Branding can make a firm millions – or strangle it at birth. A strong brand image is the most powerful of all marketing tools and choosing the right name for your firm is a serious business.
A brand name should convey carefully thought-out values, impressions and signals. As the pithiest condensation of a brand’s message, it must support the brand’s promise, story and spirit. When your brand can influence the people who matter to the success of your business, you can compete.
Rules of branding
I had some firm ideas of my own when it came to naming the new company. One – nothing cheesy. Two – no fruit. Three – no ‘Q’s. QuinetiQ was the last straw.
Four – the new name must not have initials. Initials are all very well for international institutions like the BBC or ICI, when it was a great company. But they don’t sit well with smaller companies. Like HBoS.
Five – have you ever tried to look up 3i or 600 Group in a directory? Three steps to oblivion. No numbers.
I wanted a brand with some meaning behind it, without being a real word. Words in common usage come with baggage and built-in associations. A global firm needs a global brand; and that’s when language barriers become semantic traps. Just look at Bonka coffee and Bimbo bread from Spain, Krapp toilet paper from Sweden, Pansy male underwear from China, Mukk yoghurt from Italy, Poxy flooring from the Netherlands, and Skinababe baby lotion from Japan.
No one told the Americans before they launched the Nova, that in the Spanish-speaking world, ‘no va’ means ‘it doesn't go’. The Ford Pinto met with success almost everywhere except Brazil, where pinto is slang for ‘man with a tiny cock’. The Mitsubishi Pajero, was greeted with mirth among Argentineans who knew ‘pajero’ as the sort of swearword you might hear at a football match – as in ‘the referee’s a pajero’. Toyota fell into a similar trap with its MR2 in France. Say this out loud in French, and it sounds like the sort of thing a dog would leave on the pavement.
‘Mist’ is another word to have caught out many a multinational, unaware that it means ‘manure’ in German. Clairol, for example, blithely sold a hair curler dubbed the Mist Stick in Germany, while Estée Lauder had to withdraw a hairspray called Country Mist.
Form and function
On a more serious note, there’s an issue of form and function here – the name must work, it should be pleasing, and it must be memorable.
Mimicking the sounds in other words can allow a brand to absorb manifold connotations. Viagra has an inspirational name. The initial ‘vi’ sound suggests the words ‘vitality’, ‘virility’ and ‘vigour’. The ‘agra’ evokes aggression. Masculine sexuality in a nutshell.
I wanted a brand with meaning behind it. I also wanted a name that placed emphasis on innovation, was suitable for both the high net worth and adverse markets and was established, while promising new mortgage solutions. We chose edeus; ‘deus’ meaning ‘creator’ in Latin, and ‘e’ meaning ‘online’.
We are creating a business to justify that name. With a larger-than-life brand like edeus, we needed to be able to put our money where our mouth was. The business must live up to the goals we have set – to find faster ways to do business, to help brokers do business, to use cutting-edge technology, to offer a wide product range and to be undisputed experts in our market.
It is no good developing a flashy brand to cover up a bad business. Rebranding Royal Mail into Consignia was a prime example where the rebranding meant absolutely nothing – it was just a sticking plaster for a failing business, and everyone knew it.
Aside from the sticking plaster problem, there are the dangers of being too fashionable. In 2002 the consultancy division of PricewaterhouseCooper was rebranded as ‘Monday’. On the one hand, the name Monday is achingly hip. On the other hand, it is the most reviled day of the week.
No one likes Mondays. Just ask Bob Geldof. For me, Monday means ‘slightly hungover and tetchy’, although I see the resulting analogy might not be terribly helpful.
Launched on June 6 and pulled on July 30 – 53 days – Monday cost the company over £75 million. Loathed by PWC staff and a little too original for its own good, this was the shortest-lived rebrand in history.
As Cicero once said: ‘Nomen omen,’ – ‘the name is an omen’. Our competition would do very well to remember that.
