I recently received an email from a friend and colleague who’s about to launch her next startup. She made a comment about how ridiculous it was for early stage companies to spend tens of thousands of dollars on naming consultants, when the practically realities of finding a name that’s available and affordable often renders their creative concoctions superfluous. She’s right.
Brands are tricky, and particularly in technology-based businesses where we’re often inventing new categories and markets. But the options for a CEO of an early stage company are actually fairly straightforward. So at the risk of offending my friends in the branding business, I’m going to attempt to demystify this process.
Here’s what you need to do to name an early stage company:
1) Figure out who you are and who you want to be.
Take a clear, unbiased look at your company, your market, your competitors, and your targeted customer segments. Answer two critical questions: what distinguishes your business from your competitors/comparables, and what’s the mindset of your high value customers? Your answers should be both rational and emotional. Brands (particularly consumer brands) have both logical underpinnings and evocative personal attributes. Ultimately your brand needs to reflect the personality of your company, your culture and your vision for future success.
2) Avoid talking to yourself.
Rely on your instincts and your insights about the market and your opportunity. You live and breathe this idea, and will have spent more time thinking about it than anyone else. But be sure to offset this with savvy opinions from well-informed outsiders. A little bit of market research can go a long way here. You don’t have to do an exhaustive (and expensive) study. There are many resources available for modest fees, and even some good work published free online from organizations like Pew’s Internet & American Life Project. While there’s a certain amount of self-selection bias in the results, quick-and-dirty online focus groups can help to fill in specifics related to your particularly market opportunity. Listen to your customers and market before you start getting creative.
3) Write your positioning statement … and don’t confuse it with a tag line.
This is probably one of the singularly most difficult efforts for any organization. A good positioning statement is a well-worded, verbal representation of your company. It’s the foundation for your marketing strategy and the platform for your communications programs. It clearly articulates the definition of your business, what differentiates it from your competitors, your target market, and the benefits delivered to your target market. It reflects both the character and culture of your company. It’s okay if it’s a little awkward – it’s not a tag line or advertising copy. But it needs to be credible, relevant, unique and able to stand-up over time.
4) Do a reality check before you get carried away with cool ideas.
Once you’ve got some rough concepts for names, do a preliminary URL and trademark search. You want to avoid getting too attached to something you realistically can’t have. Compare your concepts to the names of your competitors. You should make sure your name stands out – in a good way. Test the name in a variety of applications. Try writing a board brief or looking at it on a PowerPoint slide or on a web page and see if it’s easy to use, and if it’s not, think about ways you might modify it. For example, it’s awkward to use a name that begins with lowercase letters or ends in punctuation. Having said that, two of the top online brands are examples of this: eBay and Yahoo!. Sometimes these names work really well, but be forewarned, it takes a lot of time and money to build these kinds of brands.
5) Think about your brand as a verb, not a noun.
Ross Mayfield made this comment about the Web in a recent blog post, but I’ve been saying it for years about brands. Brands are customer commitments. Your brand image is conveyed through every single customer contact, from your advertising, to your web site to the way your receptionist answers the phone. Over the past decade, increased media fragmentation and rising consumer expectations has made this perspective even more important. The Web 2.0 marketing environment makes it critical. (N.B.: ironically Web 2.0 can’t even define itself though John Hagel makes a valid attempt in his current blog post.) So as you think about your name and your brand, think about it in the active voice, not as a passive place or thing.
Bottom line: you probably have most of what you need to create a name and brand for your company. You’ll want some outside help, to enhance your own thinking and to mitigate the risk of being too insular. And of course you’ll need some great creative talent to dimensionalize your brand, as a logo and with things like a type family, copy voice and various graphic systems (both print and digital). Your brand is an investment. Current valuations for top brands add millions to corporate balance sheets. But start simple … and be realistic.
As a branding professional I take no offense at having the naming process demystified. If anything, I applaud the effort. However, despite the sound logic and smart approach outlined in the article, there will always be companies that spend too little time thinking about who they are and too much on what they should be called or what the logo should look like.
No. 3 is the most important of the steps above and time after time I see companies who manage to mess it up completely. Perhaps the positioning statement was always an imprecise instrument but nonetheless it should be crafted with care and with simplicity in mind and err on the side of real words versus mumbo jumbo. Does your positioning statement have phrases like "solutions provider,"best of breed" or "a leading company"? Take them out. They neither differentiate you from your competition nor do they actually mean ANYTHING. You won't have lost anything; quite the opposite, you may end up with real words that mean something to you and your employees.
It may even help you name your company.
Posted by: Jerry Blanton | October 06, 2005 at 14:05