With enough marketing dollars, one can imbue any brand name, nonsensical or not, with meaning and value. However, most fledgling brands do not have vast sums of money to educate the world on their value proposition and what their name means. From the split second your brand name is uttered or viewed, it should start working for you. It should sound right, look right, feel right, and ideally, connote or denote some meaningful aspect of the brand. What do we mean by right, you might ask? It should have cognitive fluency.
The difference between a good name and a bad name has a lot to do with the "fluency effect," which is the term used to describe the ease or difficulty with which someone can process information. Names that are easier to process have a clear advantage over more complicated names. A good name should be readily encoded and easily accessed from memory. A good name invites the prospect to learn more about the brand and to ultimately purchase the product, support the cause, or join the organization, whatever the objective might be.
Leonard Mlodinow, the author of Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, offers some very compelling evidence on the power of good names.
"The ease with which a person can process information (such as the name of a stock) does exert an unconscious effect on people's assessment of that information."
"Investors were indeed more likely to invest in the initial public offerings of companies whose name or ticker symbols were easy to pronounce than in companies with complicated names or symbols."
Other studies show that people tend to react more favorably to things that are easy to comprehend. This is called the "illusion of truth" effect.
"It is easier to trust medicines with simpler names as compared with those that are difficult to pronounce – the human mind associates ease-of-reading with ease-of-trusting."
Surprisingly, many business people tend to overlook some essential details when they develop a brand name. In their rush to launch a brand, they miss some critical factors. If their name references a local area, will it have credibility when the brand's trade area expands? Can the name also be acceptable as an abbreviation? For instance, the Federation for Employment and Guidance Service became "FEGS," which was a total liability until it finally closed its doors.
Name Changes to the Rescue
Some names sound unappetizing. Some names conjure the wrong associations. Still, some names actually work against the very objective that the brand is trying to accomplish. For instance, if you’re trying to introduce young people into the field of science, you should avoid using the word “science” since many young people decide early on that “science” is a difficult course they took in school. Call your “science center” a “discovery center,” and it becomes less threatening. You’ll get more people over the threshold where they can discover that science is fun.
The following provides seven essential tips one should consider when developing a new brand name:
· Start with your brand's positioning. What is the single-minded seminal idea that your brand wants to convey to its target audiences? Ideally, your new name should denote or connote your brand's positioning. For example, Zip Car is a natural extension of its brand promise, "Join instantly. Drive in Minutes." Ally Bank makes its positioning clear right up front. Rocket Mortgage delivers on its promise of speed and ease. Apple implies simplicity and ease.
· Remember the fluency effect. The mind equates ease of understanding with ease of trusting. This is a mental heuristic whereby one name is processed more fluently, smoothly, more quickly than others. The ease in cognitive processing helps with memorability and likability since people feel closer to things they understand.
· Consider using names of objects: Names with concrete referents conjure mental images more quickly than abstract nouns. For example, words such as Apple, Dove, Black Dog Bakery, Blue Moon Beer, and Rocket Mortgage are more easily encoded and recalled. Magnet (our name) is easy to remember because it's also a familiar object, and it ties into the positioning idea of "Creating powerfully attractive brands."
· Phonetics: A client of ours, Sanford Institute for Savings, abbreviated their name, thinking this would help open their business outside of Sanford, ME. This backfired in several ways: 1) "SIS" sounds like "Cyst." 2) The sibilant "ess" sounds like air leaking from a tire or the hiss of a snake, which does not say solid for a bank and does not stand up well against more comprehensible phonetically dependable names such as Northeast Bank (See cognitive fluency). By the way, much to the relief of employees and customers, we changed SIS to Partners Bank.
· Geography: Beware of using a name that may paint you into a corner. For instance, it's sometimes (not always) difficult to expand your trade area and specific target audiences with a local name.
· Wearability/Usability: Is this a name that you will want people to wear? Many clients do not have the money to spend heavily on advertising to imbue a character with meaning, so how the name and logo fit on a cap, a shirt, a mug, a bumper sticker can matter a lot.
· Descriptors matter as much as the name: The descriptor, i.e., the definition of your product or service, is often overlooked and can be as important, if not more important, than the name itself. For example, a medical center, a clinic, or a medical group can offer the same service; however, one of these entities is perceived to be of greater value. The same is true for exercise, wherein a gym, fitness center, health club, fitness studio, or wellness center can offer the same services, but one of these is more appealing to a broader swath of the public. One of these descriptors will enable you to provide more services with greater credibility. Or, how about a Science Center? If your objective is to draw more people into the field of science, then "Science Center" is NOT the best descriptor. Contact us, and we'll be happy to explain.