Brand architectonics from the mind of Gucky

One evening at the local pub, Broken Record, I was rapt in conversation with Amanda Peterson, a brilliant former Landorian and current HP brand strategist. “Gucky,” as she’s known to friends, said two things so great I just had to share.

One gem gave me a new appreciation for “branded house” architecture systems and how to garner internal support for them. In a branded house, there’s one master brand and all products have descriptive, often generic, names and/or alphanumeric designators (e.g. FedEx Ground and FedEx Express, or BMW i3 and BMW 535). If you’re a product manager it’s natural that you’d want to give your product a real name with depth and character, not a generic one.  

For a product manager at a branded house, generic names can be a bitter pill to swallow, reducing your unique product – your baby! – to a descriptor and a mishmash of letters and numbers. But the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, so somebody at some point has to break it to the product manager that their product won’t get a unique name. This is how Gucky frames it:

“You should feel sorry for sub-brands because they have been kicked out from the heartland of the brand.”

I just love this. She positions the master brand as a real source of pride, and any product that doesn’t have the privilege of basking in its radiant glow and rewarding equity is in brand exile, banished and left to fend with only a new and unknown name to set it apart and fight for attention in the jungle of the marketplace. She makes the master brand irresistible, which is helpful, because in a true branded house, resistance to master branding is futile.   

Next beaut: Gucky thinks the era of the disconnected “house of brands” is over. She points to a recent backlash against Unilever. As a house of brands company, Unilever sells independently-branded products like Dove and Axe that compete and coexist on shelf with “kisses and punches.” But sometimes punches outnumber the kisses.

That’s what happened when Unilever tried to play the field with two personal care brands that were antithetical to one another. Specifically, their Dove brand staked its position in The Campaign for Real Beauty, a celebration of women who are beautiful despite, or because of, their imperfections. At the same time, Axe body spray advertising featured sex-charged, objectified women; sexist to most, sexy to some.

Now, if the brands were Tide and Downy in the same portfolio (as they are in P&G’s), no problem. One is best for deep cleaning, one best for softness. Those ideas can play well together. But when two brands in one company’s portfolio have violently conflicting values, it spells trouble. That was the case with Dove and Axe, when it wasn’t just a small handful of hard-core feminists who loudly objected to the sexist Axe ads; a whole country had a problem with them, too.

According to Gucky, this portfolio dissonance is a sign of the times.

No, not that sign.

Back when things were simpler and we walked five miles to school in the snow (uphill both ways), there was such a thing as “invisible branding” in a house of brands. Invisible branding, when a parent brand is not visible in the consumer communications of a product brand, is how Disney insulated its family-friendly brand image from the grown-up content of Touchstone Pictures. It's how the soybean-hugging Silk brand could be quietly bought and silently operated by industrial agriculturist, Dean Foods.

There have always been limits to invisible branding. Shareholders and employees know who owns what. Gucky reminded me that Unilever now owns Ben & Jerry’s, whose original, radical values changed after their buyout, demonstrating that the parent brand is invisible only to consumers, but is in full view and control of the brands in its portfolio.

The limits of invisible branding have recently become more pronounced. Before the social network era, you might not know that your favorite mom-and-pop brand is now part of a corporate behemoth. Or that the maker of your preferred moisturizer slash feel-good cause also uses oiled-up nymphomaniacs to sell men’s body spray. Today, everyone knows everything. As I wrote in Bullshit-Free Branding: 

Armed with Snopes, mass reviews, WikiLeaks and other trusted sources, everything a company claims can and will be verified, almost instantly. Every pissed-off critic holds a megaphone and now the whole world can hear their rant.

That means the glory days of true invisible branding are over, says Gucky:

“There’s no such thing as invisible brand architecture. Social media has made it impossible. Dove can’t peacefully coexist with Axe.”

Today, companies must be ever-mindful about the values and messages of all the brands in their portfolio, even those with no visible brand relationship. Despite the distance between Axe and Dove, they are close enough to create brand dissonance in the mind of the market, and a whopping headache for Unilever.

Thanks, Gucky, for your words of brand architecture wisdom!

How to create names using the world's most powerful naming tool

 
Words inspire me.

The more words I see, the more inspired I become. So when I create brand names, I want to be overwhelmed by endless lists of words.

Publications and dictionaries offer words in abundance, but they don't offer an easy way of discovering masses of words relevant to specific ideas or attributes, such as those found in a naming brief.

In my experience, a corpus – a large sample of words in context – is the most useful and comprehensive stockpile of words, especially when searchable in a database.

I have several go-to corpus resources, but one favorite: Sketch Engine.

