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

Roark is the heroic architect in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead. “I assume that everybody’s read it,” Kramer says. “All architects had to have read it. Still, we get a lot of people asking, ‘Who is Howard? He never seems to be around.’ Our phone message says that he’s in New York marketing, and he’ll be back on Friday.”

Experiential. Think Web browsers like Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Safari. They all tap into what people experience—searching, exploring, navigating—while using the product.

Invented. The uniqueness of an invented name has numerous advantages. It belongs to no other product or company; it can be typed into a Web browser and take the viewer directly to a company’s site. But uniqueness can also mean unfamiliarity, a lack of clarity about a company’s message or product. An invented name, then, often needs a measure of market familiarity to be successful.

Alternative Living Services, a Milwaukee-based provider of residential housing for dementia patients and their families, asked Nametag to help determine if it needed to change its name. Levin and Young’s research included Equitest, a proprietary tool that measures the “equity” of a brand—its meaning, its perception in the marketplace, and how well it fits with the message the company is trying to convey.

Alternative Living Services executives were dismayed to discover that the general public viewed the company as a provider of housing for people pursuing “alternative lifestyles,” an interpretation that kept prospective customers from even calling them. Still, the company’s executive team wanted to retain the root of the name, because the 25-year-old business had established some brand equity.

The name that emerged, Alterra Healthcare, is a nod to the past, but it also implies “alternate,” which means a new and better way to provide care. Plus, the “al-” portion of the name ties to Alzheimer’s, while “-terra” evokes foundations, land, and grounding. The cherry on top is that the new name will continue to appear near the top of the Yellow Pages listings.

Evocative or emotional. The most creative names are the most unexpected—and also the riskiest, which makes them more difficult to sell up the ladder to company leaders. The name “Banana Republic” had nothing to do with clothing, but it did the heavy lifting of differentiating the store in a crowded marketplace, suggesting an out-of-the-ordinary irreverence.