When prospective clients ask, “What is the hardest part of developing a brand strategy?”, they are often surprised by my answer. It is not the positioning work: finding hidden insights; getting to know an audience at a deep, emotional level; synthesizing that into a meaningful brand promise. While all of that work is not “easy”, it typically goes more smoothly because we base it on deep research and strategic logic that is then translated into a more creative expression. 

What’s most challenging, I tell them (and they are often quite surprised) is naming. One word, highly subjective, that expresses your brand to the world. It is not easy to get right, but it is very easy to get wrong.

There are several reasons why naming efforts can go off track, and I like to call them the “Seven Deadly Sins of Naming”.

Sin #1: Naming before strategy. Clients often make the fatal mistake of locking in on a name idea before the strategy work is even done. I like to say that the name is the icing on the cake—your cake being the strategy. Choose the name before the strategy and you may very well end up with two things that are good on their own, but don’t really work together. (Think: Red velvet cake with peanut butter frosting).

Sin #2: Relying on personal preference. While naming should be rooted in strategy, it often becomes very subjective and based upon personal preference. We see this time and time again. Clients fall in love with their own naming concepts filled with personal meaning, things like family names, hobbies, and unrelated business interests. But be warned. Just because a name has personal meaning to you, doesn’t mean it will work for your brand. 

Beyond falling in love with their own names, people often rely too heavily on the evaluations of friends, family, and colleagues over sound strategic logic and quantitative testing. It’s hard to resist the temptation, but let the strategy keep you on the right path.

Sin #3: Not doing your due diligence. Sometimes companies select a name that is owned by a well-known brand in another category, yet trademarkable in the category in which they compete. The problem? They spend too much time educating people that they are not the “other brand”. Case in point is the website development company American Eagle. They spend an inordinate amount of time and money in explaining to people that they are not the better-known, youth-oriented fashion brand of the same name. 

There are also certain names that are commonly across categories such as Capital, Gemini, Pyramid, Summit, Frontier, River (and this is just the tip of the iceberg). While these names do have depth and meaning, they are so widely used by so many brands that the names don’t really do a good job of helping to differentiate.

Beyond ensuring that you are selecting a unique name, it is also essential to consult with a qualified intellectual property attorney. While clients and their brand consultants can explore Patent & Trademark office databases for conflicts, it is best to rely on a thorough knock-out search by a professional who can also lead your name’s trademark application process. 

I am often stunned by the number of businesses that do not want to invest a few thousand dollars in this critical brand safeguard. Implementing a name that has not been properly vetted can be costly not only in potential lawsuits, but also in the time, money, effort to “undo” and “redo” your naming and branding strategy if you’ve stepped on another brand’s toes. 

 Bottomline, failing to invest in proper research and legal vetting upfront will cost you in the end.

Sin #4: Leaving it to AI. AI can do a lot of things, but naming isn’t one of them. I wanted to see how AI would approach naming one of the most iconic brands in history, Nike. So, I assumed the role of the original founder, gave it a brief, and awaited the results.

A creative victory for Gemini? Not exactly. Even after multiple rounds of prompting, prodding, and collaborating, my names (and the thinking behind them), were mostly a collection of awkward portmanteaus, and a few brand names that are already in use in other industries. Good for a laugh. Not so good for a final deliverable.

At best, AI-generated names sound like a million names you’ve heard before. At worst they’re silly, trite, convoluted, or totally disconnected from the strategy. Can it be a helpful brainstorming tool? Sure, but at least for now, I see it simply as that, a tool to help you through your thinking process, but not a replacement for some of the most essential, strategic thinking that goes into your brand.

Sin #5: Choosing a name that fails to reinforce the brand promise. You may have heard the saying, “a name doesn’t mean anything until it means something.” This is great advice… if you have a massive marketing budget to build a brand from the ground up. 

When you need to build brand awareness quickly and efficiently, your brand should — in fact, it must—do the heavy lifting. If your name fails to communicate what your brand is all about to your target audience, it’s not working hard enough.

“But, what about iconic brands like Marriott?” you might ask. I get that question a lot. While the Marriott name may be synonymous with hotels now, it wasn’t always. It took decades of progress, thousands of hotels, and billions of dollars of marketing spend to reach that point. 

Most new brands don’t have that luxury. So, it’s in their best interest to select a name that works hard from the start. Does that mean it needs to be boring and utilitarian? Hardly. Take Clear, the identity company whose name you probably recognize from the airport security line. It works well for travel, where “clear” was already a term in common use like “clear customs” or “cleared for landing” or “cleared to board”. But what is ingenious is that the name is flexible enough to continue to work well as it expands its identity recognition technology into other industry segments, like stadiums, healthcare, and financial services, making experiences more seamless and clear for people and businesses.

Naming is both a science and an art.The trick is to make sure that you don’t sacrifice clarity for style. And with the right strategic foundation, you can build out a name that communicates what you do in a way that’s creative and compelling, but also clear.

