Many thanks to friend of BrandTrue, Bonnie Bastian, BA, MA, for posing this question. The answer is, like everything in naming, that it depends. You need to look at several factors, most notably where your brand equity flows from and what are your category conventions.
Should You Name Brands After People?
Check out this #tellthetruths for more details, then let us know what you think!
This video originally appeared in LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this video, check out:
A Name Can’t Be ALL The Things
TRANSCRIPT:
– Hey everyone. It’s Rebeca with BrandTrue. And today we’re going to talk about whether or not you should name brands after people. My friend Bonnie Bastion posed this question, and I thought it was pretty interesting. It got me to thinking. Unfortunately, there’s not a cut and dried answer because like everything in naming the answer is it depends. It depends on what your strategy is. I would say also it depends on what the equity is that you’re pulling from.
So for a lot of companies, there’s equity in the person, the person is well known for some reason, and therefore that name, that personal name embedded in the brand name is a competitive advantage. For some reason, Kenny Rogers Roasters, I think was the name of it, a brand of a chain of chicken restaurants that the country singer Kenny Rogers started. Like that made sense. The reason people went there as opposed to any other chicken restaurant was probably him. So it made sense to have the name in there or all hail Dolly, Dolly Parton has a town, a resort, I don’t know what a little Shangri-La called Dollywood. And you go there for a lot of reasons but it kind of starts with the fact that it’s Dolly, right? So it makes sense for her name to be in there.
We see a lot of heritage brands that were named after people that we don’t even realize it anymore, like Procter & Gamble or Disney, that aren’t about the cult of personality anymore, but that’s their equity. So I certainly wouldn’t say that they need to change it. Then there are some brands that absolutely are about the cult of personality, like say Martha Stewart and what other name could her company have other than Martha Stewart. So I think it’s interesting to think about what you’re trying to communicate.
Think about what your heritage is what equity you’re pulling on, right. If there’s a famous person. And also, I think you look at the standard in your industry. Sometimes that might guide you or sometimes that might give you an opportunity to make a zag. So for example, law firms are typically the vast majority are named after the founders. And it’s like name, comma, name, ampersand, name, right? Surnames. Well, so maybe because of that you follow that convention in order to sound established and not sound fly by night, but maybe not. If it were me and I was starting a law firm I would actually give it a completely different sort of more consumery name in order to stand out. So it’s something to keep in mind. It always depends. But thank you for the question, Bonnie. I liked thinking about that and I’d love to hear what you think. Bye!
