OPTIONS AND TACTICS FOR BRAND ELEMENTS
Consider the advantages of “Apple” as the name of a personal computer. Apple was a simple but well-known word that was distinctive in the product category—which helped develop brand awareness. The meaning of the name also gave the company a “friendly shine” and warm brand personality. It could also be reinforced visually with a logo that would transfer easily across geo¬graphic and cultural boundaries. Finally, the name could serve as a platform for sub-brands like the Macintosh, aiding the introduction of brand extensions. As Apple illustrates, a well-chosen brand name can make an appreciable contribution to the creation of brand equity.
What would an ideal brand element be like? Consider brand names—perhaps the most central of all brand elements. Ideally, a brand name would be easily remembered, highly suggestive of both the product class and the particular benefits that served as the basis of its positioning, inherently fun or interesting, rich with creative potential, transferable to a wide variety of product and geographic settings, enduring in meaning and relevant over time, and strongly protectable both legally and competitively.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to choose a brand name—or any brand element, for that matter—that satisfies all these criteria. The more meaningful the brand name, for example, the more difficult it may be to transfer it to new product categories or translate it to other cultures. This is one reason why it’s preferable to have multiple brand elements. Let’s look at the major considerations for each type of brand element.
Brand Names
The brand name is a fundamentally important choice because it often captures the central theme or key associations of a product in a very compact and economical fashion. Brand names can be an extremely effective shorthand means of communication.6 Whereas an advertisement lasts half a minute and a sales call could run to hours, customers can notice the brand name and register its meaning or activate it in memory in just a few seconds.
Because it is so closely tied to the product in the minds of consumers, however, the brand name is also the most difficult element for marketers to change. So they systematically research
them before making a choice. The days when Henry Ford II could name his new automobile the “Edsel” after the name of a family member seem to be long gone.
Is it difficult to come up with a brand name? Ira Bachrach, a well-known branding consul¬tant, has noted that although there are 140,000 words in the English vocabulary, the average U.S. adult recognizes only 20,000; Bachrach’s consulting company, NameLab, sticks to the 7,000 words that make up the vocabulary of most TV programs and commercials.
Although that may seem to allow a lot of choices, each year tens of thousands of new brands are registered as legal trademarks. In fact, arriving at a satisfactory brand name for a new prod¬uct can be a painfully difficult and prolonged process. After realizing that most of the desirable brand names are already legally registered, many a frustrated executive has lamented that “all the good ones are taken.”
In some ways, this difficulty should not be surprising. Any parent can probably sympathize with how hard it can be to choose a name for a child, as evidenced by the thousands of babies born without names each year because their parents have not decided on—or perhaps not agreed upon—a name yet. It is rare that naming a product can be as easy as it was for Ford when it in¬troduced the Taurus automobile.
“Taurus” was the code name given to the car during its design stage because the chief engi¬neer’s and product manager’s wives were both born under that astrological sign. As luck would have it, upon closer examination, the name turned out to have a number of desirable characteris¬tics. When it was chosen as the actual name for the car, Ford saved thousands and thousands of dollars in additional research and consulting expenses.
Naming Guidelines. Selecting a brand name for a new product is certainly an art and a sci¬ence. Figure 4-3 displays the different types of possible brand names according to brand identity experts Lippincott. Like any brand element, brand names must be chosen with the six general criteria of memorability, meaningfulness, likability, transferability, adaptability, and protectabil- ity in mind.
Brand Awareness Brand names that are simple and easy to pronounce or spell, familiar and meaningful, and different, distinctive, and unusual can obviously improve brand awareness.7
Simplicity and Ease of Pronunciation and Spelling. Simplicity reduces the effort consumers have to make to comprehend and process the brand name. Short names often facilitate recall because they are easy to encode and store in memory—consider Aim toothpaste, Raid pest spray, Bold laundry detergent, Suave shampoo, Off insect repellent, Jif peanut butter, Ban deodorant, and Bic pens. Marketers can shorten longer names to make them easier to recall. For example, over the years Chevrolet cars have also become known as “Chevy,” Budweiser beer has become “Bud,” and Coca-Cola is also “Coke.”8
Surname
Dell, Siemens, Gillette
Descriptive
American Online, Pizza Hut, General Motors
Invented
Häagen-Dazs, Kodak, Xerox
Connotative
Duracell, Humana, Infiniti
Bridge
Westin, DaimlerChrysler, ExxonMobil
Arbitrary
Apple, Yahoo!, Infiniti
To encourage word-of-mouth exposure that helps build strong memory links, marketers should also make brand names easy to pronounce. Also keep in mind that rather than risk the embarrassment of mispronouncing a difficult name like Hyundai automobiles, Shiseido cosmet¬ics, or Fagonnable clothing, consumers may just avoid pronouncing it altogether.
