Name Recognition

Do people remember your company and its products? The name game isn't as easy to play as it looks—and not playing it right could be the difference between success and failure.

March 2006 | by Phil Bolsta

William Lozito of Strategic Name Development didn’t cook up the Davanni’s name, but he has worked for another food-service business. Lozito helped G&K Services come up with the “ProSura” name for its food-service garment and safety products.

Photograph by Bill Kelley

The Game of the Name

When a company is seeking to create a moniker more memorable than “Smith & Associates” or “ESR Enterprises,” it might be tempted to go into do-it-yourself mode to avoid the cost of hiring a naming firm or branding agency, which typically runs between $20,000 and $100,000. Hey, how hard can it be?

“There’s an idea that it’s a vending machine, where you go to an agency and get handed a great name,” says Lee Thomas, Yamamoto Moss’s director of content strategy. “But there’s a huge amount of process involved. It’s incredibly difficult to come up with names that don’t sound stale, that will be competitive in the marketplace, that don’t have other connotations and meanings, and that are legally viable—dealing with the trademark implications alone is a very time-consuming step.”

Considering there are nearly 12 million active trademarks around the world, dreaming up a name you can own is a major challenge. “The big rub is that a lot of the names we come up with aren’t going to be available,” says William Lozito, founder and president of Bloomington-based Strategic Name Development. “There are in the neighborhood of 260,000 trademark applications a year . . . So it’s no surprise that, in many categories, a lot of good names have already been registered.”

Experts also say that an in-house naming project can be undermined by egos, politics, and emotional attachments. One of the most frustrating obstacles for many naming agencies is “the Thanksgiving table.” “That’s the one we dread,” says Levin with a laugh. “It’s when the CEO gathers the family around the table, and Grandma decides to tweak the name. We always try to go to legal before Thanksgiving!”

Even the perfect name may still leave customers perfectly confused. In 1983, when Roger Schelper, Mick Stenson, and Bob Carlson decided to aggressively grow their eight-year-old pizza-and-hot-hoagie restaurant business, they were dismayed to learn they didn’t have exclusive rights to the name Pontillo’s. Paging through an Italian dictionary, the word d’avanti—“ahead” or “the leader”—jumped out at them. They Americanized the word to Davanni’s and tested it in focus groups. “People started describing exactly what we were,” Schelper recalls. “Family, casual, not too expensive. Wow! It was perfect.”

Instead, it turned out to be the perfect nightmare. As soon as the signs out front changed from Pontillo’s to Davanni’s, sales dropped 11 percent the first week and 15 percent the next. “Your pizza isn’t as good as when you were Pontillo’s,” read one customer comment card. “I don’t like those new guys who bought the company,” said another.