Thanks for sharing….

Agree advance business systems is a bad name, I couldn’t even remember it after a decade of their ads, but it was one example of the name not doing the heavy lifting of a brand.

Putting a brand in the shopping experience great idea, I hadn’t thought about this.

I might have 1.5-2 more posts on naming coming up. I think you’ll enjoy a post I have summarizing a naming academic study.

These new attributes are not arbitrary, however (nor do I believe you’re suggesting this). Not only are the name’s meaning and resonance likely to evolve over time, as you point out, but the very mission of the company can evolve and/or be perfected (or disintegrated!) over time. This accounts for some, but certainly not all, of the attribute “drift.”

Edsel and Enron both acquired negative connotations not because of branding mistakes, but because of corporate errors and/or exogenous events. The “i” prefix is completely exogenous; as it became part of our communications currency, it made sense for exploit that acquired meaning in branding. That’s what Apple did. The Ayds diet product was dealt a death knell by the AIDS virus. No one could have predicted this, but the company can and should be blamed for failing to rename immediately. Just pure hubris.

To Mikal (1st post): Thanks again for your comments. You are positing what I might term the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Naming: the attributes affect the name, but the name affects the attributes, too. You are right that different brand names emphasize different attributes. That’s why some attributes are more important than others. Equally weighting every attribute creates naming errors, but all attributes are not created equal. Those that are essential must be reflected in a name.

For those who don’t know which ones are essential, I would argue they haven’t properly done their positioning. Attributes and competitive analyses beget positioning which begets a name. If the order is changed, then chaos ensues and names become arbitrary selections rather than choices made on the basis of reason. (And, yes, a brilliant intuitive leap could generate a name a priori, but even then, it has to be established that the name meets the proper criteria.)

The dilemma that you describe – two different names taking the brand in subtly different directions – is accurate, but what its existence says to me is that the value and prominence of the different attributes hasn’t been fully examined: they’ve all been stacked up equally rather than evaluated for strength, eliminated/merged for duplication, etc. I’m sure we’ve all seen positioning “meetings” where 4 synonyms for a single attribute “beat” one unique word for a powerful attribute. That’s where the error arises; early clarification doesn’t lead to a single name, but it does provide clarity about which name reflects the attributes you want.

Now, working backwards, if you are leaning toward a name that seems to conflict with your rank ordering of attributes, then it’s time to reexamine those attributes’ rankings. Perhaps in discussing the name, you’ve come to a new realization about the attributes, and that type of “give and take” is worthwhile and fruitful.

As for Advance Business Systems, any way you look at it, that’s a terrible, god-awful name. It’s not just stodgy, it’s generic and grammatical awkward (at best). Their tagline is an attempt to get around that, because perhaps by now they’ve established some identity, but it’s still a terrible name. It is incapable of doing any lifting, let alone heavy lifting. Whatever they’ve accomplished would have been easier, better and more productive had they had a good or great name.

To Mikal (2nd post): I seek internal and external input because independent minds often think of new ideas or see connections one cannot or does not. I neither undervalue nor overvalue it. In other words, I evaluate the input based on its merits, whether the source is a checkout clerk at the store or the CEO. I look solely at the idea, not at the person. Now, if the product is aimed at 18-24-year-olds, seeking input from septuagenarians wouldn’t be very helpful. So you have to take demographics and psychographics into account. I have found that engineers (and I’ve been an engineer) often think they can name a product, but they would never think that you or I could code their applications or tell them how to improve their code (generally, a correct view, excepting my software background). Some CFOs immediately condemn a name, but imagine if you tried to tell them how to properly interpret some obscure FAS.

If you do branding and naming, you’re being hired because of your expertise, and sometimes it’s necessary to assert that. One reason for having a process is that it enables everyone to see how you’ve gone from nothing to a finished product. It also enables you to emphasize that it’s possible to love a name, color, etc., but to recognize that it’s inappropriate. Personal, subjective preferences need to be acknowledged and discounted in favor of objective, impersonal decisions based on the personal, subjective impressions and objective needs of the target market (yeah, that’s a mouthful).

