Brand Name

Episode 5 is on naming. The Five Tests every name has to pass: distinctiveness, ownability, scalability, pronounceability, narrative load. The discovery method that pulls candidates out of your customers' own language. 

The cost of fixing a name later runs three to twenty times what getting it right would have cost.

A name is the most permanent decision in branding. Choose it the way you would name a child.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

So a name is the most permanent decision in branding. You think about it, logos can be redesigned, taglines can be rewritten, websites can be relaunched, but a name is the thing that's travels with the brand through every chapter of life. And so this episode is about naming. Why the cleanest name is not always the strongest one, and what to do about it. So let's get started. When my son was born, my wife and I had to give it a name, like all couples. Most families struggle with this and they enter decision paralysis and they think about family history, cultural resonance, and whether a teacher at the school is going to mess up saying it, or whether the kid's gonna get picked on, and how the name is going to travel. So even with my own son, I thought about the name the way I think about every name: how it sounds, how it travels, and how it holds meaning. And of course, how it will age when he gets older. I've always liked shorter names, and specifically for him, we ended up landing on a five-letter name. Five-letter names are basically the longest name that your brain can hold it as one unit, one shape. So we named him David Johan Laube. David Johan Lob 555. So there's symmetry there, there's balance. And David means beloved. Johan means champion, and so it's our beloved champion. We found the name we loved, and so the meaning followed. And that's how naming works. The meaning deepens a choice, it does not make it. We also gave him a Spanish-friendly middle name because he's in a bilingual home. Both languages from day one. Both names work in both languages. And of course, I bought his domain the day that we settled on his name. So we're still sitting on davidjohan.com. Because you know that's parenting 101. So a child and a brand name work the same way. The name can carry meaning before the person or before the brand arrives. David Johan carries beloved champion. Grace carries elegance. Victor carries triumph. But the inherited meaning is not the lived out meaning. A child named Grace will not always be graceful. A child named Victor will not always win. But the name is the starting point. The life is what fills it. And brand names work the same way. Alright, I'm John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands: the ones that accept their positioning in the market and the ones that challenge it. And this show is for the challengers and for the founders and CMOs who are the ones responsible for making that change happen. So going back to naming, think about the meaning of a name. You think of a name like an astronomical event. Well, that's the meaning of the name. What's the name? Equinox. It is a moment that happens twice a year when the day and night are equal. And the meaning has nothing to do with the brand that the customers picture when they hear the name Equinox. The premium gym, the marble lockers, the recovery suites. The brand created the meaning through behavior over time. And every studio they opened, every member they accepted, every dollar they charge, every campaign they ran, the word Equinox holds the association now of what the definition is. Not because their original meaning matched the brand. Because the brand spent decades filling the word with something else. And that's true for every great brand name. Apple meant fruit, and now it means design discipline. And premium consumer electronics. Originally it meant for creatives. Amazon meant river. Now it means delivery and infinite amount of selection. Nike meant a Greek goddess, and now it means athletic performance. Slack meant lazy. The opposite of what productivity software should be called. Now, Slack is one of the most recognized B2B brands in the world. The original meaning is inherited, and the lived meaning is what the brand earned. A name gives you a starting point. Behaviors fill it with meaning. And that is true whether the name belongs to a person or a company. A good name does not explain the business, it gives a business something to become. A brand name is the most used word your company will ever own. Let me say that again in case you missed it. A brand name is the most used word your company will ever own. Okay, the name will appear on every email, every invoice, every legal document, every piece of marketing, every product page, every job listing, every press mention, every domain, like on your website, on all of the search results. If your company succeeds, that name will be said, written billions of times. And in the book, The Law of Branding, there's a law called the Law of Generic, and it's pretty simple. Giving a brand a generic name is one of the fastest roads to failure. And we see it everywhere. Founders want to compete for SEO terms, so they name their company after the category electric company and city name, solar solutions for this region, and it works for local search, but it doesn't really work for everything else. So let me be clear: a generic name doesn't destroy a business. There are successful exceptions, right? We have General Motors, American Airlines, American Standards. These companies survive their name, but every one of them has to work harder for the name to stand out in the category or to stand out in the sentence of which it lives, in the paragraph of which it lives. General Motors competes against everything that generally talks about motors. American Airlines competes about every airline that is in America. American Standard competes against anything that claims to be a standard. So the name does not exclude, so the marketing has to do all the work. A brand name has one job, and that's really to stand out in a sentence and to be remembered. If the name sounds like an adjective or descriptive with a category, it dissolves into a sentence. People can't see the difference. The customer cannot tell whether the description ends or the brand begins. And so there are different types of brand names. Each one of them has a strength or a ceiling. Descriptive names tell customers exactly what to sell, and they're easier to understand. However, they're hard to own. Generic names use the category words. They're easy to fill in the search, but they're hard to stand out and to become the name of the category. Subjective names imply something without stating it. So they're harder