How should a new brand name itself?

“Words are finite, but their meanings are infinite” has always been a profound aesthetic experience of the Chinese people. In my opinion, this is exactly what a brand name should pursue as an “expression”.

How should a new brand name itself? This is a question that seems simple, but it is not easy to find the "boundary". It is also a question that is constantly discussed but will never have a standard answer.

There are always new possibilities in brand naming, and new naming methods emerge in an endless stream. These are all influenced by the never-ending cultural infiltration and ideological emergence, as well as the rapid explosion in the number of brands and the reality that concise names are even more difficult to come by. However, fundamentally, we must admit that coming up with a good name is ultimately a kind of "creativity". Since it is creativity, we need to be in awe of its mystery.

When it comes to brand naming, anyone who has or has not been involved in marketing can probably come up with a number of standards, such as:

• Be concise
• Be special enough
• Have your own style
• To facilitate memory
• To be impressive
• Have good associations
• To show the significant characteristics

So, why, with so many standards, are good names still so scarce relative to the absolute number of brands?

I think the subtle logic behind this is precisely because we ignore "time".

Time changes our lifestyles, which makes our interpretation of "good" very different; time triggers subcultures, which makes the associations of names different; time shapes new business trends, which makes good names lose their effectiveness; time defines the aesthetic taste of language, which makes names encounter the problem of "adaptation".

Therefore, it is always relatively easy to follow the above naming conventions at a certain moment or a certain "cross-section" in time. However, once we want to use a forward-looking perspective to "foresee" a good name, we will immediately feel the difficulty of this matter.

Therefore, before discussing “how to name a brand”, let’s change our perspective and invite the “witness” “time” to take a look at what traps brands are prone to encounter in naming.

In my opinion, the first "trap" that decision makers are most likely to fall into on this issue is failing to see the "user value" behind the product. Let's take Zipcar , an American online car rental platform founded in 2000, as an example.

Zipcar is an early innovator in car sharing, providing Internet -based car-sharing services. However, what many people don’t know is that, perhaps because of its persistence in the concept of “sharing,” the company once wanted to name its brand USCarshare, because the team felt that this name was not only powerful, but also directly interpreted the business and philosophy.

But subsequent user insights showed that many people have a deep-rooted aversion to the concept of "car sharing." "This concept easily makes people feel like they are being ordered to queue," the company's survey showed. Based on this feedback, the company gave up its original idea.

From the perspective of "discovery marketing", we believe that all corporate expressions should be centered on "user value". Starting from naming, brands should "translate" the language of social value and commercial value into the language of user value.

Using the Zipcar example, is “sharing” a user value? It may be true for environmentalists, but for most ordinary people, "sharing" is still a language of social value, and the real user value is actually "travel on a whim", which saves users from the worries of buying, maintaining, repairing and getting stuck in traffic jams in order to travel, thereby gaining instant ease.

I think the final name of "Zipcar" and the slogan "Wheels When You Want Them" do more accurately reflect this user value.

So what does this have to do with "time"? If you think about it carefully, it is actually very relevant. For example, in many industries, when some foresighted companies discover innovative business models , or opportunities for innovative categories, they tend to be fascinated by new concepts and bundle the brand name with the category concept, directly choosing naming methods such as "XX used car " and "XX car rental".

From the static dimension of time, such naming is natural because it can simply and directly tell users "who I am" and "what I do", but from the dynamic dimension of time, it requires great caution. For example, if you are not an early creator and leader in this category, then following the naming methods of the leading brands will quickly lead to the following problems:

1. Since the proposers of new categories are often the first to enter the user's mind, when users recognize through the name that you also belong to this category, they will often lose interest in you immediately.
2. Category creators and leaders will define the image of "followers" and " imitations " for latecomers, which is not good for your public relations and the perception of ordinary users.
3. Category creators and leaders will define the "value standards" of the category, causing users to use these standards to view your value; even if you make some differentiated innovations, users will not only not easily accept them, but may instead view you as an "outlier."

In summary, the category creator who first enters the user's mind is always the best in the user's mind. Therefore, if you want to bundle the brand name with the category, it is best to meet one of the following two conditions: A. Either you are the creator and leader of this category (such as "Guazi Used Cars" and "Youxin Used Cars"); B. Either you can subdivide the original category or create a new category in your own way, and at the same time you can put the concept of this category into the brand name in a concise way (such as "Xibe Youmiancun").

