What's in a name?

I am currently working on three naming projects – one for a new academic institution, another for a fast-growing British software business, and a third for a new leading edge product for a Chinese manufacturer. Three very different types of types of names needed, and three very different cultures, but in each case three very similar points of discussion. Is the name important? What will our existing clients and staff think? How will people interpret it?

Names are important. In a piece of research in the US participants were shown photographs of people and asked to rank how attractive they were. Two photographs were selected that both men and women ranked as equally attractive. Then, when participants were shown these photographs named Jennifer and Gertrude, six times more people ranked the photo labelled Jennifer more attractive than the one labelled Gertrude.  Same photo, different names, different reaction from the viewer. Which probably also says to all you photographers, that giving an appropriate name to your compositions may have more effect than you realise.

The name of a business or product can significantly affect your expectations.  You probably expect something different from ‘SpeedyCheapFotoService’ than from ‘TraditionalPhotographPrinting”. This would affect your propensity to choose one rather than the other, as well as your expectation of the price point.

However, if you are renaming an organisation, then – as long as you avoid a name with very negative connotations - what your existing clients and staff think is not particularly important. Their impressions of the qualities of the organisation are already set. The name is really only important in attracting and setting the expectations of those people who don’t yet know you. Yet almost every time the CEO and Board look at the possible name candidates and try to evaluate them on what they like (or on what their spouses like) rather than what will have the most positive impact in attracting new customers who have yet to discover them, new customers who will be essential to their future success.

And the interpretation of a brand name by people coming across it for the first time is very dependent on context. On the Internet it might come up first as a word in a search, but once you click on the site, or see an advert, then the look of the logo, the colours used, and the photographic style and imagery that surrounds it will have far more impact than the name itself.  So it isn’t critical that a name is too dull, or too playful. Our design partners recently worked with an investment company that decided to call itself Frog Capital – but then by using simple, serious black and white tones and imagery they were able to completely avoid giving it a childish look, letting it use the distinctive name in a business-like context.

So would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Certainly – but your expectations of its sweetness will be determined by its name and context. If you could only try the scent of one rose, would it be VioletMusk, or FartySocks?

Viva La Diference! - Global Research finds significant regional differences in consumer choice behaviour

In this age of global brands and global marketing, it is refreshing to find hard evidence that people around the world do not all think about brands the same way.

We are just completing a major piece of consumer research across six continents. We have analysed what drives consumer choice between brands in a particular category of brown goods – purchases of things that people only buy occasionally, and only when they actually need to replace the one they have. There are some famous international brands in the category, but it is not a high interest category, and often a distressed purchase. The research has involved over 16,000 consumers around the world, with at least 1,000 in each country, and included online research, face-to-face interviews, and consumer observation at the point of purchase.

As well as gathering the usual data on awareness, consideration, purchase and loyalty, and asking people directly what influenced their choice of brands, we asked each consumer to rate their brand against 40 attributes.  We then used factor analysis to group these attributes into a smaller number of independent factors: sets of attributes that consumers are, perhaps unconsciously, mentally grouping when they make choices in the category. Using statistical techniques, we analysed these factors to determine which are most significant in driving brand selection.

Understanding what actually drives demand, as opposed to just finding what people claim is influencing them, is important. In surveys consumers tend to give the answers that they think they should, or think will show them in the best possible light, so to try to appear logical. They therefore tend to overstate the rational factors, and many understate or deny being influenced by emotional factors or advertising. Demand driver analysis enables us to derive what is actually influencing choice of brand. This knowledge is invaluable when it comes to establishing an effective brand positioning and efficient marketing campaigns.

Our research supported some national stereotypes. For example, German consumers were significantly more likely than others to research their purchase in advance and to be influenced by hard data, such as independent test results.

