Existing Name vs. New Name

Whether the NameStormers are engaged in a naming contract for a Fortune 500 company or a startup, existing or potential brand equity is always a consideration. Listen to this week’s episode of “Naming in an AI Age” to learn about the differences between a Branded House and House of Brands, brand naming in the context of the high-end auto industry, and the value of name testing. When considering how to best leverage brand equity as you work to develop a name make sure you consider the advantages of external research and reach out to NameStormers if you have more questions!

Episode Nine of “Naming in an AI Age” Podcast  

Adelaide Brown: 

Hi Mike. Um, welcome listeners to another episode of “Naming in an AI Age” with your NameStormers team, we are here and as promised, this week we are gonna be talking a little bit more about the marketing side of things. So, when clients come to us with significant brand equity which many of the clients we’ve talked to or engaged with are very large, very brand equity-heavy, rich companies. Um, so when they come to us and they ask us about developing an existing, developing their existing name or further exploring the development of a new name. So, we have Mike here to talk with us a little bit about this dynamic. Um, and we’ll just jump right into it if that’s okay with you, Mike.  

Mike Carr: 

Let’s do it.  

Adelaide Brown: 

So, when you have clients who have an established brand name, um, some of these just larger companies, Fortune 500s, how do you recommend naming for potentially a sub-brand or a new product launch? Um, can you walk me through the different layers of the master brand, sub-brand and then house versus, um, the other kind of brand name?  

Mike Carr: 

Sure. So, one of the considerations strategically that I think anybody that’s got a well-known brand out there is can you extend it, right? Can you use it on more and more products, services, whatever it is you’re doing. And that obviously leverages the years of awareness and all the brand preference you’ve built around that brand and the schools of thought and the questions that clients have asked us before have to do, well if I extend it into a new area where we maybe don’t have the same old plated product yet, am I running the risk of tarnishing my brand there? And as a result, it tarnishes my brand everywhere, right? So, a great example many, many years ago was Tylenol was tainted and it, it affected, I think it was Johnson and Johnson that had the Tylenol brand, it affected their reputation, potentially adversely. Now they handled the situation very well and they, they pulled it off all the shelves and they did a lot of other things that really bolstered the reputation of Johnson and Johnson; J and J as a company that put customers first.  

But you always run that risk, right? So, one of the considerations is if I’m going to extend my brand to new areas, do we have the product and service offerings that are of the same caliber and quality and vetting, uh, before we put our brand name on there? And so, we’ve had clients come to us and say, well, let’s have a different name for a while until we’re sure this new product’s gonna be well received or this new service really delivers and then we’ll, we’ll use the new brand name on it. And that’s great. The other thing of course you have to do is remember legal availability, right? You may have legal rights, and we run into this all the time with our global clients that have different, different, uh, goods and services description in their trademark applications in different countries. And so, while they may have permission and their, their, the broadness of their goods and services description in the US may be fine to extend this name into other spaces, in certain countries, they weren’t able to do that.  

And so, you can’t automatically assume just because you have this brand name and sort of, you’re sort of using it in this one space and there may be a, an adjacent space you wanna move into. Well, often you don’t have the legal rights to do that in all these countries or maybe even in the US if you’re just a domestic, so that’s something else to check is do you have the legal availability? Now, you asked several other questions as part of that, like the difference between a house of brands versus a branded house strategy. You know, how many levels of branding may be too much or beneficial? We can get into all this stuff if you want to, but Adelaide, if you want me to focus on one thing that you think would be the of greatest value to listeners or the viewers, I’m happy to do that.  

Adelaide Brown: 

Yeah. Just for new listeners, I think let’s explore, I think one of the first meetings we had when I was first hired, was an explanation of that “branded house” versus “house of brands.” So, I’d love for you to just give a brief overview of that for, to provide a little foundation or context for our discussion.  

Mike Carr: 

I would say historically, house of brands approach before there was all this noise and clutter was the preferred approach, right? And so that’s the Procter and Gamble map model, and a lot of other companies too where that you have very distinct different brands in your portfolio. So, you might have Tide detergent and Cheer detergent and you segment and you market those very differently from one another, but they’re really both from Procter and Gamble and consumers don’t necessarily even know that or care. And so, what it gives you the ability to do is develop very different messaging and a very different story behind multiple brands in the same category so that collectively you can have a greater share and perhaps drive greater margins. The challenge with that approach is it’s very expensive and it’s very difficult in today’s world to gain any awareness just for one new brand name.  

And so, when you try to be, when you try to launch, you know, multiple new brand names in different categories and you only have one big bucket of brand dollars to spend, you end up fragmenting and diluting your brand building efforts across many disparate, you know, brands. And so, the other, the other strategy is sort of this idea that, look, we have this, this branded house, we have this master brand, if you will, uh, that we put on everything. And so, HP is a good example of this. Years ago, Hewlett Packard, HP had what I would call more of a house of brand strategy. You know, they had the laser jet printers and first and foremost you were promoting laser jet. Microsoft did the same thing. You know, you had, you had Word and you had PowerPoint. And then what sort of evolved is that, well now all of a sudden Microsoft is at center stage or HP is at center stage.  

