How would you like to wake up one morning without a name? The question sound’s bizzare, doesn’t it? Actually the scenario would present an uncomfortable situation for just about anyone in whose life such a momentous event unfolds. Okay, now just imagine a Fortune 500 multi-billion dollar company being confounded with a similar fate. Visualise the mayhem that would be unleashed on the unsuspecting employees, markets, shareholders, debtors, creditors, competitors, not to mention the bewilderment of the consumers. Get the picture? No. Okay. Let’s look at the life-saving questions that neo-entrepreneurs try to answer when launching a new company: Will venture capitalists fund the project?; Will talent buy into your vision and join you?; What is the revenue model?; When will you break even?; How big is the market?; Who will be the competition?; Is your product/ service/ technology unique? The questions, each more critical than the other never cease. Unfortunately, in the pandemonium, an equally important question loses out: have you thought of your product’s brand name and what should your brand stand for? Egads! Questions and more questions. One hopes that by now the reason for all the above theatrics and hysterics is clear. Typically, brands are worth 10-20% of a company’s capitalisation, often worth even millions and sometimes billions of dollars. Just as naming your new-born baby is important for his unique identity in society, so is naming your brand crucial to your company’s development. No doubt, naming is an emotionally loaded topic, for parents, consumers, organisations and even countries (refer the confusion over naming us India, Bharat or Hindustan?)

Phonetics, Allusion,
Alliteration or Plain Genetics
You could be a chief engineer for General Motors who quits and buys the Maxwell automobile works, and changes the car name to his own. But then everyone is not Walter P Chrysler. Be social. Talk to your employees and their families and you could possibly name your car after one of their daughters, Miss Mercedes.
You enjoy the Grand Prix! Then you could name the fifth car company to be acquired under your General Motors flagship after your favourite Swiss-born race car driver: Louis Chevrolet.

You could be a designer working under the personal supervision of Herr Fuhrer Adolf Hitler on what the latter called “the peoples’ car” – the Volkswagen. Later you could use much of the engine and chassis parts to build a sports car which would bear your name or at least apart of it: Dr Ferdinand Porsche.

You could be standing in front of a shaving mirror, in the year 1885 with your razor performing its job as well as always. Suddenly you realise that very little of the blade was actually used in the shaving process. Could there be a new type of blade, one practically all edge. And one that made shaving cuts and accidents nearly impossible… better still disposable. Then before your competition could say ‘Jack Brown’ you designed a blade that was thin, flat, efficient, cheap, and disposable. And well, your surname happened to be Gillette, so you decided to dedicate your idea to yourself. Congratulations
and welcome!

You could also be a pharmacist. Not just any pharmacist, but one who invented a “brain tonic” in 1886, which among other ingredients had “the properties of the wonderful Coca plant” and the famous “Cola nuts” and you sell the world’s most valuable brand to be, for five cents per glass. Thanda, really thanda!

Maybe, your biggest (and only) client is the Army. So aptly you decide on the name that comes from saying out aloud the Army’s nick name for “General Purpose” or “GP”, and hey pestro, you have a brand new name for your vehicle: Jeep.But then why take the trouble to go through short forms and long forms. All that you could do is recycle an old name, maybe even that of your competitors’. The name Explorer, for instance, was a 1954 Chrysler concept car before it became a Ford sports utility vehicle (SUV). Mahindra’s Scorpio was a name of another automobile elsewhere in the world.

Better still. Do you have any favourite alphabets? George Eastman did. To quote him here: “The letter K has been a favourite with me – it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with ‘K’. The word ‘Kodak’ is the result,” Eastman averred.

Years later, Ekta Kapoor of Balaji Telefilms shares his obsession with the word “K”, and of course not to mention the Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf’s favourable disposition towards the alphabet.
Like fruits? They are delicious and you can more-or-less spot them easily. Well, name your product after your favourite one. Apple needed to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by the other computer companies at the time who had names like IBM, NEC, DEC, ADPAC, Cincom, Dylakor, Input, Integral Systems, SAP and PSDI. They needed to reverse the entrenched view of computers in order to get people to use them at home. They were looking for a name that was not like a traditional computer company and supported a positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different, so it went ahead and grabbed ‘one’ from the Garden of Eden. Thank you very much Eve!

Simply dial and listen to Orange. The telecom company recently painted an entire town of England orange to put their point across. It seems they are all happy and having an Orangy day. (With its connotations of hope, fun, and freedom, market research indicated that people found the name distinctive and friendly, extrovert, modern and powerful. The name – along with the term “wirefree” – was registered as a trademark.) Truely a clockwork Orange.

Does Banana Republic Sound Like a Derogatory Cultural Slur?

Not Really!Look around you. Look at the rainbow. So many beautiful colours. Dedicate your brand to nature’s lovely colours. What Can Brown Do For You Today?” Brown is a new calling device for UPS, the United Parcel Service, which employs 350,000 personnel clad in brown, running around in brown trucks. Despite a $45 million campaign, Brown is still struggling to

Self-propelling

• Does this name tell a story – whether at the local bar, on the job, in the market
  or on CNBC?
• Will this name make its way through
  the world on its own?
• Is it a name people will talk about?

