ON BEHALF OF THE COMPANY

On an increasingly competitive market a well chosen name may help to better start out a business or launch a brand; or, on the contrary, if it is badly chosen, on the very spur of the moment or lacking inspiration, the name may as well burry down one business.

Coming up with the right name for one’s business or product is highly essential in brand making. This is far from being something to be treated superficially, nor is it wise to rush into making a decision in this respect just because some headers need to be printed or the website is ready to be launched. A company’s name cannot be identical with or similar to another one, it must necessarily bear a distinctive mark. From the costs and benefits point of view, the name is one of the most effective marketing tools. Cristian Paul, Creative Director and partner by Brandient, claims that the name is an essential element of brand differentiation and that it may have a decisive influence on the brand’s evolution, especially along the first period of its life cycle. ‘An unique, memorable name may have a considerably great impact on people and may strongly seize the consumer’s conscience right from its launching, whereas a wrong name may cause considerable ‘maintenance’ costs. This is how names such as Novensys and Zuzu have had a great, instantaneous impact and are now on the list of top preferences, and all this with lesser communication costs than the competitors’ ones. On an increasingly competitive market a well chosen name may help to better start out a business or launch a brand; or, on the contrary, if it is badly chosen, on the very spur of the moment or lacking inspiration, the name may as well burry down one business. “On deeming their trade offer as superior, many businessmen think that choosing a good name (and generally o good brand identity) is definitely something useless, but what they fail to realize is that such a name may increase even more their market success”, states Stefan Liute, Strategy Director by Grapefruit brand consulting company. The name of a company tells about what that company is dealing with, what the company is like, the way people in that company think, or about the way they act. This is the shortest company profile possible, the name is thought of as identifying with the company’s identity and it is very important since this is a message that can never be missed by the clients’ or collaborators’ radar. ‘The name is something that one simply cannot ignore. As compared to people, a company is looking for an unique name. By different means one manages to avoid the situation of having two Mary ‘girls’ by the same name in the same class. There may be, of course, one Mary selling car spare parts and another one specialized in soft-ware. But they are studying in two different high schools and nobody can ever take one for the other. The name is the essential feature of the naming process, an ‘only if’ condition usually giving a hard time, but it also opens opportunities, says Bogdan Branzas, General Manager by Branzas consulting and design company. But what exactly does naming stand for? We may define naming as a professional discipline dealing with choosing the best names for various entities. Subjects of the naming process may be persons, companies or any other types of organization or human groups, products and services or even new ideas and notions. If it is well done, naming may put together linguistic, semantic, marketing, psychological and juridical elements. We must also clearly differentiate brand from naming, but one must also understand that a complete branding process shall always include naming too. Any brand in the world asks for a name. ‘Brand is a package of perceptions, values and expectations that we are attributing to a particular company or product. The name is a psychological trigger activating in one’s mind this whole package of information. Company brands too may create confusions’, claims Bogdan Branzas. The brand stands for a company’s identity both on the inside and on the outside as perceived by its clients, employees, partners, by its target and shareholders. Branzas also says that these confusions between brand and naming occur rather often on the complex background of certain particular factors: a busy market, a rushed naming process or an unsuited strategy, as well as an underdeveloped brand may condemn one company to anonymousness. Should there be many competitors bearing insignificant names and little known brands it will be more than normal to confuse them.

THE SECRETS OF A GOOD NAME

When making a decision as to choosing the right name there is a series of elements to be taken into consideration in order to be able to come up with a really good name. Generally a good name is a memorable one, a nice one, reach of significations; further more, if this is a commercial name, it must be transferable (that is to have the ability to be used also by other related commercial entities), adaptable (to various tastes and cultural trends) and give the possibility to be legally defended. ‘There is no globally accepted pattern or procedure in choosing the right name (whether this already exists or it is brand new). Each naming service supplier is making use of the best suitable working procedures and is looking to engender name proposals that should comply with the specific number of performances typical of one particular project (features like those mentioned above, expressing certain notions or key-words, etc). Basically, the results of this type of procedures consists of several sets of proposals (from tens to hundreds and even thousands of proposals); of all these one eliminates until finding to the best one’, states Grapefruit representative, Stefan Liute. Cristian Paul from Brandient thinks that there is no naming formula guaranteed for success. ‘Some people talk about systems resulting in the creation of thousands of names and about elaborate, sophisticated composition methods, but if asked which are exactly the names having resulted of all these methods, their answer shall certainly be very poor and irrelevant’. When creating a name the elements that one must take into consideration differ from one particular project to another. The features of a name depend on the perspective we are looking from to that name: linguistic (polisemy and significations in multiple languages), taxonomic (name types) and so on and so forth. Cristian Paul claims that a good brand name must be unique, memorable, legally available and in consent with the brand’s strategy and positioning. ‘This may sound simple, but in practice things are quite different. In our business we say very often that ‘all the good names have already been taken’ – as a matter of fact almost all the words in the English dictionary already exist as brands. This situation has also a positive side: an invented name is by definition an unique one, never having been used before. On receiving the brief for a consumption credit company Brandient had to make reference to the word ‘credit’ but also to come up with something unique. Thus came Credisson, a name that shortly became well known – which contributed to the full success of the business and resulted in tens of millions of EUR for the company’s owners in no more than 3 years’, states Cristian Paul.

