As important as it is to create a great brand name, we want you to remember that a name never stands alone. You always have many other elements of the marketing mix to help describe your brand or add emotion.
Names Don’t Stand Alone
Check out our latest #tellthetruths video to hear more about how names work together with descriptors and tag lines to create a richer communication.
This video originally appeared in LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this video, check out:
Naming Using Emotional Benefits
The Beautiful Challenge of Naming
TRANSCRIPT:
So something that I focus on a lot in our naming practice is the choice of name, how emotional or how descriptive it is has a lot to do with, you know, your overall strategy. If you’re introducing a new idea, a new category or creating something new, you might want to have a name that’s, like, dumb as two rocks and just explaining it. If, on the other hand, it’s a well established category, well understood by your target market and you want to differentiate it, you might end up with a little bit more poetic or certainly a more emotional name.
Okay, so that’s the baseline, but I want to talk about the next level of that, which is that you have other parts of your whole marketing, you know, toolbox that will balance that out. Just because you have a prosaic name doesn’t mean that you don’t have emotion. I love the example of Disney. When we hear Disney, we get emotional now, but it’s just the founder’s last name, and in the beginning, it wasn’t particularly emotional. When, you know, the company had been around a while already, but when they launched their first theme park, they used a very emotional tagline that they still use today, Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth, and I think it’s just a really great example.
Nike, again, it’s become emotional to us, but what did it mean in the beginning? You know, not much, Just Do It, a lot of emotion there. You can balance things out and that can go in the other direction, as well. You can have a very, very emotional name or a very poetic name because that’s what works for you strategically, and you can balance it out with a tagline or a descriptor that grounds it so that you’re sure that people understand what it’s about.
So I just wanted to talk about that balance, that, you know, as much as names are the thing I think about the most, they don’t exist in a vacuum, and you’re creating a whole with them. So that’s what I think. I’d love to hear what you think. Let me know, bye.
