Branding & Naming Guidelines: 10 Common Mistakes & How to Fix Them

In this episode, Mike Carr highlights the top ten mistakes companies make with branding and naming guidelines. He explains how long, rigid documents often go unused and how internal focus can alienate teams and confuse customers. Using examples from OpenAI, Intel, Xbox, BMW, and Toyota, he stresses the importance of flexible, customer-first strategies, clear quick-start guides, and dynamic, AI-powered tools that evolve with the market.

Chapters

• 0:04 Introduction to Branding and Naming Guidelines
• 1:00 Mistake #1: Guidelines Are Too Long
• 1:48 Mistake #2: Heavy-Handed Tone
• 2:39 Mistake #3: Hard-to-Read Formatting
• 3:28 Mistake #4: Rigid Strategies with No Exceptions
• 5:15 Mistake #5: Lack of a Coherent Naming Strategy
• 7:00 Mistake #6: Overly Complex Naming Systems
• 10:02 Mistake #7: Internal Teams Ignoring Customer Clarity
• 11:19 Mistake #8: Globalization and the English-Language Bias
• 13:01 Mistake #9: Undefined Decision-Making Authority
• 14:34 Mistake #10: Static Brand Books vs. AI-Driven Tools

Transcript

Mike Carr (00:04):

Do you have branding guidelines or naming guidelines? Do you even know what I'm talking about? Well, if you don't grow and if you're successful, you at someday will have to wrestle with branding and naming guidelines. And if you don't believe me, take a look at what Mess Open AI has right now. And Sam Altman, if you're listening, I think you probably know what I mean. But before we get to open AI's particular problem with their AI naming, I want to take you through 10 of the most common mistakes that we've seen over the decades, helping folks write their branding, naming guidelines, their nomenclature systems developing their naming architecture and all that kind of stuff. So mistake number one is they're two blasted long. So how long is too long? Well, Microsoft supposedly has guidelines that are approaching 100 pages, and Apple has Microsoft beat with over 200 pages.

(01:00):

Now, do you really expect someone who's trying to come up with a name and needs some help to read through a 200 plus page document to try to figure out how to come up with a name or how to come up with some brand messaging that's consistent with whatever the corporate standards are? I don't think so. So what's the ideal length? One page, maybe two pages? Yes. We've developed branding, naming guidelines for some of the largest companies in the world that are just one or two pages long, and you're going to say, no way, ours right now is maybe 40 pages, 50 pages. There's no way we can convince that down to one or two pages fine. Go ahead and create a quick start guide or something that can be scanned by your poor department heads, your brand managers, your new product development teams that just need help coming up with a name but can't read through a verbose a hundred page, 200 page document.

(01:48):

Number two mistake. They're too heavy handed. A lot of these are written as you're the police, the branding cops, the adversaries not really trying to help your user community inside your company or your organization. Rather, you want them to adhere to the standards, and if they don't get adhere to the standards, you're going to come in and slap their hand. That's not really conducive to folks using this stuff. So rather than coming across as the adversary or using words like our naming policies that you must follow or what we won't allow you to do when it comes up with a new name or a new brand, maybe focus on how you can help position yourselves as the partner, the helpful department person that's going to come along and help them navigate the complexities quickly and easily with not a whole lot of effort on their part.

(02:39):

Number three, these things are hard to read. Now, I don't want to disparage anyone that takes delight in writing, and maybe you've used ai. Claude four is pretty darn good at helping you write a naming branding guide. You just prompted the right way and you'll be amazed at what it comes up. And you're so excited. You've got paragraph after paragraph that explains why you have a master brand strategy or a branded house strategy and all the standards and how to put everything together. Do you really expect anyone to read text? It just isn't going to happen. So make it easy to digest bullets, not chunks of text graphics that are meaningful and simplify the process, not that are overly complicated and show five levels of brand hierarchy that no one's going to understand or want to try to figure out where their name fits into all this thing.

(03:28):

So make it easy to read and give them some easy to follow templates and some guides that they can follow and some great examples so they know what you're talking about. Number four, unbending adherence to a fixed branding or naming strategy. We've seen this multiple times. We've had to come in and help clients resolve this. There are always exceptions to every naming guy. I've never seen one. If you actually then go out and audit the names or look at what the future holds in store, you're not going to have to make an exception to what the standards the rules are. So you need to develop these so they're flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen situations. So let's talk about the branded house strategy where you have one master brand, and underneath that you have more descriptive or intuitive names. This seems to be the preferred strategy these days because it's so expensive to develop names, but there are exceptions to the branded house.

(04:24):

Like if you introduce a new offering that's at a much higher price point, can you really elevate your current master brand to that whole new tier? A good example in the automotive space is Toyota, when they decided to introduce the Lexus line, rather than call it Toyota Premium or the Toyota 7,000, they thought it was much wiser to come up with a totally new brand Lexus, which did not carry any of the negative baggage of a more economical value price. Brand like Toyota back in the day carried or when Hotelers introduced new, less expensive budget hotels, Marriott, for instance, with their Fairfield, they didn't call it Marriott Conno or the less expensive Marriott because Marriott had a certain prestige or cachet associated with it. They simply called it Fairfield Hilton's done the same thing with Hampton Ends. And there are many other examples out there.