You ask “where do you put external feedback in your process? Is customer research a part of your naming/tagline process? And how do you go about ensuring you’re getting the right types of feedback.” My perspective is different than many others here. I am an individualist and I reject groupthink, consensus-building for the sake of consensus – knowing that it leads to watered-down mediocrity and the destruction of great ideas, and the weighting of all opinions equally.
I cannot tell you how many times I have created names and/or taglines that generated initial uncertainty, only for the customer to find that, once in the marketplace, customers loved it. People typically don’t like the unfamiliar or something that’s changed. Therefore, the better a name is, often the more resistance you’ll find to it (this is particularly true as the size of the company gets larger and you’re dealing with committees, BODs, etc.) This is why I emphasize, again and again, that everyone has permission to love or hate a name personally, but that isn’t what the process is about. It’s about what will work and achieve the company’s branding/rebranding goals.

To answer your question: I find feedback immediately useful in identifying brand attributes. Everyone wants to contribute and everyone understands it’s not about the name, so the pressure is off. I create a matrix of the attributes (weighted if appropriate) with prospective names/taglines (which my team or I has typically come up with: if there’s a great suggestion from someone else, we’ll include it, or if the scene is more politically sensitive, we’ll include our names as well as a couple of the company’s favorites.)

By getting buy-in on the matrix, what happens is that the grading (typically “A” to “F”) of the cross products of each name and attribute explicates why bad names are bad. I also make a very strong effort never to present a “bad” name myself ☺ I then seek feedback based on the presentation of the matrix. This gives everyone context, so that when a bad name is proposed, it’s a straightforward process to evaluate it against the relevant attributes, and then everyone agrees that the name is terrible. If someone comes up with a better name or tagline (it happens, albeit rarely), then we’ve already got a process in place that makes it easy to see the strength of the contender.

Customer research is important in the following ways: for B2C products, you need to understand the psychographics even more than the demographics, although both are important. For both B2C and B2B, you need to know what they’re buying now, why they’re buying it, and why they’d switch. Focus groups in which bored people pimping themselves out for $$$ produce valid results no better than chance, in my view. But here’s a trick for a consumer product. Take your package/bottle/etc. and put it on a shelf in a real store (yes, with permission of the manager). Then see what real customers actually do. Do they see it? Do they pick it up? Do they laugh? Do they cry? If you can get a snapshot of your customers’ behavior in their actual buying environment (with an e-commerce product, you can conduct a similar experiment), you’ll find that’s infinitely more valuable than watching focus group sessions.

But I’d add that what brand attributes are important/resonate should be an inclusive process of both internal and external feedback. I’d also add its useful for finding out words that people just flat out don’t like – and why. Then its our job to synthesize that information – determine whether or not its a roadblock and continue with a recommendation / decision.

Open question – where do you put external feedback in your process? Is customer research a part of your naming/tagline process? And how do you go about ensuring you’re getting the right types of feedback…

Even asking other marketers can have a group think-type aspect to it.

I agree and disagree with you about the name being all the salient points of a brand and not just a component.
I think that in the formation of a name, there is give and take between the brand attributes and the name. When you look at any final options for brand names, you realize that adopting a different name would take your brand in a subtlely to completely different direction- depending on the final name (see: kumo and the hypothesized bing). So while the name encompasses the brand attributes, some brand name options prioritize different aspects over others.
Additionally some brands are empty vessels. Polaroid and Xerox two completely different companies, however I’d posit that the names themselves are interchangeable for their products. And in that case the name is just one component.

Another example – Advance Business Systems. Boring name right? Well growing up their whimsical ads were all over my television. I even forgot their name typing into live.com (there is a name for you) ‘advanced copiers we live and breathe this stuff’ anyway the ‘we live and breathe this stuff’ makes it clear that they are a less stodgy brand – so again in this case the brand NAME doesn’t do the heavy lifting.