Monday, April 24, 2006

Whats there in a brand name?


There was a great article by Meryl K. Evans and Hank Stroll for chosing the perfect name for product company.

In this post, i will give you a flavour of examples from across the globe. Lets start with Apple. What does apple mean? Do anybody know? I think very few. But is it successful? Definately. So whats the reason.

Before moving on to that lets go back to the article and see what do the writer has to say. Consider doing these two things when searching for the perfect name:
1. Match the name with the business or product
2. Involve others to brainstorm

In point 1, when you say Play Station, it makes lot of sense. People will recognize it as video game consoles. And what about Nintendo? Ok many of you may know about it, but what does it mean?
Unless you have a HUGE advertising budget to get your meaningless but cute name (Yahoo, Google and iPod) out there, researchers find it's generally best to come up with something logical that people can relate to your company or product. The best way is to make people sit in a group and scratch their heads, and obviously the people who know something about the product or company and just start making a list of the uses, attributes and unique selling points.
Sheryl Kravitz, principal with SK Consulting, provides other suggestions:

1. Smart marketers must first seek to understand the business or industry segment and customers the name should resonate with.
2. They need to identify how the name will fit within the context of the organization
3. Third, the name should fulfill specific criteria—it must be relevant, lend a competitive edge, be easily understood and pronounced and be culturally appropriate in other languages.
4. It should be legally protected

Few more examples:

a) the name Beetle beautifully sticks to the car and to the mind. Mini became, over time, as equally cute and sweet in nature as they are in name.
b) When people think of Scorpio in India they think of the SUV from Mahindra and Mahindra
c) Nike is more famous for its logo - the tick mark
So brand elements in general matter a lot in the value chain of brand creation.

Can you give intersting stories of popular brands created in past or in the way of getting popular!!

3 Comments:

Blogger MarkOUT said...

Actually its a combination of the product performace and brand image created. There are many case studies where marketing efforts flopped because the product quality was not up to mark. Can you give some examples for this.

April 24, 2006 2:45 PM  
Blogger MarkOUT said...

Hi ANil,

I dont think Maggi Atta noodle is a failure ... Do you have any report or some material which justify this. And also for the other examples.

April 25, 2006 6:48 PM  
Blogger MarkOUT said...

This answer if from Anil:

1. kissan juice was a failure because of their poor quality in front of Rasna and also the market captured by rasna
2. blue pepsi was a failure because it had a look like kerosine for consumers
3. vanilla coke had a bad taste as a survey by The Telegraph(will post u t document)
4. dandi namak beause of their lack of quality, sales and dist.and unusal packaging and strong competition from tata salt
5. zero b because of their technical default in their product and could stand in front of Aquaguard
6. regarding atta noodles, it is rectified as the maggi with a changed taste which was launhed before (will give u the case study published by ICFAI business school) and then they had changed it later
7. monutain dew is fighting for survival as per the conducted survey by the TNS group(my friend has the document)will scan and post u later

April 26, 2006 12:42 AM  

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