The brand name should reflect user value. When a new category that is easy for users to understand appears, the category concept itself represents "user value". However, what's more, "category" and "user value" are written into the brand name together.

Guazi Used Car is a typical example. Many people overlook the fact that the full name of the brand, which it repeatedly emphasizes in its advertisements, is actually "Guazi Used Car Direct Sales Network." "Used car" reflects the category, and "direct sales" reflects the user value of "no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference." This will be a very powerful naming method for new brands of a single category that enter the market with functional value innovation .

Examining brand naming from the perspective of time, another embarrassment that is somewhat similar to the above problem is that many products with good technical backgrounds do not have a "truly good" name. They have more or less encountered the problem of "time is running out for naming".

This situation refers to the situation that in the early stage, business decision makers usually start a business based on an idea of ​​their own. When the idea has not been verified by user insights, decision makers have not yet deeply discovered the value behind the product, and it is difficult to predict the product direction and industry trends in the next few years, the product cannot be without a name...

Mobile news client products reflect this type of problem more prominently. For example, names with a strong news awareness orientation such as "XX Express" or "XX Information", and even the category concept of "news client", in my opinion, are far from the reality of how users use such products today. When it comes to these products, some people are obsessed with entertainment gossip, some like to watch and complain, news and opinions go hand in hand, and picture reading and short videos fly together.

In fact, if based on an early understanding, the brand name is too closely linked to the product's functions and category attributes, unless you can do it like "Zhihu" and have an unchanging core functional value to support it, you should also look at this naming logic with caution.

The second "trap" that decision makers are prone to encounter in brand naming is that they like to go against the "cognition" of users, which is mainly reflected in the following two aspects:

The first is cognitive convergence caused by imitation.

For example, when a subculture's language paradigm emerges, there will definitely be a large number of followers. An example of this "mob effect" in communication is that when the concept of "craftsmanship" becomes popular, you will find that a large number of "craftsmen" have emerged; and in naming, when the first " Jiang Xiaobai " or "Xiao Ming classmate" becomes popular, many "X Xiaobai" or "Xiao X classmate" will appear overnight. The result of brands choosing to do so is usually that they barely enter the niche market and attract the attention of some price-sensitive consumers.

The second is to ignore the "preconceived" mechanism in the user's cognitive rules and name it according to subjective wishes.

Internet brands make many mistakes on this issue. For example, Baidu likes to name its businesses "Baidu XX". What will be the result? The result is that businesses that are close to the core cognition of "search" (such as Baidu Encyclopedia and Baidu Tieba ) will be easier to do well because they have the nourishment of cognitive advantages, while businesses that are farther away from the core cognition (such as group buying, online food ordering, and videos) will be more likely to gain growth space only if they are not named after the parent brand.

In addition to not taking into account the user's "preconceived" cognitive mechanism, this naming method also completely ignores the fact that under a brand name, if the product category extends broadly and lacks a unified core value to focus cognition, then the user's cognition will inevitably be scattered; and once scattered, it will inevitably be weaker than brands with higher mental significance in each segment.

Similarly, when the category awareness of "UC Browser " is too strong, and "UC" is placed in front of an "information reading" product such as " UC Headlines ", the professionalism of the product will not be easily accepted by users.

In the field of children's watches, "360 Children's Watches" is destined to inherit the parent brand's perception of "safety", but if users' value standards for this category change, for example, if "safety" is no longer a core purchasing demand, the name will lead to a reduction in brand value. This is what we mean when we say that a strong name can become less effective over time.

These examples reflect that when naming a brand, corporate decision makers must carefully consider users' existing cognition of specific concepts, think more about the issue from the perspective of "temporality", and try to use a more forward-looking perspective to ensure that the name is not likely to conflict with users' cognition in the present and in the future.

Having discussed common naming misunderstandings from a dynamic perspective, let’s now talk about static naming principles. Although we have mentioned many standards such as “simplicity”, “specialness”, and “impressiveness” before, in SDi’s opinion, new brands only need to follow the two core standards of “recognizability” and “tactility” to do a good job in brand naming.

First of all, the role of a brand name is to make people recognize the brand, and the so-called "recognition" must be "recognition" first and "knowing" later. If even "recognition" is difficult, it is tantamount to a fantasy to expect users to "know". From this perspective, improving "recognizability" becomes the first requirement for brand naming.

