsushita, Hyundai and others. Under the same brand name, these companies market everything from automobiles to semiconductors to batteries. And while similar practices aren’t nonexistent in the United States, American companies pay much more attention to brand. A great example of this is Proctor & Gamble, who uses its corporate name on nothing, but has very strong brands in numerous categories like Tide laundry detergent, Mr. Clean and the Swiffer. The numbers tell the real story here. In one recent year, the top 100 U.S companies had an average profit margin of 6.2 percent compared to 0.8 percent for Japanese companies.