(05:15):

Or if you have a house of brand strategy, the Procter and Gamble, where you have very distinct standalone brands for each product offering. You have the tide detergent, you have the cheer detergent, et cetera. If that's your strategy, well, how many millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars do you have to keep feeding that beast? Because that's what it requires. If you start proliferating very independent brands that are distinctly different from everything else, you run out of money very quickly. So even if you are a well-healed consumer CPG company with lots of money, it often doesn't make sense to launch a totally new brand every time you come out with a new product. So the house of brand strategy can be extremely expensive to implement. The branded house strategy can be very limiting or very restrictive in terms of what you want to be able to do depending upon where you're going in a competitive marketplace.

(06:05):

Number five, and I've already talked about this a little bit, but I think it's worth revisiting. You really can't adhere to any single strategy. You really do need to have that flexibility, but you need to have a strategy, right? So while you need to be flexible, you need to have some strategy. No strategy at all is not the best way to go. And I mentioned OpenAI, and I just want to share with you their current naming system. If you go out there, I went out there this morning and looked at this, so I'm currently using Catch GT zero three, and if you go, they have GPT-4, oh, they have an oh four mini, an oh four mini high, A GPT, 4.5, et cetera. Now, you might think that chat GT four oh is the newer version compared to chat GPT zero three, but it's not zero three actually came out after 4.0 and it actually has some reasoning capabilities, deep research capabilities that four oh does not have.

(07:00):

And then I have no idea what oh four mini high is, I mean, oh four mini, I think fast version, but I don't know, or four oh mini. So it's just extremely confusing where you have an oh three, a 4.0, a four oh mini a four oh, mini high, a 4.5, don't know what's going on. I get confused. I can't even write these names down, right? So how do you expect the customers to figure out what's going on? So you need a strategy, right? But you need the right strategy. You don't adhere to the wrong strategy. And there are many examples over the years of companies we've worked with that have the wrong strategy. One that I'll mention because it's been in the public eye recently, is Intel. Anytime you hear the word concatenation, you should run from it like it's fire, right? It's going to burn you because that's what drives some of the naming guidelines and branding guidelines is you have family names and you've got product names, and you've got line extension names, and you start to concatenate, well, the family name needs to go here and the proc name needs to go here, and the line extension needs to go here.

(07:52):

Before you know it, you've got this gobbledy group of names that either too long and nobody's going to use, or you have to shorten everything to little letters and little numbers that only internally do the engineers or do the product designers know what those things mean, but none of your customers have a clue. And so Intel's got the I 5 10 30 5G seven, that's one of their names for one of their processors, the I 5 10 30 5G seven. Then they have the I 5 13 40 P. Then they have the I 7 13 55, you, et cetera, et cetera. I don't have a clue what this stuff means. Now, if you really get into it and you're a technical guru or nerd, you can probably figure out that some of 'em are performance oriented. Some of 'em are low power oriented, and an I five that's new is going to be faster than an I seven.

(08:32):

That's old, even though the I seven that's old has a faster processor because they have to sort of turn it down a little bit because it's running out of juice if it's running out of battery power. All those kinds of considerations. Anyway, naming way too complicated. Another example is BMWI used to have A BMW. I love the BMW, never understood their naming, and now it's just a mess. You have their electric hybrid vehicles. Oh, okay, well, that's an I, right? An I three, I four, I five I seven. Well, no, because then you have the E three 30 s, the five 50 E, the seven 50 E. So what's the difference between an I five, which is an electric and a five 50 E? And then you have the pH v, you've got the X five pH v, you've got the X three pH v.

(09:09):

I have no idea what the I is what little E is and what A-P-H-E-V is. They're all electric hybrids. And I'm sure if you got into the weeds, you could figure out, well, some of 'em are just electric. Some of 'em are hybrids, and some of 'em are something else. But come on guys, it doesn't really make sense. So be sure the strategy is the right strategy before you lock and load and build and write your naming guide and your branding guide. Number seven. Number seven, letting internal groups drive your naming decisions versus your customers. So who's writing the naming guide, the branding guide, and what is its purpose? Usually it's written internally for internal consistency. It's all driven internally, and it ends up putting unnecessary guardrails and restrictions on things that don't serve the customer, right? They actually hamper you getting clarity and a simple competitive advantage out to the customer when it comes to your brand messaging or your naming.