Improving recognizability will make it easier for us to think about what to do. For example, names that are not concise enough are usually difficult to recognize. Therefore, in the era of mobile Internet , brands such as Ermenegildo Zegna and Salvatore Ferragamo in the clothing field will face greater cognitive pressure. On the contrary, in terms of simplicity, we may not find a more extreme example than Apple’s “i” series naming, or a more recognizable example among the numerous technological products.

In Chinese names, rare characters with complex shapes can easily lead to a decrease in recognition. For example, when I was observing the baking industry, I noticed a bakery called "Yoshu". Frankly speaking, this is an excellent brand. Its main product is soft European bread with a long-lasting taste. In the store scene experience, it incorporates the quality and literary qualities of a red wine cellar, which blends perfectly with baking. However, the overly complicated brand name is a bit of a flaw.

When a name results in an increased cognitive cost for an individual user, this effect is amplified in the group.

For example, it can easily suppress the user's desire to recommend. For instance, when using a mobile phone input method, one may need to constantly form words; one may also encounter trouble when using a search engine or relaying information to others. Therefore, the increase in identification costs is often due to the increase in communication costs and dissemination costs. Children whose names are difficult to pronounce in class will have lower academic performance because they are less often called upon by the teacher, which reflects a similar principle.

Finally, "recognizable" also means "special". When we say that someone's voice is very "recognizable", we are actually discussing its characteristics. Therefore, blindly following the naming paradigm of successful brands will only make the brand more similar and less "recognizable" .

The second key point in naming a brand is "tangibility". In the discovery marketing theory, we say that the basic principle of value expression is "carrying value and triggering cognition". Since it is to trigger cognition, it must be "tangible", because the so-called "expression" is actually what you say and others listen; what you do and others watch; a name, a logo, a product... In many cases, the basic expression of a brand is quietly waiting there, waiting for users to discover and pay attention to it. Therefore, a good expression must make people "know it at once". Even if it is only a few seconds of contact, it is enough to activate a certain consciousness of the user.

What should the brand name make users “touch”? From the different naming methods, we can roughly summarize the "tactile" goals of different brands as follows:

So how should managers make decisions when faced with so many tangible directions? What should be the focus of user perception? Discovery marketing theory believes that no matter the brand category, target population, functional characteristics, lifestyle symbols, or founders, the origin and place of origin of the brand, these various concepts actually reflect "user value".

So what should the brand name let users know? The answer is actually very simple. It should come from the decision maker's judgment, that is , what kind of "user value" will have the highest uniqueness and significance in the user's mind? In other words, what the brand name is ultimately meant to "express" is the decision-maker's thinking on user value.

For example, when the "value information" of the creator, source or origin of a product is unique enough and has a very high mental significance, there is no need to use another name to explain this value. Just use the founder or the source of the brand directly.

For example, when a brand is the pioneer of a new category and the category best reflects user value, the category concept is worth considering in the name; for example, the functional value of the automotive industry is generally homogenized, so the brand name is closer to "lifestyle". Different brand names target different ideological needs and create different emotional values.

Under the naming strategy with "user value" as the core, decision makers can also combine the following guidelines to further review their naming schemes:

1. Can users know the answer at a glance?

A major skill in brand naming is to use things that people are already familiar with to express value; on the contrary, specific concepts do not have this advantage.

For example, taking the baking industry as an example, what does the name "85°C" let you know? cannot! So what does “85°C” mean? It turns out that it means "freshly brewed coffee tastes best at 85 degrees."

As you can see, this is a very unique concept that is difficult for the general public to understand without searching or hearing it discussed. At the same time, only when you become a well-known brand will people be interested in learning about it. Therefore, adopting specific concepts will increase users’ cognitive costs and brand communication costs, and it needs to rely on the “feedback” of other “expressions” of the brand to assist cognition.

The brand name is the entrance to user cognition. We might as well imagine it and the product as the relationship between " title " and "main text". If the "title" fails to activate a certain consciousness, confused users will not be interested in reading your "main text"; conversely, how well should your "main text" be written to make up for the shortcomings of a mediocre "title"? Through this metaphor, everyone can roughly understand the importance of "tactility".

