Zinzin

brand positioning

Five steps to avoid defining an empty set in your brand positioning

Venn diagram - those who get it - those who do not get it
Image: Dave Walker, The Cartoon Blog.

When naming, it is often tempting to create a very well-defined, buttoned-down and thorough brand positioning, rigidly specific down to the smallest detail. Such a positioning stance is often the outgrowth of a process in which competing client factions allow too many cooks into the kitchen and draft an overwhelming number of positioning “requirements” meant to satisfy each of those factions. This is a dangerous practice, as it often leads to the outcome of an empty set being created, as conflicting “rules” cancel each other out and leave a hollow space in which no possible name can exist, as in this example, exaggerated to make a point:

Venn diagram - empty set brand positioning

A sure way to spot when this demon rears its ugly head is if you find yourself or members of your team muttering, in reference to the search for the perfect name, “I’ll know it when I see it.” This is the kiss of death for a naming project, because it is highly likely that the impossible outcome of an empty set has been described, or the wrong filters are in place, or both. In such a situation, you could consider every word in the English language (Officially 1,013,913 as of January 1, 2012) as a potential name for your new company or product, plus another million invented or compound names, and still never “know it when you see it,” for the simple reason that no name can satisfy a brand positioning framework that defines an empty set. Such a situation is the cause of most aborted naming attempts.

To transcend the “empty set” conundrum the first thing you need to do is make sure you have no contradictions in the brand positioning. As the example above shows, no name can satisfy the requirements that it be an “invented abstraction with no prior meanings” and simultaneously “evoke our brand positioning, be memorable and help tell our unique story.” Another example of an empty set might be, “available for global trademark and exact match .com domain, be only one syllable, five letters max, easily understood and pronounceable in eastern as well as western languages, and yet be a common word that closely describes our brand position in our industry.” Time to order up a new dictionary, a new language, or a new parallel universe. So the first step toward recovery is to recognize that you have a problem, and make some changes in your approach.

Here are five steps to freeing yourself from the prison of an empty set brand positioning:

  1. Resist the urge to box your brand into a corner. Create a cloud of positioning attributes and know your fundamental story, but don’t try to describe every little detail of the positioning and then expect to find a name that will align with all of them. You won’t.
  2. Understand that while it’s true that a great name will map to and reinforce your brand positioning, such a name will also have the power to inform your brand positioning. It’s a two-way street: brand positioning leads to a name, but the perfect name also influences the brand positioning moving forward. For example, a very similar brand positioning could have led to the names Yahoo! and Excite, but the brand positioning that came after the names were chosen was necessarily very, very different; in the former, very powerful with great marketing legs for years to come; in the latter, well, a me-too derivative long since out of business.
  3. Open your minds. Rather then merely describe your brand positioning with a descriptive or experiential name, like your competitors do, consider creating a highly-memorable evocative name that strongly differentiates your brand from your competition by demonstrating your brand positioning rather than explaining it. The key is to move beyond the literal and into the metaphorical. Think Amazon, Virgin, Twitter, Coach, Caterpillar, Yahoo!, Oracle, Apple. That’s not to say that great invented or experiential names aren’t out there, they’re just few and far between, so you have to work extra hard to identify them.
  4. Evaluating names should be more like a Socratic dialog, not an exercise in democracy. Resist the urge to let everyone on your naming team, or your company, vote on the final name. Nobody’s first choice will survive. The “winning” name will be the one that is most people’s third choice, the one nobody loves but everyone can “live with.” Great brands are not created from such a shrug of the shoulders. A vigorous debate is not only beneficial, it is often a requirement for creating a powerful name. And if half the team loves a name and half the team hates it, you’re in a much better place than if you have immediate consensus one way or the other. When you adopt an amazing name, no matter how contentious the process may have been that got you there, the naysayers will eventually come around and embrace it–they always do. It just takes some people longer to understand the power of a truly different and memorable name that might at first be uncomfortable for them.
  5. Informed outside council can be beneficial, while uninformed outside opinion can be damaging. In other words, if you are truly stuck in your naming process, you will likely benefit by hiring a naming agency (shameless plug here) to come in with a fresh perspective and get everyone on the team to see name development and brand positioning in a new light. The flip side is taking a short list of names to a focus group or other uninformed outside agent to solicit their opinions about the names. Doing so will almost certainly guarantee that the most unique and powerful names will be killed off, and the weakest, most typical or conformist names will be celebrated. This is especially damning, of course, when you are attempting to position your brand as bold, adventurous, and fiercely independent, as it will lead you to a name that betrays all those fine aspirations.

During your naming project, as you generate –> iterate –> regenerate –> and reiterate the name development process, keep the above points in mind and continue to make sure at every step of the way that you have not defined an empty set. Because if you have, you’ll never find the perfect name, since you wouldn’t know it if you saw it.

Cautionary tale: Krafting a failed name: Mondelez, or how not to do corporate rebranding.

The Beautiful Dogma of Dogme 95

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” ~Orson Welles

The Danish “Dogme 95” directors created some amazing films, and their famous Manifesto, below, still resonates with us. Try replacing “movies/films” in the Manifesto with “names/naming” and consider how it applies to the process of naming and branding:

  1. Dogme 95 is a collective of film directors founded in Copenhagen in the Spring of 1995.
  2. Dogme 95 has the expressed goal of countering ‘certain tendencies’ in the cinema today.
  3. Dogme 95 is a rescue action!
  4. In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The New Wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck. Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for awhile, but no changes. The Wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The Wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby … false!
  5. To Dogme 95 cinema is not individual!
  6. Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of the cinema. For the first time anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media comes, the more important the avant-garde. It is no accident that the phrase ‘avant-garde’ has military connotations. Discipline is the answer … we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!
  7. Dogme 95 counters the individual film by the principle of presenting an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.

The Dogme 95 VOW OF CHASTITY

  1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found)
  2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
  3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
  4. The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
  5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
  6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
  7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
  8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
  9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
  10. The director must not be credited.
  11. Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work,” as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and setting. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

Of course, every Dogme 95 director broke one or more of these rules, but having them in place and following them as best they could gave them their work a structure, a framework that lead to the creation of some brilliant films. It should serve as inspiration to anyone involved in a creative endeavor, including the naming of companies and products. Make sure you have a rigorous structure in place for your naming process, and stick with it. Also, the brand positioning should serve the function of a “vow of chastity,” and any name that doesn’t support the primary positioning directives of a brand should be jettisoned in favor of those that do.