A brand name or trade name is the name a company or organisation calls itself or the name of a product or service being offered. A company or brand name can be almost anything.
Brand names were first introduced in order to credit the creator or manufacturer for their work, product or service and differentiate themselves from other similar companies in their communities. In the late 19th Century during the Second Industrial Revolution when a person’s good name was inexorably linked to his reputation, companies began to be named after their owners. Examples include Singer and Hoover.
With the beginnings of a booming consumer market after the 2nd World War companies had to work much harder when creating a brand name in order to compete in increasingly competitive environments. Today ‘naming’ is one of the most difficult aspects of brandbuilding. It has to be carefully and strategically thought-out. It has to align and fit with each of the other brandbuilding components as it plays a critical role with direct impact on the potential success or eficacy of the brand.
Generally names tend to focus on one or more of the following aspects:
- Focussed on identifying the sector, the location, the activity of the business
- Identify the market (audience) the business is targeting
- The problem the business is solving or the benefit being provided to the customer/client.
There are a number of different types of name that can be used to address these areas. They can be:
- Founders, geographical, or historical – Dyson, Gucci, Adidas, A&M Records, Costa Coffee, Heal’s, Pfizer, Boeing
- Descriptive/experiential – Uber, Oracle, EasyJet, Duracell, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Twitter, Volkswagen, Whole Foods, E*Trade, Phones4U, Money Supermarket, Direct Line
- Emotive/evocative/associative – Apple, Nike, Amazon, Timberland
- Experiential – Uber, Oracle, EasyJet, Duracell, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Twitter.
- Portmanteau or a compound word – one word made from parts of other words, i.e FedEx, Groupon, Nutrisystem, Cisco, Pinterest
- Invented words – Rolex, Xerox, Kodak, Accenture, Verizon
- Acronyms & initialisations – creating a shortened name based on the initial letters of a much longer name, i.e IBM, BMW, BP, UPS, WHO, NHS, BBC, KFC
