Just because IBM, RCA, AIG and MSN use initials to identify themselves doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Company names should mean something, convey a concept or set a mood. There are very few three-initial brand names that do so.Initials have no personality They don’t resonate. They don’t elicit emotion. They communicate no passion, history [...]

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Your brand platform and your branding strategy should dictate which. We all know Proctor and Gamble emphasizes product brands. Tide and Crest and Pringles stand on their own. As they say in hi-tech, the company is “transparent” to the consumer. During my time at IBM, we didn’t brand the products as such, we just named [...]

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When Al Ries and Jack Trout first introduced positioning in their 1981 breakthrough book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (I own a first edition), they espoused the idea that market participants were responsible for positioning products. In other words, customers perceived products differently one from another. As marketers, we could measure those perceptions and [...]

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I wonder just how many entrepreneurs have come to me for help with establishing a brand or developing a brand strategy, but are dead set against changing the name they’ve already chosen? I can count twelve, and I’m sure there are others. Same thing has happened when one proudly presents a logo their 14-year-old daughter [...]

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Taglines have been a part of most brand communications for more than a century. Ivory Soap’s “99.9 Percent Pure: It Floats” date to before 1900. Whether you call them taglines, slogans, or positioning statements, they are almost manditory for today’s brand. These five-to-eight-word phrases are supposed to differentiate your business, product, service or event from [...]

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Since the name is the rallying flag for your brand, it pays to spend the time and energy required to either find or create a really unique and relevant one. The success of your branding efforts begins with the name. Now “finding” a name means looking for existing names that suit your product or business [...]

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While ranting about company nicknames in my previous two posts, I remembered something I’d seen on the web site of Lexicon Branding several years ago. Lexicon is one of the premier sources of powerful brand names in the world, branding products as diverse as Swiffer, BlackBerry, Ridgeline and Evista. Lexicon relies heavily on linguistic constructions [...]

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My Friday blog was concerned with companies adopting nicknames when, apprarently, the original brand name wasn’t “catchy” enough. Here’s another example of branding a nickname: Southern Comfort, a flavored whiskey with rich traditions and associations, has taken to calling itself “SoCo” in their commercials and on their web site. Now you do save two syllables, [...]

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