Brands with difficult-to-pronounce names have an uphill battle because the firm has to devote so much of its initial marketing effort to teaching consumers how to pronounce the name. Polish vodka Wyborowa (pronounced VEE-ba-ro-va) was supported by a print ad to help consumers pronounce the brand name—a key factor for success in the distilled spirits category, where little self-service exists and consumers usually need to ask for the brand in the store.9
Ideally, the brand name should have a clear, understandable, and unambiguous pronuncia¬tion and meaning. However, the way a brand is pronounced can affect its meaning, so consumers may take away different perceptions if ambiguous pronunciation results in different meanings. One research study showed that certain hypothetical products with brand names that were acceptable in both English and French, such as Vaner, Randal, and Massin, were perceived as more “hedonic” (providing pleasure) and were better liked when pronounced in French than in English.10
Pronunciation problems may arise from not conforming to linguistic rules. Although Honda chose the name “Acura” because it was associated with words connoting precision in several languages, it initially had some trouble with consumer pronunciation of the name (AK-yur-a) in the U.S. market, perhaps in part because the company chose not to use the phonetically simpler English spelling of Accura (with a double c).
To improve pronounceability and recallability, many marketers seek a desirable ca¬dence and pleasant sound in their brand names.11 For example, brand names may use al¬literation (repetition of consonants, such as in Coleco), assonance (repetition of vowel sounds, such as in Ramada Inn), consonance (repetition of consonants with intervening vowel change, such as in Hamburger Helper), or rhythm (repetition of pattern of syllable stress, such as in Better Business Bureau). Some words employ onomatopoeia—words composed of syllables that when pronounced generate a sound strongly suggestive of the word’s meaning, like Sizzler restaurants, Cap’n Crunch cereal, Ping golf clubs, and Schweppes carbonated beverages.
Familiarity and Meaningfulness. The brand name should be familiar and meaningful so it can tap into existing knowledge structures. It can be concrete or abstract in meaning. Because the names of people, objects, birds, animals, and inanimate objects already exist in memory, con¬sumers have to do less learning to understand their meanings as brand names.12 Links form more easily, increasing memorability.13 Thus, when a consumer sees an ad for the first time for a car called “Fiesta,” the fact that the consumer already has the word stored in memory should make it easier to encode the product name and thus improve its recallability.
To help create strong brand-category links and aid brand recall, the brand name may also suggest the product or service category, as do JuicyJuice 100 percent fruit juices, Ticketron ticket selling service, and Newsweek weekly news magazine. Brand elements that are highly descriptive of the product category or its attribute and benefits can be quite restrictive, however.14 For example, it may be difficult to introduce a soft drink extension for a brand called JuicyJuice!
Differentiated, Distinctive, and Unique. Although choosing a simple, easy-to-pronounce, familiar, and meaningful brand name can improve recallability, to improve brand recognition, on the other hand, brand names should be different, distinctive, and unusual. As Chapter 2 noted, recognition depends on consumers’ ability to discriminate between brands, and more complex brand names are more easily distinguished. Distinctive brand names can also make it easier for consumers to learn intrinsic product information.15
A brand name can be distinctive because it is inherently unique, or because it is unique in the context of other brands in the category.16 Distinctive words may be seldom-used or atypi¬cal words for the product category, like Apple computers; unusual combinations of real words, like Toys“R”Us; or completely made-up words, like Cognos or Luxottica. Even made-up brand names, however, have to satisfy prevailing lingu
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