Even if customers are aware of the brand and what it stands for, if they cannot spell it, they will struggle to find it through a search, Gamble points out. “We had a music school as a client that had spelt skool with a K. We needed to look at that because it was hurting them from a search point of view.”
Gamble says a company’s name should give potential customers an idea of what you do. Marketing Angels, for example, reveals that the company provides marketing and comes in to help, says Gamble.
Names should also be future-proof as much as possible. The brand name Pentel is sufficiently broad to be about writing, more than pens alone, opening the way for innovations such as tablet pens.
“A lot companies think very short term,” Gamble says. “They start with a brand name in mind, and as they evolve, they don’t rebrand or reposition as much as they should. Or they launch with one brand, then add another that has an unrelated name. Each brand is not building awareness of the master brand.”
Sometimes companies can reposition themselves with a positioning statement, rather than renaming, says Gamble. Nike’s “Just do it” or Hungry Jack’s “The burgers are better” are two cases in point. Recently, Telstra has achieved a significant rebrand with its colour spectrum, to conveys its range of services, including that each service is associated with a colour. “It takes a while to build,” Gamble notes.
However, Hogan warns that renaming can be a way to cover up deeper issues, such as trying to escape the corporate past, or giving up on solving tougher strategic issues. “Organisations love this kind of distraction,” she says. “It is the ‘bright shiny object’ syndrome.”
More seriously, a rebranding that misfires or is unnecessary is a massive waste of shareholders’ money, says Hogan.
“Isn’t this a great way to waste shareholders money? Typically coming up with new names, runs into millions of dollars, with the agency doing all this research. Then add all the logos, changing all the signage, the uniforms, the massive infrastructure. It is a lovely juicy piece of work for an agency. There is not much impetus for someone to turn around to say, ‘This is a bad idea’.”
Better to rebrand than to stick with a poor choice, however, says Gamble. Admitting to naming stuff-ups, correcting them and rethinking the brand strategy is smarter than hanging on to a failing strategy.
Once the brand is decided, however, the story is not at an end. Gamble says: “Every brand needs to be bought to life by the company’s behaviour.”
Says Hogan: “You don’t make a name to mean something, your name comes to mean something because of what you make.”
This article first appeared on LeadingCompany.