Emotional Connection

• What does the name suggest?
• Does the name make you feel good?
• Does it make you smile?
• Does it lock into your brain?
• Does it make you want to know more about the company /brand?

Poetry

• Physically does the name look and sound good?
• How does it roll off the tongue?
• How much internal electricity does the name have?
• How does the name sound for the millionth time?
• Will people remember it?

Personality

• Does the name have attitude?
• Does it exude qualities like confidence, mystery, presence, warmth, and a sense of humour?
• Is it provocative, engaging? Take the example of Gillette Mach3. While the name itself communicates superior performance, speed, grace and innovation, it also speaks to the consumer on an emotional, more inspirational level. This way the brand name taps into the end-benefits that consumers are likely to enjoy using the product, viz. freedom, confidence and comfort. And there’s another winner from Gillette: The Gillette Sensor Excel. The word Sensor is suggestive of sensing the skin and contours of one’s face, while Excel suggests excellence, and supports the brands positioning. All in all a message goes out that here’s a line of products with more advanced features and benefits than the original product. Above all, the line of procucts will offer more value to the customers.

Kiss: Keep It Simple Stupid!
Names are ultimately a condensation of meanings and associations. Brands like Arm and Hammer, Tide, Visa and Xerox are all packed with meaning and associations, from the immediate connotations in the names themselves to the equity of the major branding efforts in which their companies have engaged.

Phonetics, roots, symbolism, themes, allusion and alliteration are some of the tools names and marketers use to pack brand names like these with meaning and power. But which of these objective tools should you pick up for the subjective art of naming your own next brand! Looking at the branding trends, industry experts predict that by the end of the year, half of all the farm products in the markets will carry a brand name.

Laugh Aloud But Get a Name
Imagine that you are wondering if jumping onto the branded fresh fruits market will boost your sales. To find out, you hire a team of marketing consultants. The consultants inform you that adding a brand name can be very effective as long as you follow their advice.

First, they say, your brand name should include the name of a specific farm or person. If you call your oranges, “Ambani Oranges” for example, customers are going to assume there’s an Ambani somewhere who cares about his reputation, and, therefore, his oranges. Without having to make any overt claims, there is the unspoken assumption that Ambani takes care of his operation a little better than anyone else, or he wouldn’t put his name on it.

You will boost sales even more, they tell you, if you add “Mumbai” to your label. Most people have a positive association with where they live. They harbour the illusion that shady dealings and shoddy
products are found somewhere else. To further enhance your brand name, your consultants tell you, it would be wise to add a bucolic term or two. Most consumers are so estranged from the land that they yearn for anything that suggests country living.

So: “Ambani’s Mumbai Oranges?” How about “Farmer Ambani’s Mumbai Oranges?” you ask. They tell you this is an excellent choice of words because “Farmer Ambani” evokes the past as well as the countryside. You give your graphic artists the go-ahead to design a logo with a red barn and haystack to reinforce this link with the past. Great! With just four carefully chosen words, you’ve managed to imbue your oranges with integrity, local pride, wholesome country living, and the nostalgic past. “Farmer Ambani’s Mumbai Oranges” it is then.

But what about those legions of “green” and health conscious consumers? Has your brand name lured them in yet? Not really. So, say your consultants, it’s time to reach for some of those ubiquitous words linked with health, nature, and wholesomeness. You add the words “fresh” and “natural”. So, now you have: “Farmer Ambani’s Fresh ‘n Natural Mumbai Oranges.” (Note how that “’n” adds a little extra folksy charm!)

But just when you’re ready to spend tens of thousands of rupees to trademark your name, design your labels, and begin your marketing campaign, your advisors say that they are beginning to hear about something called “organic.” They think over this quaint concept. Once again, they have the solution. Simply add the words “Organic” to your label, they say. Image is all. “Farmer Ambani’s Fresh ‘n Natural Organic Mumbai Oranges.” Well you could go on and on and your marketing consultants could keep earning their money or you could glean through some naming styles and create one of your own and of course, sack the consultants.

The Branding Phenomenon
The following list contains considerations that should be made before making a final
choice of brand name. A good brand name should:

• Evoke positive associations
• Be easy to pronounce and easy to remember
• Suggest product benefits
• Be distinctive
• Use numerals when emphasising tenological features
• Not infringe on existing registered brand names.

And, we all know how crucial first impressions are. Names are the first public act of branding and can be assets of enormous value. Through their meaning and sound, names project the personality of a product, service or company and should communicate to customers the quality, integrity and strength of what they represent.

Also, one should not forget about a trigger called curiosity! Curiosity sounds a deafening red alert in every neuron of the brain. The brain is at its curious best when faced with something that seems irregular or uncommon in some way. If your brand name doesn’t create a curiosity factor, you are wasting gobs of money to just trying to cut through the communication clutter. The sooner you get psychological exclamation marks into your brand name, that much sooner you get the attention you crave for.

But What If You Have a Boring Company Name That You’re Stuck With?Hey it happens! You inherited the brand name and there is not much you can do with it without the shareholders going for your jugular. Well don’t fret. First you’ve got to realise that branding is not restricted to just your company name. A process/product that your company has or follows could become bigger than the company itself.