If your brand isn’t reaching the potential you think it should, perhaps it’s time for a brand audit. Specifically, take a long, hard look at the name of your brand, and see if it might be suffering from one or more of these fatal flaws:
- Your brand has a boring, generic, descriptive name. This is causing it to blend in with a crowded field of weakly-named competitor brands. If you want people to notice, pay attention to and care about your brand, you must not act out of fear. Be bold and unafraid, not ruled by FOSO — Fear Of Standing Out.
- Your brand name is an invented mash-up with no meaning. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the semantic meaning of individual morphemes translates into real-world brand engagement. It doesn’t. Such names may technically (linguistically) have “meaning,” but, like snowflakes in a blizzard, they are not meaningful.
- You brand name came from a visit to the thesaurus. Nearly all companies who move beyond the boring, descriptive name and the incomprehensible mash-up go this route, so it’s another excellent way to get lost in the crowd. Get over the idea that finding the right experiential synonym for “advanced,” “intelligent” or “powerful” in a thesaurus will lead to the perfect name. It won’t, because those names have already been done to death. Ditch the thesaurus and go deep instead – a poetic metaphor that maps to your brand positioning will transform your brand identity from a liability to a powerful business asset. Let you competitors adopt boringly “appropriate” names from a thesaurus — they’ll be doing you a great favor.
- Your brand is shrouded in vacant, overused words like “solutions.” A quick web search will confirm that you can find a solution for nearly every problem, except perhaps for the problem of having too many “solutions.” Other empty vessels include “network,” “business,” “business solutions,” “leading provider” (“leading” anything, for that matter), or the ultimate, “a leading provider of business solutions.” Search that last phrase in Google, in quotes, and you will see that millions of results are found. Don’t toss your beautiful needle into that haystack.
- Your brand name is different only for the sake of being different or extreme in any way just for the sake of being extreme. The most powerful names are those that best support their brand’s positioning, no matter what, and depending on the circumstances, a name might be “extreme” or it might not. If your name is trying too hard to be different just in order to stand out, it won’t — it will blend in with all the other names that are also trying too hard, and failing, to stand out. This is a mistake frequently made by technology startups.
The most important thing is that you should never “settle” for a mediocre name for your brand, when a great name can be such a powerful force for business success. Find a lot more tips in our Naming & Branding Manifesto, or download our free Naming Guide, which includes the Manifesto and much more.