to grasp at first, but they are easier to grow into and they have less of a ceiling. Inventive names mean nothing until the brands make them mean something. They're hardest to launch, they're the hardest to copy. Direct response names name the trigger, the customer, and the aspiration in the name itself. And those names are for the highest conversion at the door. However, they have the lowest brand ceiling over time. These are not names that people are going to tattoo on their body. Each type works in its context, and none of them are right for everyone. So let's bring this to life. General Video Rental is a bad name. Blockbuster is a good name. Netflix is a good name. Chat Widget is a bad name. Intercom is a good name. Cloud Storage is a bad name. Dropbox is a good name. AI Assistant is a bad name. Claude is a good name. The bad names describe what the product does. The customer knows exactly what they are buying and forgets a name immediately. Nothing to hold on to. There's no real brand narrative. There's nothing to repeat. Nothing to say at the dinner party. It just sounds like another adjective. A good name creates a container that the brand fills over time. So Netflix means nothing in 1997, but it means everything now. It means exclusivity. No one else can be Netflix. Dozens of companies can call themselves online streaming service, but only one could call themselves Netflix. And Mark Randolph, the Netflix founder, did not even like the name Netflix. He wanted to buy replay.com, but the seller was asking $50,000 for it. And that was in 1997. That was crazy money for a domain. So he passed and he tried alternatives. Netflix, uh F-L-I-C-K-S, that was taken. NetPix, P-I-X was taken. So the only thing that was left was Netflix.com. And so Mark, the founder, wrote about this. He said that $50,000 felt like a lot of crazy money back then. So even though the founder did not know what the name would become, it became the name that it is today. Now notice what's happening with AI. Chat GPT is a product description. Right? OpenAI actually tried to trademark it. USPTO rejected the application. They ruled chat as a generic term for computer network communication. And GPT is a widely recognized acronym for the AI architecture. The name was too descriptive to own, which means now anyone can use those terms. And I would not be surprised if some people already confusing Chat GPT with products that borrow the same generic language. Maybe people are using their competitors and they don't even know because there's no way to protect the name ChatGPT. Because the name is so generic and it's so easily forgotten. Any product can call themselves similar and get the same shelf space and the same memory. The brand is paying full price. Meanwhile, Claude is a good name, Gemini is a good name, Grok is a good name, and one category is ownable. The other brands belong to the category. So all of those are good names, and the the category could become owned by one of those names. Made-up names can have great potential. We have Kodak, Xerox, Hagendoss, but typically when they are short and sound symbolic or rich, and they're easy to say. Made-up words that require explanation or cannot be spelled after hearing it is oftentimes worse than a generic word. You know, that even at least communicates something. So now consider a name like Hot Fit Moms. On a landing page, they that name can be used to target moms who want to get in shape. So let's say you have a comparison where you have Hot Fit Moms and you have Planet Fitness. Well, most likely Hot Fit Moms would outperform Planet Fitness on a landing page. The name is the customer, the aspiration and the trigger in those three words. The customer knows immediately, hey, this is for me. And that same strength becomes the ceiling. Hot Fit Moms has a harder time going premium, it has a harder time expanding beyond women who are not mom. It also has a harder time surviving cultural shifts in how the audience wants to be spoken to and how they want to be noticed. Now, compare that to Equinox. Equinox does not describe a gym, right? It creates a new world, a new experience, and it sounds premium before you even know the price. So the name in itself has room for clubs, hotels, apparels, nutrition, status, right? That's the difference between a name that converts and a name that compounds and grows over time. Sometimes a direct response name wins with the first click, but the brand wins the decades, right? Has names with high brand potential don't always win with the first click. The highest form of brand equity is when the name becomes the word that people use for the thing itself. Pass me to Kleenex. Put a band-aid on it. Google the answer. Uber home. Zoom the team. Slack me the deck. Venmo me for lunch. Netflix. Netflix and chill. None of those names are product descriptions. But they become the language. Most names will never reach verb status. And the point is not to really chase that. The point is to build the name with enough room that it could. And the best name is not always the clearest name. The clearest name may win the landing page, but the ownable name will win the category itself. So at my studio, every name goes through five tests. Memorable enough that someone hearing it once can recall it later. Ownable enough that you can get it the domain, the trademark, the search results, maybe not immediately, but you can get the search results. And then the handles would be obviously the secondary option. And scalable enough that it works when the company is 10 times larger, when it's doing more, it's serving different audience groups. And it's pronounceable enough that a stranger can say it, they can spell it, relatively speaking, and they can find it. It has a carry of narrative mode, some mood implication, a story that gives the brand somewhere to go. That helps it become more memorable. You miss one, the name has gets some loss of energy, right? It takes more thinking power to remember it, to stand out. So a name built for direct response is built to convert in the moment of attention. It names the customer that trigger the outcome. A name built for the shelf is built to recognize against three competitors sitting next to it. We have distinctive types, distinctive sounds, distinctive shape, and it wins by standing out, not by describing itself or by describing the benefit. A name built for the long term is one that compounds over time. It becomes the language, it enters a conversation. The brand is not paying for it. Netflix, Slack, Uber, these are different jobs. The name has to know which job it's doing. Many brands fail because they pick a name that's built for one job and then they try to use it for another job. And that test really