Why a naming agency will save you a lot of money and headaches!
Everything you wanted to know about naming ...
but didn't know who to ask.
Every
day there are thousands of man hours wasted by executives trying
to develop names for their new company, factory, service, facility,
sports team or other product family. That is what makes naming
so frustrating and so interesting. But really it is like photography.
We can all take pictures, yet we hire a professional for our wedding
or company function. So too with naming. We can all do it. But
how well can you do it and how long does it take you? Many of
you have named your children, but then you usually had nine months
and duplicates were allowed. You didn't have competitors' lawyers
hovering to send you the dreaded "cease and desist"
letter if you infringe on their client's trademark
rights. You didn't run the risk of your product brand
being confused on the shelf or eliciting snickers over the name.
You didn't have your child ignored because he had a funny name
(we hope).
A
brand naming agency like Brighter Naming, that performs company,
product,
brand and service naming, does a lot more than just act as a creative
naming agency. They also do name
research, domain name checking and registration, phonetics
and linguistics research and other brand
consulting. Their professional name generators can
beat any computer program because computers do not understand
tone or style or marketing, let alone the dreams and aspirations
of your management team.
In
new fast growing fields like health care or biotech, naming overlaps
both business-to-business naming, scientific naming and consumer
naming. And there are only so many basic words in the English
language and so many descriptors in any segment of the science
- and they are all probably taken as names or name roots. How
much training and experience do top business executives and biotechnology
Ph. D. scientists have in the science of naming? What is their
hourly rate? On top of that, what does your highly qualified (and
expensive) intellectual
property lawyer charge you to do a proper name check?
All these people need to be involved in health care naming projects,
in biotech naming, in product naming and in brand naming just
like the founders were in naming the business. But let's pay them
to help set the strategic directions and messaging, and make the
final decisions. And leave the 'heavy-lifting" to a naming
company that has the appropriate name creation, name change, name
search and name registration experience.
Such
a naming agency will know the naming convention for naming a compound
or solution, a product or a service, a family of products, a foreign
company or a small sole
proprietorship. They will have a systematic
creative process that gets results in a short timeframe.
They will have a good portfolio
of reference names in a number of different fields. They will
have a team of namers around the country (if not the world) and
understand regional
naming differences. They will have a very extensive
in-house database of names in many different styles. They will
have a strong background
in languages, phonetics
and linguistics. They will be continuous students of
naming as styles
and trends evolve and they will be structured so as
to not have any major biases
or influences. They will have marketing and strategic
business backgrounds with knowledge of proper executive decision-making
facilitation. For any sort of technical naming, they will have
namers with technology
backgrounds so they can properly communicate with your
team and your target audience. Similarly, they will help you create
proper brand
naming architectures. Furthermore, they will have the
tools, staff and experience to do comprehensive legal name checking,
in all its nuances, to produce search results that can stand up
to the scrutiny of any top trademark attorney in the country.
And
unlike when your lawyer or engineer makes up some awkward construct
or a long slogan-like name (two common errors we see), you won't
have to call for more help when your salespeople start using the
name a hundred times a day on the phone. A quality
name is one that is appropriate for the job it has
to do. Many good ones are smooth and musical. But sharp and edgy
names can also be cool for many other applications. Your name
is not a slogan,
tagline or description. It is not a set of initials.
It is not an abbreviation that has you lost in the alphabet jungle.
And, just like your accounting, it can stand up to a good name
audit.
Famous
brand names like Acura, Cingular, PowerBook, Pentium, Compaq,
Prius and many others have been launch successfully after they
were all made up by naming agencies. What are these names worth
today? How much easier has their marketing job been because of
the uniqueness, hidden values, brevity and trademark clarity they
all embody? What are you
paying your marketing
agency and staff? What are you spending on your launch
campaign, packaging, website, product marketing and promotions?
And
yet, how much productive time and effort is going into the name?
Ries and Trout, in their great work Positioning: The Battle
for the Mind, said "your name is your primary weapon
in the battle of the mind". The English language has
three times as many words as most other languages, but most common
English words are already overused in trademarks.
How much easier would it be for your sales
and marketing channels to deal with your company and
products if your name was clear and unique?