Other regional findings were more surprising. If we judge customer sophistication by the number of different independent factors that they take into account when choosing between brands, then many Westerners would have expected the Europeans or North Americans to be the most sophisticated. This wasn’t true. We weren’t the least sophisticated – that proved to be the Brazilians, who seem to wrap everything in this category into one composite factor of “is it good?”. But the most sophisticated proved to be the Nigerians, who took a much broader range of factors into account and who, incidentally, could all name the brand they currently owned, which wasn’t true anywhere else in the world. It is true that one of the sampling criteria was did they already own a brand in the category, which would have cut out quite a lot of the poorer Nigerians, but that sampling criteria was used in all markets, so the international comparison is valid.

In creating global brands, it is easy and not uncommon for managers to assume that consumers around the world are similar and think in the same way within a category. But if they don’t understand how ways of choosing between brands differ from country to country, as well as which desires are common, they could easily be making mistakes and wasting money.

News Internecine

So Farewell then, News of the World

No more News of the Screws

As you were better known.

So a great brand has fallen on its sword – or been thrust upon it by its disgusted parent, Rupert. It reminds one of the ‘honour killings’ of poor girls from third world countries who have been violated and then accused and sacrificed for bringing their families into disrepute.

The Business Editor of the News of the World on breakfast television this morning said that this was because it was felt that “the brand has been so badly damaged that it can’t be saved”. Implying that the closure after 168 years of the largest circulation English-language newspapers in the world was fundamentally not for commercial reasons, nor for moral reasons, but for brand reasons.

This had been the cash-cow of the New International empire. But when the transgressions of the previous management of News of the World became more prominent in the public eye, and the cries of “Shame” that ran along Fleet Street were echoed on television and in the Houses of Parliament, the pressure became to great. And rather than own up and say ‘the buck stops here’, the News Corporation and News International management have endeavoured to limit the damage to their own brand reputations by implicitly blaming the institution and brand of News of the World.

It is an interesting contrast to the response of BP to their tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, where ultimately the top people did take responsibility and try to make amends.

Here, although top management have clearly either been guilty or negligent in their duty of upholding legal and moral standards throughout their organisations, rather than setting in motion a purge of any immoral or illegal news gathering activity across all of their titles and media assets, and making sure that their management systems would prevent future payments for illegal line tapping or bribing police, they are so far blaming those beneath them and sacrificing what was hard-working, campaigning and yet popular newspaper. The brand is too damaged they say.

The difference between marketing and branding

Marketing is the process of taking products and services to market.

Branding is the process of creating brands. 


Simples! 



Marketing is therefore a commercial activity, focused on getting customers to buy your products and services, which can involve some or all of the activities of: identifying potential markets; researching customers' and consumers' desires, needs and wants; analysing competitors; creating or developing new products and services; redefining their distinctive qualities and benefits; packaging, positioning, pricing and promoting those products and services; engaging staff, distribution channels, customers and prospective customers though advertising, social media and experiential marketing; monitoring how well all these are doing in growing sales and profits; learning from this and doing it all again to continue to grow. 



Branding is the activity of creating distinctive reputations for organisations, products, services, people and places. It is not necessarily a commercial activity. It can be a particularly powerful tool for marketers. It can also be a powerful tool for leaders engaging many different stakeholder groups, not only clients and consumers, but also shareholders and analysts, employees and candidates, suppliers and partners, patrons, patients, voters, viewers, visitors, members and followers.

It is also clear from these definitions that branding is not a sub-set of marketing, for their are many non-commercial brands that are not consciously 'marketed', nor bought or sold - Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge would be one example, and there are many more from many different fields. Similarly marketing is not a sub-set of branding, as there are things, commodities for example, which may have some marketing activity but are not brands.

Brand Kate

Personal brands can be immensely powerful. Millions of people will take action, or even take arms, because of the perceptions they hold of a person they have never met. Muammar Gadaffi is one example. Kate Middleton is now another.

The power of a brand is in its ability to influence people’s behaviours – how they spend money or time. Millions of pounds have been spend on Royal Wedding branded memorabilia. That hundreds of millions of people around the world have changed their normal routines to watch today’s Royal Wedding shows the power of the British Royal family’s brand. That hundreds of thousands have travelled to watch or celebrate the wedding of two people they only know by reputation emphasises this.