just doesn't work. So can this name be remembered, owned, said, searched, or grown into? The strongest names use sound to do the work, and the brain remembers without trying. Ariana, a well-loved creative on our team, mentioned a story about Booba and Kiki. And then I later studied it and I found it profoundly useful as an example for naming. So the story is that in 1929, a psychologist, Wolfgang Kohler, ran a simple experiment. And he showed people two shapes. One was spiky with all sharp angles, and one was round with soft curves. And then he gave them two words, booba and kiki. And he asked people to match the word with each shape. Now he did this across cultures, languages, and different types of age groups. And 95% of them picked booba with the round shapes and kiki for the spiky ones. So the sounds carry a shape. And the brain assigns a visual meaning to the sound before it assigns a linguistic meaning. This is done by nature. And that's why we call it the booba kiki effect. And it is why hard consonants like K-X-Z signals sharpness and strength, right? We have Kodak, Xerox, Zoom, NAC, right? There's strength in those words. And why soft consonants, M, L, N, signals calm and maybe care, right? Mello, Aveno. The consonant choice, a sound, is doing the emotional work before the customer has even thought about the brand. And naming firms do this deliberately, but most founders do it accidentally. Another key thing is that repeated sounds makes the name sticky and makes it more memorable. Coca-Cola, Pay Pow, Krispy Kreme, Lululemon, Range Rover, Best Buy. There was a separate study that people remembered the words when they repeated the consonants rather than when they did not. So alliteration is one of the oldest mnemonic devices in the language. Brand names that use it punch above their weight class, right? They have to, their dollar for advertising goes further. They have to work less to go into the consumer's mind. Val's repetition does the same thing musically. We have Google, we have Apple, Hagen DOS, Vimeo, right? They're easy to say, they're easy to remember, and short names typically beat the long names. Roughly 70% of the top 100 global brands have one or two syllable names. And in the Fortune 500s, roughly 90% of the companies operate on the exact match of the dot com domain. The name is also the website. The website is the name. There's no real add-ons. It just is what it is. There's no dashes, there's no get try. You know, if your name needs a prefix or a suffix or a hyphen for the domain, the name is already losing some of its energy and it has to fight harder. So three syllables is acceptable, four is rare, five is almost unheard of, and the brain prefers names that it can say in one breath. Google, Slack, Stripe, Nike, Uber. If a name has to be shortened to fit on a sign or to fit in a sentence, or to fit in a conversation, that's a tax. The brand will pay for that tax for the rest of its life. Visualize names beat abstract one. Apple is a visualization. Amazon is a visualization. Bluefin is a visualization. Synthetic strategic solution is not. The brain stores images faster than concepts. When a name conjures something that a consumer can see and visualize in its mind, then it'll be remembered faster than a name that does not, right? It makes sense. It's what you visualize. It's added another touch point. So these are not real rules, they're just levers. They're things that are how the human minds work. The best names pull off several of them at once. Even if it has to do with smell or touch or feeling, whatever other association in your senses can you gather so that the name becomes more memorable. So when our studio named Knack, a cannabis brand that was based in New York, we were looking for something short, right? Percursive and full of linguistic potential. Knack is also five letters. You got a knack for this, that's a knack. Once you go knack, you don't go back. The name generates language naturally. Every time someone uses the idiom in everyday conversation, the brand gets a free impression. A brand name with wordplays and pun potential is not just memorable, it has so much linguistic potential, it becomes conversational. You know, when we named Onspire, Onspire is a healthcare marketing agency from the merger of four different companies. So we tested the linguistic potential of the series of names, and also with different prefixes, we played with our short list, right? So if it's in, what about on, up, off, up, down? So inspire was one of the words, but in is passive. You are in a state, right? That's not your state. You are in the state. Someone has put you there. On, if you are on the state, you're turned on, you are switched on, you are activated. And so we flip the coin over instead of in, we became on. So it was on spire. A name that was engineered to sound like one real word that signals momentum and intent. Names can sometimes be an act of corporate diplomacy, but when a merger needs to feel like the future and not a compromise, the name has to do some emotional work. Well, if the name does do emotional work, that's even better. And so that's what Onspire did. Now, when we name Mello, Mellow is a fermented hand soap brand. We want something that was easily read without spelling it. Pronounceable in any language, suggestive names beat descriptive names. So hand soap co tells you what it is. Mellow tells you how it makes you feel. And so, therefore, it had great brand potential. Most founders spend more time naming a conference room than naming their company. Their conference room does not need to be remembered, does not need to be owned, doesn't really need to be pronounced or searched or really grown into. It's just a conference room. But the company and the brand does. A name is not a label, it is the first thing that the market files you under. It is the word that travels when you are not in the room. It is the acid that will help you grow, or it could be like a leaky bucket over time for all of your marketing energy. The difference between those two outcomes can become huge, and this is usually made in the afternoon by a team that did not really take it seriously enough. People often underestimate the power of a name. There's a proverb that says, a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. And without a good name, what do you have? A name is really everything. So, next episode, we move from the name identity to visual layer of the brand and why it's important to think about the whole visual system and not just the logo. And why a tree is known by its fruit, not its bark. So thanks for the listening, and we'll talk soon. And again, we'd love to hear your feedback on this episode. So let me know what you think.