Sketch Engine: The Most Powerful Naming Tool I've Ever Used
Published by Lexical Computing, Sketch Engine has over 60 corpora to choose from. There are seven English corpora, each comprising millions of words from spoken and written sources. The other 50+ corpora are non-English, spanning the familiar to the exotic. If you are looking for a corpus of German, the Polish Bible or Igbo, you're in luck.

Some of the corpora you'll find on Sketch Engine

How to Create Names with Sketch Engine
My starting point for creating names is a review of the name objectives I've developed, particularly the brand's key attributes. To show what Sketch Engine can do, let's pretend we're naming a new brand that should be perceived as strong.

Sketch Engine will provide a deep exploration of the word strong, and inspire names that are differentiated yet relevant.

After logging-in to Sketch Engine – which requires a well-worth-it paid subscription – I click on a specific corpus link to load it. I choose UKWaC, comprised of a mind-boggling 1.3 billion words culled from UK web sites.

Having loaded the corpus, the option to make a concordance is presented by default. Concordances are a great tool for creating natural-sounding compound names because they show how two words have appeared together in a real-world written or spoken context. For example, a concordance of the word "sun" would include beam, burn, flower and moon -- words that commonly appear next to or near the word "sun".

But we're not going to do a simple concordance because another, more powerful tool is available: Word Sketch. A Word Sketch is a like a concordance on steroids. It shows you every word that has appeared next to your query word, organized by part of speech.

Click Word Sketch on the left to get started

Let's make a Word Sketch of the word "strong". Click Word Sketch in the blue box on the left, and you're asked to enter a "lemma". A lemma is the most basic form of a word, as you'd find in the headwords of a dictionary. Enter "strong" in the lemma field and choose "adjective" from the pop-up menu.

After clicking the "Show Word Sketch" button, we're presented with listing tables of the specific words that have appeared near or next to "strong" in the texts of the corpus. Tables are organized by grammatical context and include frequency information about each collocation.

Before studying our Word Sketch of "strong", click "More data" in the blue box on the left to fetch more results. Click it a few more times after the data loads to get even more results. And you do want more results, right?

Part of the Word Sketch of "strong"

Our Word Sketch of "strong" can be used in different ways to create new brand names.

How to Create Compound Names with Word Sketch
To create compound names that include "strong", navigate to the "adj_subject" and "modifies" columns. These words have been modified by the adjective "strong". Combine "strong" with them and you'll have a nice list of natural-sounding compound names:

Strong Tide
Strong Bond
Strong Wind
Strong Link
Strong Force
Strong Lead

You can also consider these words without "strong" as stand-alone names or combine them with other words.

Scroll through the Word Sketch to explore further

The columns "adj_comp_of" and "np_comp_of" include words that naturally precede "strong", giving us potential names – or slogans – like:

Feel Strong
Grow Strong
Stand Strong
Think Strong

How to Develop Symbolic Names with Word Sketch
Our Word Sketch also tells us what symbolizes strong. To see what's "stronger than ___" or "as strong as __", navigate to the columns "pp_than_i" and "pp_as_i":

Steel
Desire
Bond
Fear
Love
Force
Ox
Alloy
Rope
Lust
Glue
Armor

Can your dictionary do that?

Some of these words will combine well with words from other columns, giving us interesting ideas like:

Steel Bond
Tide Force
Alloy Strength
Oxwood 

Discover New Creative Directions with Word Sketch
The column "and/or" tells us what words combine with "strong" in an and/or phrase. This is helpful for finding words that pair with "strong":

Healthy
Durable
Fit
Vibrant
Stable
Tall
Brave
Independent
Thick
Bold

You can use these words as springboards for new creative directions that indirectly reflect "strong". For example, "tall" and "healthy" could be separately explored for synonyms, associations and metaphors that lead to new, relevant names.

A Totally New Thesaurus 
Sketch Engine also features an interesting thesaurus that gives you options Roget never thought of. The results from this thesaurus are generated automatically, so they include words that aren't synonymous yet are related.

No ordinary thesaurus

Click the "Thesaurus" link in the blue box, enter your lemma and choose the part of speech. The results of "strong" offer these interesting ideas:

Real
Clear
Big
Positive
Original

You might find viable names in this thesaurus or springboards for new directions.

Compare Two Concepts Using Word Sketch
Sketch Engine also has a word comparison tool called Sketch-Diff which reveals the intersection of two words. Let's imagine that we're naming a technology brand that should be perceived as strong and fast.

What qualities do strong and fast have in common?

Click "Sketch-Diff" on the left and enter "strong" for the first lemma and "fast" for the second. Then click "Show Diff".