So, you have an HP printer and uh, the branding’s built around, well, it’s an HP printer, not as a laser jet printer, it’s an HP printer and it just happens to be a laser jet or just happens to be an office pro or whatever it is. And so, it allows you to put all that brand investment behind one master brand and sort of build that reputation up around that and gives you more trust and more credibility as you take that brand, you know, into new spaces. The only problem, well, I shouldn’t say the only problem, one of the problems with that is, is if you have well-entrenched competitors that have rifle shot names or brands that are very focused on a compelling benefit in that category, and then you try to go in with a master brand that’s sort of this broad brush brand that means many different things, it kills you. And a great example I think is high-end sports cars. You know, you got names like Ferrari and Lamborghini that are very associated with incredible speed, incredible performance, and aesthetic that’s just beautiful. And then maybe you have more of what I would call a, a master brand that spans many different types of automobiles, like Honda. Well, I don’t think Honda could effectively take that brand into that Ferrari/Lamborghini space because Honda means lots of other things, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean high performance and speed and just uber design, and so if Honda were to get into that space, they would probably be much better served with a brand-new name that sort of had the same cool factor and the same design appeal that a Lamborghini or Ferrari and those kinds of things had. 

Adelaide Brown: 

That makes a ton of sense. So, if a company like say HP or high-end automotive company came to you and were asking you to just assess their brand’s current name, how do you go about that process? How do you potentially determine whether a name is successful or unsuccessful and whether it should be further evolved or if a new name completely should be developed on behalf of the, on behalf of the company?  

Mike Carr: 

Well, you do, you do some research, right? So, you go out there and you try to assess what the brand stand for today in the minds of the customers in the marketplace, right? Are there certain attributes that are automatically associated with it in terms of performance or efficiency or speed or ease of use? Whatever those are, those tend to be fairly universal. And, and in some cases if that’s already the association with the brand and if it’s a very positive association, you can sort of suss out that yeah, they, there is permission to sort of take that same equity cause it’s so well known, it’s so trusted, and move it into some adjacent spaces. But I don’t think you, you can make that assessment internally. I think you actually have to go out and talk to not just current customers, but potential future customers.  

And then you also need to look at the competitive set, right? So, you need to take, take a look at, well, okay, if we’re moving into this space, has someone else already claimed those, those words or those perceptions where it would be very difficult for us to sort of steal those from them. Like even though we’re well known for this in this one space over here, when we try to extend the brand into a related space, if we have an entrenched competitor, we may have to pivot and try to come up with something that’s a little bit different. It may still be around one of those attributes, it may still be around the ease of use, but it may be more refined, right? That not only is our product or services are they easy to use, but what we really focus on is minimizing the number of clicks to get to a result, right? That there may be other folks out there that quote, it’s very easy to use too, it just takes you more time, right? It’s still a very intuitive interface, if you’re talking about a piece of software or an app. But it might take you 10 or 15 clicks to actually accomplish the task. Whereas what we’re all about is not just making it easy but making it much more efficient and much quicker; so, where we can get done in five clicks. So there may need to be a refinement of that strategy based upon where you’re moving and who’s already there and what they’re known for and where the SWPT where the, where the SWOT analysis, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats sort of reveals that there’s that white space that’s, that’s the vulnerability that you can go after and you may be able to go after that with your existing brand or you may decide, no, we really need a new brand there.  

Adelaide Brown: 

And you mentioned this briefly in what you were talking about the not being able to rely on personal or internal opinion, but going out and determining whether or not a name is good via external testing, which we typically do testing after developing a name for, um, a company but have conducted testing to compare a current name with other names. So, including their current name in the market research testing. And you think that’s a really reliable option? 

Mike Carr: 

I think we’ll have to have a whole separate session, maybe a series of podcasting sessions on the mechanics and the tactics used in in testing names. Cause there, there are a lot of ways to do it incorrectly and there are a few ways to do it right, and it really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with that test. I just think that in general though, it’s very hard for anyone that’s in the weeds, you know, that’s part of the organization that’s providing the products and the services, to think about the name the same way their customers, their consumers think about the names. And so, getting that external perspective almost always yield some insights that were surprises, they might be pleasant surprises, or they might be things that cause a directional change, right? That we, we thought we could sort of roll it out this way with this type of story, this type of messaging. But now that we sort of understand what the hot buttons are out there, we really think there might be a more refined or different focus that’s gonna yield a lot more resonance with our customers.  

Adelaide Brown: 

Well, that seems almost like a perfect segue into next week’s topic. Um, thank you so much Mike for joining me for this conversation. Next week we will be talking more about the system one/system two research and some of the caveats, some of the tactics, um, that really, the mechanics that come with that process. Um, so you won’t wanna miss this next week’s episode. I’ll see you then, Mike. 

Mike Carr: 

Thanks, Adelaide. See ya.