However, the counterexample of using specific concepts is that although such names have low tangibility, they are highly recognizable; for example, although "85°C" is not easy for you to associate with anything, when it appears among many "XX bread" and "XX bakery", it is "special" enough; similarly, the bitten "apple" and the coffee-loving first mate " Starbuck " (the origin of the Starbucks brand name) in the novel "Moby Dick" can be said to be specific concepts with low tangibility.

Therefore, when decision makers are confident in the "overall expression" of the brand, in layman's terms, they are aware that they face high cognitive resistance, but they are bold and skilled, and "going against the grain" becomes the special strategy of these brands. This once again proves that naming is a dynamic creativity and there is never an absolute right or wrong in marketing. It is just the right time to win, and these are all artistic expressions based on different “times” and “situations”.

2. Are the visual and auditory senses up to standard?

In the past, we often said that a brand’s “value expression” must take into account the user’s “five senses”. When it comes to brand names, we should pay special attention to the fact that they are dual expressions of vision and hearing. Some expressions are visually perceptible but not auditorily.

For example, take the brand name of the shared bicycle "ofo". Visually, the name's shape itself easily triggers people's associations with bicycles and riding, but it is completely untangible aurally (when we hear the continuous pronunciation of the three letters O, F, and O, it does not trigger specific associations); at this time, users will prefer names that are tangible both visually and aurally, such as "the little yellow car."

3. Can the “minimum number of characters” be used to trigger a more layered cognition?

A major criterion for judging the quality of brand naming as a creative idea is whether it can trigger rich user cognition with the minimum number of characters. This means that the cognition of dimensions such as category concepts, functional characteristics, and ideology do not necessarily have to be separated from each other, but it is entirely possible to "integrate" them into the same name.

For example, names like "Nongfu Spring" and " Uniqlo " are rich in tangible characteristics. "Nongfu Spring" not only triggers people's recognition of the category, but also easily makes people think of the product characteristics of "natural" and "pure". "Farmer" can even extend users' recognition to the brand emotional experience of "focus and diligence". "Uniqlo" not only reflects the category and embodies the high quality and richness of the products, but also carries the cultural characteristics of the country to which it belongs in terms of hearing.

For this type of attempt, I will use a case of my own to further illustrate it.

"Benwei Chupin" is a high-end baking brand that I led the planning of, targeting young urban women. During the brand planning stage before the launch, through user insights, we defined the brand's "value discovery" as "using natural ingredients and craftsmanship that adheres to the original taste, using baking as a language, to arouse customers' perception and pursuit of authentic life."

So how do we put this “discovery” into a concise name? It took me a long time to come up with the brand name "本味初品". In fact, these four words are all related to the cognition that needs to be triggered.

For example, "本" as the brand's DNA corresponds to the functional value of "authentic, natural, and fresh" and the emotional value of "pursuing an authentic life"; "味" targets category awareness; "初" comes from the key information we obtained in the focus group: rather than saying that customers are buying bread, it is better to say that they are buying the "fragrant, soft, and hot" moment when the bread is just out of the oven; "品" as a verb corresponds to "taste", and when used with "初品", it symbolizes "freshly baked products", and also has the meaning of "tasting in the freshest state" and "every tasting is like the first time", and it is also homophonic with "出品" in terms of hearing.

When these four words are put together, I find that it not only relatively completely interprets the core value of the brand, but also has more layers in the cognition it triggers.

4. Behind the name: Is it true that “the words are finite but the meaning is infinite”?

Continuing from the previous topic, in my opinion, a good name should be instantly recognizable to users, that is, the pursuit of the so-called "instant knowledge". If users need to "think about it" before they know it, or even require you to write a note to explain it, then it is definitely not a good name.

However, marketers should also be careful not to go to extremes on this issue. For example, there is a view in the industry that since a good name is meant to make users "know it immediately", if they understand it when they see it, then they understand it, and if they don't understand it, then they don't understand it, so there is not much point in pursuing the meaning behind the name.

SDi does not agree with this view. We believe that clarity and simplicity do not mean simplicity and blandness, and “knowable at a glance” does not mean that a name cannot have rich connotations. On the contrary, a name with rich connotations can bring more "storytelling" angles and opportunities to convey ideology to the brand, and will have more language scenarios to integrate with other expressions of the brand. Naming a new brand is ultimately a creative idea based on strategic thinking. In this regard, "words are finite but meanings are infinite" has always been a profound aesthetic experience in the hearts of the Chinese people. In my opinion, this is exactly what a brand name as an "expression of value" should pursue.