Naming for brands built to last
A good name is an essential strategic and identity element for organizations that want to meet their business objectives and thus endure. The gateway to any brand's imagination and, at the same time, a generator of emotional connections with the people to whom value is delivered. Names are everything, Oscar Wilde said. Because they build realities.
As part of our brand creation and management work, we frequently accompany companies that need to work—or rework—their naming and thus modulate their brand image, that subjective perception that emerges in each person when interacting with a company, within the context of a broader and ongoing effort: Brand Strategy, Identity, and Activation.
We walk you through the challenges and opportunities we've identified.
The Great Challenge of Naming
Naming a company, or changing its name after years of operation, is often one of the most challenging phases of brand work because it awakens the imagination that each person carries with them: any name can remind someone of an old friendship or a project that went very badly (or very well) in the past. It's hard to shed that baggage of context, culture, and references.
For this reason, we always say that having a strategic partner on this journey is essential, and also that good naming work must anticipate the biases of that first impression with sound technical rigor. In fact, contrary to what might seem, naming is a more technical than creative endeavor in which the goal is for the chosen option to…
- Describe the business
- Be euphonic; that is, sound good, without negative connotations
- Allow differentiation or be unique
- Have no meanings that work against you, now or in the future
- Be concise, easy to pronounce and spell
- Be easy to remember
- Be flexible and capable of growth, essential to ensure scalability
A necessary horizon
Should a name meet all requirements? In an ideal world, yes, but reality tells us there are exceptions that work perfectly. Descriptive? Mercedes-Benz. Concise? PricewaterhouseCoopers. Easy to pronounce? Haägen-Dazs. Differentiated? Meta.
Naming work is, therefore, ambivalent: on one hand it's very broad, and on the other it's extremely restrictive. It's increasingly difficult to find a winning alternative. New brand registrations happen every day and domains are heavily saturated.
And we can't forget that we live in a constant rain of stimuli. In the attention economy, landing on a name with solid seams, even if it's unorthodox, isn't just necessary; it's fundamental.
Reactions to context
Faced with the difficulties imposed by the ecosystem, in recent years various trends have consolidated that look for loopholes: from neologisms, like Netflix, Spotify, or Bizum; to drawing from universes created by film and literature, as happens with The Lord of the Rings and Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, or Mithril Capital Management. Ways to check those technical requirements by taking the tangent.
We'll always have Activation
In those cases where it's not possible to meet all technical requirements—most of them, really—because we want to preserve a legacy, or because there's a very strong option in one of the categories, like meaning, we need to rely even more on brand Activation.
We're talking about creating launch campaigns, publishing content or organizing events, for example. Marketing, communication and much more. Physical or digital, for internal or external audiences.
Everything that makes the name memorable, consolidates positioning to strengthen differentiation or even adds nuance to meaning if new products and services have emerged.
A consequence of strategy
In naming work there are no magic formulas, only a labor of searching for options and refinement with solid strategic backbone. The goal, at the end of the road, is to overcome the creative and technical barriers imposed by the macro context, and also each particular sector, so that your organization's name becomes a lever for attracting, retaining and fostering customer loyalty.
