What’s in a name?
A new brand can have a name specially designed to suit its defi-
nition; an old brand is stuck with what it has inherited. How
much does this matter, and should a brand ever consider chang-
ing its name? Plenty of product brands carry their founder’s or
inventor’s name, though we have long since stopped making
associations with any real person, and are often surprised that
there was indeed a Mr Firestone or a Mr Goodyear.
Almost any name can grow to represent the brand defini-
tion, provided it has time. Of course, a good word with posi-
tive associations can also become associated with a poor brand
definition – Lada is Russian for ‘beloved’.
‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other
name would smell as sweet.’ Al Ries argues that Shakespeare, at
least when it comes to brand names, was wrong, ‘which is why
the single most important decision in the marketing of perfume
is the name’.
Choosing a word or name that sounds like or might even be
confused with another attention-grabbing word is another
approach – ‘fcuk’ being perhaps the most controversial of
recent times – it’s just an abbreviation, they say, for French
Connection UK.
Acronyms and abbreviations can of course become brand
names, and it is often a surprise when we learn their original
meaning. 3M says innovation and invention, hardly words that
the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company would
bring to mind. Who would be enthused by the products of the
Bayerische Motoren Werke? BMW to you and me.
Certain letters appear more commonly in brand names than
in normal everyday use, the letters x, k and o being the most
notable. Dulux, Kodak, Knorr, IKEA, Exxon, Xerox and Oxo
are just some of many that attract our attention through their
unusual appearance. Kodak was coined by George Eastman in
1888, being ‘short, vigorous, incapable of being misspelled…
and in order to satisfy trademark laws it must mean nothing’.
Not a bad formula. We might extend Eastman’s formula a little,
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Understanding brands