Margaret Mariani

7 Quick Tips on Creating a Lasting Brand Name

Margaret — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:15:23 +0000

7 Tips on How to Create a Lasting Brand Name:

Tips on how to create a memorable and effective brand name. Especially useful tips for bloggers, as your blog is a brand in itself.

1) Brainstorm: Start by brainstorming a list of keywords that relate to your blog, website or company. Write down adjectives, emotions, nouns. What kind of content will you be providing your end user? What do you want your end user to feel like after experiencing your site?

2) Check out the thesaurus: Play around with your brainstorm list to find words that resonate and clearly communicate the feeling or message you want to convey. Following are my two favorite thesaurus sites: Thesaurus 1 and Thesaurus 2.

3) Get friend feedback: Run some ideas by group of trusted people to get quick, topline reaction. Article recommends finding the best Scrabble player in your circle and get him/her involved. I recommend tapping into a brilliant copywriter friend who works in advertising.

4) Let loose: Get goofy and compound words (Facebook, YouTube), blend together words (Microsoft, Netscape), add affixes (Friendster, coComment), make up words (Squidoo, Odeo) or use phrases (StumbleUpon, GoToMeeting).

5) Plot along a continuum: Make a continuum where on the lefthand side it’s “obscure” and on the the righthand side it’s “apparent.” Start plotting the names and words along this continuum.

6) Cull Down: Start culling down the list to find the words/phrases/names that most clearly articulate what you’re trying to offer (actual product or emotional benefit). The more obscure the name the more investing you will have to do to generate awareness and understanding. The more apparent the name, the more boring and lackluster your brand can seem. Whichever direction you decide to go along the continuum, be sure that there is some kind of connection between the name of the blog and what the blog is about. Nina Beckhardt, president of The Naming Group, an agency whose employees have crafted names for Walmart, Target and Puma wisely says, “Generally, the more of a disconnect there is between the name of a blog and what the blog’s about, the greater the chance it will not succeed.” Whatever name you choose, make sure that it works for you and that you love it.

7) Research: Double and triple check to make sure the word/s or phrase/s you choose don’t mean something you don’t want them to mean in another language. Also, do a domain search to see if your url is taken.

Three Types of Brand Names:

Empty Vessel: Obscure brand names (such as completely made-up words like Kodak or Squidoo, words in other languages such as Hulu which roughly translates both to “holder of precious things” and “interactive recording” in Mandarin or words whose meaning is so obscure that people interpret it as an invented word such as Google which is sparked from “googol”–the name for the number consisting of a one followed by a hundred zeros).
Descriptive: Brand names that immediately convey information about what you do. They are simple, intuitive and help consumers easily identify the mandate of a blog or company.
Suggestive: Brand names that indirectly allude to the values for which the brand would like to be known (i.e. Apple).

Top 25 Taglines

Margaret — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:25:11 +0000

Forbes has just announced the 25 all-time most memorable taglines. Judges were a group of 10 CMOs and advertising experts.

Being Philly-born, I’m proud that N.W. Ayer & Son was so wonderfully represented.

The List with Year of Inception:

BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine (1971)
Nike: Just Do It (1988)
American Express: Don’t Leave Home Without It. (1975)
Avis: We Try Harder. (1963)
California Milk Processor Board: Got Milk? (1993)
Mastercard: There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard. (1997)
Apple: Think Different. (1997)
U.S. Marines: The Few. The Proud. The Marines. (9176)
McDonald’s: You Deserve a Break Today. (1971)
DeBeers: A Diamond is Forever. (1944)
Miller Light: Tastes Great, Less Filling. (late ’70s)
Verizon: Can You Hear Me Now? (2002)
US Department of Transportation: Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk. (1990)
Timex: It Takes a Lickin’, But Keeps on Tickin’ (1952)
Chevy: Like a Rock. (1991)
Yellow Pages: Let Your Fingers Do The Walking. (1964)
Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef? (1984)
United Negro College Fund: A Mind is A Terrible Thing to Waste. (1972)
M&Ms: The milk chocolate melts in your mouth and not in your hand. (1954)
GE: We Bring Good Things to Life. (1972)
Hallmark: When you care to send the very best. (1944)
Dunkin Donuts: It’s Time to Make the Donuts. (1982)
Virginia Slims: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. (1968)
U.S. Army: Be all you can be. (1980)
AT&T: Reach out and touch somebody. (1979)

Wonder if consumers would rank these taglines in a similar fashion?

I Live To Be Frightened

Margaret — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:47:26 +0000

Some excellent strat fodder from Seth Godin:

“New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, “I’m going to post this.” If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

“Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time” is a strategy. Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics. In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.

The next time you find yourself spending 8 hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.”