NAMING IN ROMANIA

After 1990 in Romania we started to approach branding unprofessionally, at random. We tried to copy patterns from outside the country of from our competitors. ‘That was a typical stage in the economic development of a country. We are now facing a new development stage. The market is already starting to have increased demands. We are looking for names able to inspire, to work on several comprehension levels. In time there shall be need for rigorous naming processes, based on strategy and creativity’, thinks Bogdan Branzas. After 1990 many local companies opted for names bearing the particles ROM or RO as prefixes or suffixes, or they used to add naturally the title IMPEX to the ‘original’ name. Lately the EUR particle seems to be in top. ‘RO is not a prefix invented after the revolution. It is, paradoxically, the results of the Cold War’, says Lucian Mandruta, director by Sign Factor communication company. ‘Along the past 50 years, at the age when the Russians were starting to settle down in Romania, joint companies were founded, which used to steal everything we had good: SovRomLemn, SovRomPetrol. After 1965 the symbol of our independence was to give up on Sov and to turn our attention to the West. We only kept ROM or RO from the old SovRom. One of the first examples in this way is MAN licence process, which in Romania resulted in the creation of the Roman truck brand. After ’90 this trend started to increase – the newly born businessmen wanted to prove that they were part of an European system (even though this was essentially a lie) or that they had brought into Romania from abroad the genuine quality’, also says Mandruta. Grapefruit representative, Stefan Liute, thinks that tendencies in the post-revolutionary commercial naming are discrete and synthetic indicators of the cultural context typical of the business owners and of their public. ‘The most frequent morphemes (the smallest meaningful word particles) in the names of the Romanian companies reflect the attitudes that their owners had been suspecting to be advantages in the competition fight (in terms of rational or emotional benefits). ROM or RO say ‘we are Romanians’ and ‘we don’t sale our country’, that is - nationalism. IMPEX says ‘we buy and sell anything, we are like chameleons in these rapidly changing times’, ‘we are entrepreneurs, we are being pragmatic’, or even ‘we have cheap products from China, Turkey, Arabia, etc’, while EURO obviously shows the common interest for the access (as a matter of fact a much delayed return) to the imaginary European paradise, probably meaning to say that ‘we are already acting like in there or we are offering something from there’. Brandient representative, Cristian Paul, says that a look in the data base of the Trade Register shows the existence of a large number of companies using names with Euro attached (11.518 companies) and that the chances for these companies to be remembered are considerably diminished. Lucian Mandruta thinks that when one lacks finances it is advisable for the name to tell something about the particular field of activity. He also settles a classification of the Romanian companies into companies that were obviously ‘baptized’ by their owner and companies that had enough power to go over this’. ‘Tricky companies that one definitely cannot trust bear names like Vasilica Impex Cominpex SRL and that is very good, they don’t need any branding at all, all they need is a tolerant lawyer. Engineer companies bear names like ‘Somebody’ System SRL or Ionescu Tech SA. They don’t sell imagination, so one has to find out this right from the title. ‘Tough’ companies are simply formed of initials: GXS, AGS, TTC, ETC, whereas the poet companies inspire from the mandatory school literature – see the Satiricon of Dinescu. The best company names are those not deriving from anywhere at all, but they resemble something’, also adds Mandruta.