The British Royal family always gather a crowd. Their personal brands bring considerable value to the British economy in terms of tourism and endorsements of British businesses. But today’s crowds have been exceptional. This is due to two things: the pageantry of the occasion, and the addition of a new personal brand, Kate. She may become known as Princess Catherine, or one day Queen Catherine, but today in the minds of most, she is simply Kate, the Kate of William and Kate.

So she is now the possessor of a hugely valuable and powerful personal brand. Her brand has grown almost entirely by association with her new husband’s family, but it is now her own. Despite the wealth of her husband’s family, it is probably now her most valuable asset. She could use her brand for good, as her husband’s mother did, or she could weaken her brand by her actions, as her husband’s father has. But whatever she does, she is now the possessor a brand that is a huge national as well as personal asset. We wish her all the best for the future, and hope she uses her brand power well.

Brands and advertising in the context of time

I came across these rather old adverts which seem quite strange and politically incorrect today, though perhaps still amusing to some people.

They reflect the then contemporary attitudes to gender relationships...

...to smoking...

...and to child health...

They make me wonder how much attitudes will have changed in another 60 or 70 years, and how strange the adverts that we feel proud of today will seem to our grandchildren and their children?

BA – Break up the brand and Fly BEA

BA has a challenge. In fact it has several. Cabin crew. Money. Competition. Brand image. And there may be more. Cabin crew and cash-flow are issues for the management to solve, though it is obvious that unless the cabin crew’s productivity is similar to the competition then the airline can’t be viable in a competitive market.

More fundamental to long term viability and success is the brand image that drives passenger loyalty and their willingness to pay a premium.

Like many, I very much like the BA long-haul First and business class experience. The new lounges at T5 are both beautiful and comfortable. The in-flight space and flat beds are very good – though the fact that US airlines like United are now fitting similar kit, and Asian airlines like Etihad and SIA are arguably superior means that this is no longer a differentiator.

However, the BA brand experience is critically harmed whenever one flies BA short-haul around Europe. This has been driven by the need to compete with budget airlines like Ryanair - now remarkably the World’s Favourite Airline by the passenger numbers metric that BA used to make that claim. However, it means that there is a dramatic difference in the brand experience. A businessman flying BA from Frankfurt to New York and back will still get a very good trans-Atlantic ride, but his most recent memory of BA when he gets home will be the packet of peanuts thrown at him on the cramped final leg.

One answer would to break up the airline back into two separate organisations, though I am told that getting feeder traffic is important to the economics of long-haul. That could be solved by feeder and scheduling agreements, but a simpler answer is just to break up the brand. Whilst the BA brand still has some positive remaining equity from its long-haul, restrict the BA brand to that. And reintroduce a separate brand for the short-haul, which would have a very different proposition, more like “the reliable cheap regional airline that connects with BA’s long-haul flights”.

And there is already a good heritage brand ready to fly – BEA, British European Airways. It may no longer be No.1 in Europe, as it claimed in 1969, but it could go back to the claim it made in 1952. “New Cheap Return Fares”. Though I doubt they will be able to offer “Paris for as little as £9.15 return”

A full toss at the broadcasters

According to Brand Republic Google/YouTube have bought the rights to broadcast live Indian Premier League Cricket. This takes YouTube into a different category, putting it head to head in the competition for global sports viewers with Sky, ESPN and the BBC as a live event/sports broadcaster.

This sounds like it will initially be on advertiser-funded model, so could help make YouTube more viable, and could be the start of a real challenge to the subscription channels, unless it presages the start of YouTube moving into paid-for content broadcasting.

Cricket is one of the worlds most popular sports outside North America, so this will take YouTube to some demographics where its penetration may have been more limited, and so build its brand franchise as well as its viewership.

It also could accelerate the market for connecting home TV to the internet, giving people a real reason to link their computer to a more passive viewing environment.

Its not just cricket, it could be the start of the next phase of media convergence