Learn what two words have in common

The result is a an integrated Word Sketch, color coded by the degree to which words collocate with one word or both. Words in red or green collocate with one word, and words in white are common to both.

A Sketch-Diff comparing "strong" and "fast"

Here's a sample of what strong and fast have in common:

secure
loud
fit
flexible
light
tall
connection
growth
response
action
car
flight
flow
time

To create names that reflect both strong and fast, use words from this list as springboards. Digging into the concepts of connection, travel (car and flight), flow, and growth will lead to new names that support or connote multiple aspects of the brand.

In the 20 years I've been creating brand names, I've used a lot of naming tools, but no one resource has been as useful as Word Sketch. Learn how to harness its power and you'll always be inspired.

Lytro, the Camera of the Future: Named by Operative Words

I've had the privilege of naming many innovative technologies in my career. But none have garnered the kinds of headlines that Lytro, a new computational photography company, has:

“Lytro Is the Camera of the Future" (CNET)
“Lytro: the ‘magic camera’ that's blown our minds” (CNET)
“Lytro Launches to Transform Photography with $50M in Venture Funds” (TechCrunch)
“Lytro’s Camera Lets You Shoot First and Focus Later” (New York Times)
“Lytro Camera to Shift Focus of Photos” (Wall Street Journal)
“Lytro Camera Lets You Focus Photos After You Take Them” (Wired)
“Camera Startup Promises a ‘Picture Revolution’” (Venture Beat)
“Lytro: The $50M Tech that May Change Photography Forever” (Fast Company)
“Lytro Changes the Way We Take Photographs” (CBS News)
“No focus, no problem! Out of focus pictures soon to go obsolete” (Examiner)
“The Making of Lytro” (K9 Ventures)
“The Future of Digital Photography” (PCWorld)

The list of headlines like these goes on and on.

When I was invited to name the company, then named Refocus Imaging, I could tell this was going to be a special project. The clients were fantastically brilliant, and there was great chemistry between us. My enthusiasm, which typically runs on the high side, was boiling over.

I was giddy over the opportunity to name the future of photography. Photography has always been near and dear to my heart: My father is a retired photographer and cinematographer, and I take pictures, too. I studied optics in college under David G. Stork, and, at Landor, named other photography technology (like Photoshop Lightroom and HP Instant Share). 

I can’t go into details about the strategy or alternative names I developed for Lytro, but I can say the project was dreamy from start to finish. Charles Chi, Lytro’s Executive Chairman, feels the same:

“Anthony was a pleasure to work with.  Very professional and effective.  I highly recommend him and would work with him again.”

Thank you, Lytro, for engaging me on this amazing assignment!

And congratulations to the Lytro team for their continuing success.


UPDATE: July 8, 2011

The gratitude I expressed above is actually incomplete. Until now, I couldn't reveal my partner on the Lytro branding project. Now I can say, it’s Sequence Branding who hired Operative Words to create the name, Lytro. Sequence developed the brand strategy, the kick-ass logo and look and feel system, and the admirable tagline "Picture Revolution" for the company now known as Lytro.

Thank you, Sequence, for inviting me to collaborate with you on this once-in-a-lifetime assignment!

- Anth

Business People are People

You are who you are. And when set foot into the office, you are still who you are.

Yet I've heard it said time and again that naming a business-to-business product is fundamentally different than naming a business-to-consumer product. The conventional wisdom is that b2b names should be more functional and descriptive. B2c names have permission to be more creative.

Hogwash.

It’s my belief that b2b and b2c distinctions are false dichotomies, and all branding is really b2p: business-to-people. Because at the end of the day – and in the morning and all times in-between – all business people are people.

Our brains don’t change when we act as consumers for our companies versus ourselves. The specific criteria for choosing one product over another are certainly different depending on the situation – routers and breakfast cereals are selected for different reasons – but our decision-making rationale and irrationale are the same.

Consider these brand names ostensibly for business audiences. I worked on all except BlackBerry.

BlackBerry: This great name, created by Lexicon where I used to work, proves that a name can be utterly irrational, yet beloved by brow-furrowing businesspeople and bureaucrats the world over. A blackberry is not intrinsically serious, yet the product named after one is. [Note to RIM and Landor: Drop the inter-cap B. It serves no purpose except to distract.]

Yum!: A perfect name for a fast food holding company. I worked on creative for this Pepsico spin-off back at Landor, and Yum was one of the names on my list. At the time (1997), Yum was liked by the client but only enough to be chosen as the spin-off's ticker symbol. A more serious, client-developed name was instead adopted for launch: Tricon. (“KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell: get it!?”). Fortunately, the ill-chosen Tricon was tossed when the company bought Long John Silver’s and A&W. That’s when Yum! was adopted as the company name, replacing the mildly nefarious and unappetizing Tricon.