NAMING AND UE

EU integration shall result in new foreign companies entering the Romanian market, whereas certain local companies shall quit the business environment. Companies having large markets, starting from a major town to a particular region or to the country as a whole, and especially those companies whose business pattern is based on a major marketing or corporate communication element, shall need strong brand names. So shall companies aiming to regional or continental development. ‘Some companies may change their own name or the name of some brands of their portfolio. The reasons behind this kind of changes may be the market crushing (here or elsewhere in Europe) with competitors bearing identical or similar names, this to such a degree that the Law Court may judge it as originating confusions among clients’, states Stefan Liute by Grapefruit. Lucian Mandruta states that the moment of Romanian EU integration shall be a great challenge for the Romanian branding. ‘It will be high time for the name to really start communicating something, for it to start being easily readable and comprehensible in a world wide language. And it must also stop being necessarily legally registered in the EU. This is the most expensive and difficult thing to accomplish.’ Increasing competitiveness in Romania or penetration by the Romanian companies of the more competitive business environment from the outside world shall generally surely result in an increasing significance of naming and branding. Brand is, in fact, a mechanism meant to win the competition for the hearts and minds of the people around. The more numerous and well trained the competition is the more one has to sharpen the guns. ‘The name has the same importance for all the companies. But its significance may vary according to the degree of development of each company and to the type of market on which it is acting. I think that many major companies on the Romanian market shall have to work more on their brand and make it stronger in order to successfully develop on the European market. Should this process include a name change this shall depend from one situation to another. There are many factors that may induce a company into changing its name. The market, the competition, the brand and geographical indication safety system, the client profile, the internal development and the aspirations for the future are only a few of them’, explains Bogdan Branzas. On his turn, Cristian Paul from Brandient says that ‘EU integration shall also mean increasing risks and opportunities. A professionally created name has all the chances to make the product or the organization stand out to a larger target, with lower cultural risks, while problem names shall disfavor the businessmen’.

GUIDE: 5 STEPS TO CHOOSING A GOOD NAME

1. Analyzing the competition – overall market research in order to have a clear image of the competition and of the elements needed for a sure and complete success.
2. Positioning, indicators – positioning is given by the position of the company on the market and by the company’s features, starting from target group and verbal style to favorite pet. The indicators are selection criteria serving to analyze one particular name. Significance, meaning, humanity, force – these are all words usually and very often considered as relevant indicators.
3. Creation, development – lists are drawn up containing thousands of names. But the key lies in the successive selection processes. The selection is based on the indicators and on the previously established positioning. The names are put down on the paper, cut to pieces, buried and then finally one part of them are chosen for the short list.
4. Legal testing – for the names on the short list one goes after obtaining registered brand on the target markets. It is extremely important and also difficult to obtain legal protection for your name. Invented names, for example, can be more easily protected by the Law than those chosen from the dictionary, but they lack the meaning. Getting to a sensible balance is crucial at this particular stage.
5. Testing in the real world – the chosen names are being used in virtual advertising campaigns, they are linguistically tested in focus-groups, in market surveys. Positioning and selection criteria are always taken into consideration. All these tests result in choosing names without negative meanings (linguistic or otherwise), which inspire, communicate on several levels and have several positive meanings. And it is at this stage that we make the final selection of the names.

CASE STUDY – HOW DOES A NAME COME TO LIFE?

One year ago the GECAD group began a re-branding process which finally resulted in choosing three brands for the three companies of the group: Avangate for GECAD ePayment, Sentinet for GECAD NET and Axigen for GECAD Technologies. AXIGEN is an electronic e-mail option, an e-mail server (that system organizing the flow of e-mails in and out of one company / organization). It was designed in order to facilitate a major mail flow. Choosing this name was a real challenge for the whole team and it took several months before it was accomplished. Long lists were drawn up containing Latin names, Greek names, names of constellations, boats or simply invented names. For example, another name that was the second on the preference list, after Axigen, and represented a real competition for this was Alliat. The main reason that stood behind the decision to drop this term out was the difficulty in writing it down, starting from the spoken word in any language, and especially in Romanian. A strong name was needed, one that should represent the whole team. In choosing AXIGEN one mainly took into consideration the values of the products to be launched on the market, the field of activity where they were going to be promoted, and also some other various criteria. The AXIGEN brand was intended to express technology. The name also makes you think of oxygen, the vital element for the people (such as AXIGEN is for the modern companies that cannot carry out their activity without e-mail) and also of knowledge. It was highly important to find the field www.axigen.com free so as to ensure a coherent promotion on international level. They also thought about the way that this name sounds like in other languages: in English, Spanish, German, so as not to cause any misunderstanding that should hinder the promotion. In this particular moment AXIGEN is managing the traffic of more than 300.000 electronic mails and it is globally supplied by more than 10 companies from various countries, especially from the two USA and from Europe.