Sin #6: Boxing yourself in. Sometimes businesses select names that pigeonhole them into a particular category, offering, or channel. The names might have, at first, succeeded in doing the heavy lifting for the brand (a good thing, which I discussed in my previous post), but they were too specific to allow the brand room to expand. 

Take Burlington Coat Factory, for example. When their offering moved far beyond coats, the name was no longer a good fit (pun intended) in communicating to customers that they sold a wider range of apparel. That resulted in the need to create a campaign — even a jingle— to remind consumers that Burlington Coat Factory is “more than great coats” and eventually, a rebrand to “Burlington”. 

1-800-Flowers is another example, and interestingly enough, the product of a renaming itself. After a decade in business, the floral company Flora Plenty acquired the phone number 1-800-Flowers. In 1986, Flora Plenty rebranded to 1-800-Flowers in order to showcase what was, at the time, a technology-driven business. But, fast forward a decade and that “1-800” number made them look dated. As people moved more to booking online, they changed their name again, this time to 1-800-Flowers.com. Quite a cumbersome name, not to mention a daily reminder of the strategic blunders they had made. Perhaps its next iteration will be “1-800-Flowers.com AI”?

When Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first franchise location in 1952, the leaders certainly did not anticipate that the general public would, at some point, become more obsessed with healthier food options and less enamored with fried food. The name change ultimately came about as fried food was labelled “unhealthy”, the menu expanded, and the “Kentucky Fried” presented a challenge with international expansion. Lucky for the company that many consumers were already using the shorthand “KFC” so they were able to make a more seamless and logical transition to the new name which built upon consumer habit and signalled a more modern feel.

What these examples demonstrate is the very delicate balance between having a name that is specific enough to tell consumers what your brand does, yet not boxing yourself in as the market, technology and consumer tastes change. Yet another reason why naming is often one of the most challenging parts of brand development.

Sin #7: Failing to reinforce the name with a strong visual identity. Your brand name says what your brand is and does, but 93% percent of communication is nonverbal. The visual identity needs to help people clearly see what the brand is and does. Fonts, colors, marks, applications of these are critical ways to reinforce what the brand promises. Particularly in a world where consumers are so visually tied to their screens, the visual must reinforce the verbal. It makes your total package so much stronger. 

Why? The brain processes images much faster than words…60 thousand times faster, in fact, according to researchers at 3M. That should be a reminder that every brand needs a strong, ownable visual identity. 

A good name works hard to quickly communicate what your brand is and does to your audience. A visual identity that further reinforces the message makes your brand exponentially stronger. Typography, colors, marks, and their applications are critical ways to reinforce what the brand promises, particularly in a screen-centric world where consumers are getting constant visual cues from one brand after the next.

Think of some of the most iconic brands in the world today. You know their names, but you know their visual identities just as well. Feeling skeptical? Think about driving down the road with a small child. We’ve all been startled when they recognize a brand before they’ve even learned how to read. Maybe they recognized the Golden Arches of McDonald’s and asked for a Happy Meal. Or recognized the signature Walt Disney logo on a billboard. Or spotted an Apple store. 

Apple is an interesting story. Getting to the big, iconic, and maybe even obvious brand we all know today took a significant amount of thought from the beginning. 

And a lot of revisions. 

In fact, their first logo featured an impossible-to-reproduce illustration of Sir Isaac Newton… and sent them back to the drawing board. But, Sir Isaac Newton, who legend has it, realized his theory of gravity after witnessing an apple fall from a tree, wasn’t the only source of inspiration. The story goes that “Apple” was also inspired by an apple orchard where Steve Jobs often retreated to be alone with his thoughts, famously snacking on the Macintosh variety that was in season. Either way, for Apple, knowledge and discovery were at its core.

At the time, the Apple visual identity signified a departure from the typical corporate branding embraced by other technology firms. It eschewed the institutional, hierarchical feel of its more-established competitors (like IBM), utilizing simple, clean design and lowercase letters to signal a brand ethos that was about accessibility, innovation, simplicity and a more youthful mindset. 

Rob Janoff, who designed the iconic Bitten Apple logo, spent weeks studying apples and getting the shape down to a simple, recognizable form that could not be mistaken for any other fruit. He then layered on multi-colored stripes, reinforcing not only the screen’s superior ability to replicate colors, but Apple’s brand personality as a colorful, creative contrast to their “boring” corporate competitors. This brand wasn’t just breaking with tradition, it was actively snubbing industry norms from the start. 

Apple is a story of a brand that got things right from the beginning, proving its sticking power even as the business had its ups and downs. Its image reinforced the name, and the name connoted ingenuity, inspiration, creativity, and accessibility, while being flexible enough to withstand decades of innovation, product additions, and new lines of business.

Although its logo depicts the fabled forbidden fruit, Apple is an example of a virtuous brand indeed.