(10:02):

So I always advocate, keep the customer involved. When you're writing this, who is your external target? They should not just all be developed internally. A great example, this is a few years ago, Microsoft, actually, many years ago, they came out with the Xbox one X that was sort of one of their core models. And then I think back in 2020, they came out with the Xbox Series X, which was an upgrade. Now, in truly, that makes a lot of sense, right? You've got the one X and I got the series X. The series X sounds better, arguably, well, customers were confused. The names were so similar to one another that when Microsoft started taking pre-orders for the Xbox Series X, the orders for the old version actually went up over 700% according to Wired Magazine. People were confused. They thought, oh, I'm willing to get the new Xbox.

(10:46):

Well, that's the one X. Oh, yeah, that sounds like what it was. No, it was a Series X too close to one to the right. So the names were internally consistent, but all they did was cause confusion in the marketplace. Number eight, this is not as commonly talked about, but I want to share with you some of our vision about what's going to be happening in the future and what your branding and naming Kai clients need to accommodate. It has to do with non-English speakers. It has to do with cultures and targets. And there's a certain, I think, arrogance that's existed amongst us customers for decades that, well, the world is an English speaking world, and if we come up with a brand that works well in English, we're going to use that same brand in Europe. We're going to use that same brand in South America am.

(11:19):

We're going to use that same brand in China and India and Japan. And that's sort of been the status quo because it simplifies everything, right? Our Marco communications are all the same. Our packaging is pretty much the same. We have to change some of the language, but the basic graphics, the layout, even the trademark registration perhaps is a little bit easier. So it's easier to manage. But I think what's going to happen in the future, and it's already starting to happen because of microsegmentation, because of what AI is enabling, is you won't just have a single brand name anymore for a product. You won't just have two or three. You might have dozens because you can with AI and with the digitization of the world very effectively and very efficiently, roll out a name that's very specific for Mandarin or Cantonese and China that's very specific for Farsi in the Middle East.

(12:07):

That's very specific to some other language in some other part of the world. And by the fact that you have a name that's tailored to that market and means something relevant in that market, you can gain a competitive edge of your competition. I think that's going to happen. It hasn't happened yet, but I think it's fixing happening. I think AI is really changing the economics of making that happen. The new norm is going to be dozens, if not hundreds of different names for exactly the same product, targeted at different languages and cultures around the world. So this goes way beyond what everyone's doing right now when it comes to linguistic screening and cultural screening, profanity, checking off color meanings, vulgarity checking, cultural inappropriateness. Now we're talking about incorporating into your guide where you actually have a series of names for the same product, and maybe a lot of the guidelines are the same, but this idea that, oh my gosh, is that going to add a layer of complexity?

(13:01):

But we do need to address it. Cause I think it's going to happen. If you don't address, I think you're going to be at a competitive advantage. Number nine. Number nine, number nine. Number nine, who makes the final decision? Is this even explained in your naming guide? Because folks, it's not a democratic process. And the worst outcome we've seen is when the internal naming folks, or the internal branding folks, the ones that wrote the guide, are the ones that actually decide what name do you go forward with? Because they see this name and they check all the standards. It meets this rule, it's so long, it's easy to say, it's easy to spell, blah, blah, blah. And before you know it, yep, checks all the boxes and they haven't bothered to see if it resonates externally with the customers, with the actual target. And that is an awful way, I think, to make a decision.

(13:42):

Usually what we recommend is the person or people, few people that are responsible for making the brand successful and have controls of the budget and know how much money there is to spend are the ones that make the decision, even if the name doesn't necessarily meet all the guidelines. But if it gives you that big competitive advantage, the guidelines are there to guide. The guidelines are not there to restrict or to limit creativity. And then the 10th one, which I don't think anyone's talking about yet, number 10, which I think is the most important and exciting, is why are we talking about branding guidelines or naming guidelines as a deck versus an AI agent or a chat bot or a series of prompts. That is, we believe that the new naming guidelines, the new brand books, won't be in hard copy. It'll be something that you turn on and you describe your problem.

(14:34):

I've got this new product, I need a new name, or I need a new messaging campaign targeted at these individuals or these types of companies or these types of users in these parts of the world who speak these languages. And you don't even have to give it all that AI will figure this out. AI then has all the rules, all the guidelines, all the stuff that nobody wants to mess with in its brain, in its memory. And it guides you through this process and it gives you some suggestions. And then it says, well, now how can I improve these suggestions? So it's an iterative process, but the whole idea is the brand guide, the brand book is no longer a physical document. It is an intelligent agent that understands where you are as an organization. It can go out and take a look at your most recent competitive situations.

(15:18):

What names have they just launched? What messaging have they just changed to? Quite frankly, you might not even be aware of and come back with suggestions when it comes to a name, when it comes to a tagline or a strap line, when it comes to messaging wrapped around that name that's relevant, that meets all the quote guidelines. And that's got a pretty good handle on. It's going to resonate with the competition, resonate with your customers. So that's what I want to share with you today. 10 mistakes that folks have been making, 10 mistakes that folks have been making when it comes to brand books and naming guidelines and writing, branding guidelines, and maybe some of the possible ways to tackle each one of those. Have a great week. See you.