A brand name isn’t necessarily a neologism. It isn’t rare for a word to be used as a brand name (ex: Apple, Windows, Bonobo, etc.). This can lead to legal issues when this word is used by another brand for one of its products. Is this a word and therefore everybody can use it or is it a protected brand name? The general principle, known as “the Principle of Specification”, is that a word, a household name can only be…
Read more >Should you deliberately choose a bad name for your new company or product? A week or so ago a couple of friends sent me articles they had seen suggesting that it was actually a very good strategy for getting yourself noticed. The argument went that people will discuss a bad name much more than a good one and therefore get your company in the spotlight. I actually talked about this kind of thing a few weeks back: the enthusiasm with…
Read more >When it comes to naming products, subjectivity comes up an awful lot. It is easy enough to rule out the name of your new international sofa range if it means ‘yoghurt’ in Italian and even easier if it happens to be a word used as an insult or sexual term in certain countries or cultures. What makes it a more difficult decision is when you are faced with someone telling you that they see certain words in your names that…
Read more >As consumers, it is not often we stop and think about the name of a product we are buying or the company we are buying from, especially in the case of familiar brands. On reflection, and particularly taking a name out of context, we might notice some strange choices. For example, have you noticed that Christian Dior’s perfume range called ‘Poison’ is not exactly an enticing name for a liquid product? And have you ever really thought about Richard Branson’s…
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