Snapdragon: Business people make decisions rationally, right? And engineers might be the most rational of all, right? Then how to explain the success of a wild-blue, irrational name for a microprocessor called Snapdragon? When at Landor, I directed the naming of this chipset for Qualcomm and wrote the product tagline, “Imagine Your Surprise”. The idea was to create a name that would reflect the amazing products engineers could design and build with this breakthrough, multi-function system-on-a-chip. A Snapdragon is a flower and as such has nothing to do with semiconductors. But in the context of a chipset, it sounds fast and powerful, driven by associations with “snap” and “dragon”. Snapdragon is a non-linear name that nonetheless appeals to the most linear thinkers.

Bracket: Named by Operative Words, Bracket is a business that helps pharmaceutical clients run clinical trials more effectively and efficiently. It eschews a functional name for one that hints at strength, support and precise delineation. Though just launched, the name has been well-received by Bracket’s pharma clients.

Corporate Express pens: This fascinating assignment required renaming pens for Corporate Express, one of the world’s largest b2b office supply companies (it was recently bought by Staples). These pens had generic names (e.g. ballpoint stick pen, ballpoint retractable pen with rubber grip, etc.) and competed against known product brands like BIC. Leading the project at Landor, I recommended we think of the business customer in the moment of purchase, browsing these pens in the hefty Corporate Express catalog. What would appeal in that moment?

Disappointingly, the client rejected the idea of naming the pens after cocktails (“Gee, a mai tai [highlighter] does sound pretty good about now”), so other solutions were adopted: Exclaim! (highlighter), Gridline (mechanical pencil), Pinwheel (stick pen with spiral pattern on grip), Icebreaker (transparent pen), Symmetry (grip pen), Center Stage (white board marker), Fluent (smooth writing pen), Silhouette (contoured pen) and Motif (retractable pen). The client said that after the pen names changed, sales of those pens immediately increased by “double digits”. If ever there’s a testament to the power of a creative name for business audiences, that is it.

Creative names like these demonstrate that just because your product is intended for a business audience, the product name itself does not have to be all business. Remember that all business people are just people. Develop a great name with people in mind, and it will succeed for everyone.

Bracket: The Story Behind the Name

A name should be worth a thousand words.

That is, a brand name should be able to simplify a complex set of ideas into a single word.

That was the creative challenge Operative Words faced creating a new name for a division of United BioSource, a Medco-owned company that, among other things, helps pharmaceutical companies run efficient and effective clinical trials.

Three key features of my client's organization were factored into name development: people, process and precision.

People, that is the people who work at the company, are responsible for helping solve their pharmaceutical clients clinical trial challenges; their people write the brilliant software that helps clinical trials run remarkably efficiently and effectively; and people are the ultimate beneficiaries of the company's know-how as new and better medicines are launched into the market.

Process is tantamount to the whole category of clinical trials. A clinical trial is a process, so even though process generally would not be differentiating, the articulation of my client's special brand of process could be.

Precision characterizes well-run clinical trials; it reflects research data that is complete and pinpoint accurate; and it corresponds with the carefully defined parameters of valid and projectable product studies.

Creative name development followed these paths. The ultimate name was discovered while thinking about the people who worked at UBC and how they treated their clients. I dived into the notion of support. One of my resources is a great desktop application called Word Menu. It's also available in book form, but the software let's you do things that you can't do with a book.

Word Menu lists words and their definitions in categories. So if you look under 'fish', you'll find a list of different types of fish. If you look up 'action words', you'll find dozens of those. It's quite handy.

Typing in 'support' -- a key attribute of my client -- into Word Menu's search box returned 490 results, each of which was an entry or definition that included the word 'support'. In that list, I found 'bracket'.

Brackets do indeed provide support. But the word 'bracket' says more than that. A good name like Bracket is polysemous, it has many meanings.  Brackets provide support, and, as symbols, they are endemic in clinical trial reports. Brackets are used to indicate subsets; they delineate and thus suggest precision. The word 'bracket' sounds smart and strong.  And, as a real word, it's easy to relate to and understand, unlike some of my client's competitors who have Latinate coined names that are alien and institutional.

Miraculously, Bracket was also available as a trademark.

The denotations and connotations of Bracket are perfect for a company that wants to reinforce precision and support. It demonstrates that a name with many meanings will ultimately fit one company perfectly when presented in a real-world business context.

Bracket illustrates that just one name can be worth a thousand words.