In this series of posts I aim to bring to light off-beat stories from the world of marketing, ranging from serious successes to downright abysmal failures.

To kick off the New Year I’ve got a triptych of brand names: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Starting with the good, I think Method deserve a mention for their range of bathroom cleaning products. There are some boring (though not necessarily bad) ones in there like ‘Daily Shower’ and ‘Flushable Wipes’ as well as some middle-weight contenders like ‘Tub Scrub.’ But the hands-down winner is the name they dared to give to their toilet cleaner: ‘Bowl Patrol’.

I think this is marvellous; it actually made me stop and laugh in the supermarket before briefly bowing my head in admiration. It’s funny, descriptive and above all breaks the category’s naming conventions. That means it will not only get noticed but gives itself a chance of being different enough to become loved. Not since Mr. Muscle has anyone launched as stunningly personality-driven a name as this in cleaning products and so I salute them.

The bad name is Rapiscan, a potential supplier of the full-body scanners at UK airports. As Nancy Friedman points out, the name is presumably the result of a portmanteau of ‘rapid’ and ‘scan’ and what Rapiscan want us to understand from that is that their scanning equipment is fast. But they should have done due diligence on this name. They really should have because media discussion of these scanners tends to have focused on people’s concerns with them. And those concerns tend to be less about how long these scanners will take to use than they are about the particular invasion of privacy that occurs when a stranger can see you naked without having asked first. And with that analogy to rape, there is a real danger the first syllable of their name won’t be pronounced ‘rap’ but ‘rape’. In that case all this name will do is exacerbate people’s fears and reinforce the barrier airport procurement staff may have to buying from them.

The final name is the ugly one: “The Beaver”. It’s the name of a venerable Canadian history magazine which has come a cropper in our internet age.

While under its own steam the word ‘beaver’ has acquired other meanings aside from the waterborne animal, the internet has blossomed as a conduit to porn and purveyors of other types of beaver. And that has meant that most of the magazine’s emails simply get diverted to subscribers’ junk email folders. As the magazine’s publisher has said “The Beaver has become an impediment online.”

So several moral tales for brand namers there: be brave, not stupid but always be prepared to find out that consumers will warp and interpret your work in a way you would never expect.

In this series of posts I aim to bring to light off-beat stories from the world of marketing, ranging from serious successes to downright abysmal failures.

Despite appeals to continue writing on murky themes I’ve decided to lighten the tone this week by talking about a few fantastic examples of the importance of rigour in brand naming. Great creative names often steal the limelight in marketing (think ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’ in a world of ‘Flora’ and ‘Lurpak’ or ‘Egg’ in a world of ‘Natwest,’ ‘Barclay’s’ and ‘Lloyd’s). But so many times it’s the unsung hard work of people with common sense that makes the real difference. And alas for the brands in question, it’s only through lapses in rigour that its importance is revealed. There are countless blunders in the annals of brand naming but here are some recent favourites:

The joint venture in June between Nigeria’s state Gas company and Gazprom: Nigaz http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8118721.stm

A self-deprecating solicitors firm recently pointed out to me by a friend: http://www.wrighthassall.co.uk/

And the Wisconsin Tourism Federation which (given its logo and acronym) recently decided to make a change:

        
        Before                           After

Brands are like human personalities and reputations. They’re just as complex and diverse. And the way consumers go about judging brands is a skill we know from judging fellow humans.

One of the most insightful tools we apply to the judgement of people is the analysis we make of the language they use: accent, word choice, performance, sentence length, fluency etc. All of these elements of language use can be pretty subtle but no less influential for being so. The subtlest of them all may be the metaphors we use. Human beings think in metaphors. That doesn’t mean we are all poets. It just means that our minds tend to handle abstract concepts by finding analogies with tangible, concrete, often physical things that we are able to perceive.

In that vein, I was interested to find out about the naming system IKEA use for their products. Here’s a snapshot:

Chairs, desks: men’s names (e.g. Jerker)
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names (e.g. Oslo)
Kitchens: grammatical terms among others (e.g. Metrik)

There are lots of jokes to make about some of the names this system creates like Fyrklöver and Lessebo which get somewhat lost in translation, but for more serious reasons I still like their system. Language is a window onto human minds. So the semantic frames in which IKEA places its categories tell consumers something about how IKEA thinks about these different categories. IKEA uses language and metaphor to give away a bit of its personality and its that, as well as the prices and good parking facilities which consumers grow attached to.

The power of effective language use is often overlooked. But since it’s the job of brand owners to manage meaning and personality, and our ears naturally bend to language for clues, isn’t it right that more brands should give weight to tone of voice and linguistic style as a fundamental part of their brand strategy?