[Cache – #78]
Now on sale
The fully-updated and revised second edition of Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* (*It’s what people think of you™) is now available for sale in hard copy and e-reader format. Buy the book or learn more by visiting the stunning website of lead author Ted Matthews, Founding Partner of Instinct Brand Coaches.
We’re number one
I’m very pleased to say that although it’s barely been released, the book has already hit #1 on the Globe and Mail’s list of business bestsellers.
EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT
For you, dear blog subscriber, the first of three exclusive excerpts from Chapter 15: Great Names Mean Business.
“Great names mean business – and names like Zoosk just don’t do the job. Or rather, the jobs.
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Job 2: Communicate the Brand Foundation
Before you can name something, you have to know what it is. Which means building a brand foundation for it. If you try to name your brand without first knowing what it is – without knowing what you are trying to describe – you will end up slapping together a partial brand foundation on the fly. With an incomplete understanding of your brand, there’s a very good chance you’ll end up creating a Zoosk that fails to tell your story.
Telling stories is of course the single most effective way to communicate a brand’s meaning. Compose your brand foundation with wording that sets up stakeholders to tell your stories with ease. Then, using your foundation’s language to brainstorm, arrive at a brand name with exactly the same storytelling potential. Your new, remark-able name will allow people to quickly get a sense of your brand and be in a position to tell others about it.
Just What You Need
The brand name need not reference every element of the brand foundation. You will find that some elements – the position, for example, as with Hotel Gelato – provide more fodder for naming than others. As was the case with the value brand of Canadian Tire – Canada’s largest retailer, with annual sales in the range of $10 billion. The company’s executive leadership gave us a ring after reading this book’s first edition.
Unlike several competitors, including Walmart, Canadian Tire did not have its own value brand. So it sought an in-house label to apply across a wide range of product categories. The brand position was that it would offer similar quality to the competitive national brands but at a lower price, and with fewer “bells and whistles.”
After considering hundreds of names and dozens of positioning statements, LikeWise was the choice that expressed the position most clearly, by conveying the value brand’s “like,” but not identical, qualities when compared to the national brands. The chosen positioning statement – Just what you need – reinforced the fewer-bells-and-whistles aspect of the position, and through a double entendre, tells consumers that LikeWise is exactly what they need. The name has been rolled out to hundreds of products and could eventually adorn everything from spark plugs to lawn furniture.”
NEXT WEEK: Bootylicious and BlackBerry Jam
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FREE OFFER: Get 2 friends to subscribe to Cache and receive the book’s new chapter, Great Names Mean Business, free on PDF. After your friends have subscribed, send me an email with their full names, and the chapter is yours. (andris@coinbranding.com)
