Mould Juice and the secrets to branding and choosing the right brand name.
What’s important is not necessarily having a good brand name, it’s just not having a bad one.
Mould Juice. Not the most appealing name for a product, but that was what Alexander Fleming was initially going to call Penicillin.
If he’d stuck with the name Mould Juice it wouldn’t have saved any fewer lives, but the fact is, we are affected by names of things. So if you are launching a new company or product it’s important to choose the right one. Actually, let me re-phrase that, it’s important not to choose the wrong one.
Think of all the stores and brands named after their founders: John Lewis, Sainsbury’s, Levi’s, Kelloggs. They’re not very interesting, but if the product or service is good, it doesn’t matter.
Take Carphone Warehouse. Carphones had their heyday in the 1980s and they haven’t sold carphones for years, but the brand sensibly stuck with the name. It had become synonymous good value phones available on a choice of networks. People had forgotten the meaning of the name and just it as a brand.
Of course, there is always the unfortunate situation when your brand name takes on a new meaning in people’s heads. No surprise that Ayds slimming chocolates didn’t last.
CADABRA AND SIXTH DIMENSION — TWO OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS BRANDS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU KNEW.
Now as you struggle to think of a name for your new brand or service, you can feel reassured that two of the world’s biggest brands also struggled with the same issue.
Cadabra and Sixth Dimension are not as you might think, pop groups from the 1980s. They were in fact, the provisional names for Amazon and Nike respectively.
Cadabra was Jeff Bezos first choice. It was intended as a reference to the word ‘abracadabra’ (as in, magic), implying you can have whatever you wished for you could have. However, someone pointed out that if people misheard it, they might think it was cadaver. And so in a puff of smoke, Cadabra vanished.
In those days website listings were alphabetised, so Bezos decided he wanted a name that started with ‘A’. As he went through the dictionary and stopped on Amazon. The largest river on earth; the perfect name for what they planned to be the largest bookshop on earth.
Like Amazon, Nike wasn’t the first name they came up with for the brand.
Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, liked ‘Dimension Six’, but no one else in the team was particularly keen on this. The other ideas on the table were ‘Peregine’ after the falcon and ‘Bengal’ after the tiger, obviously both influenced by the ‘Puma’ sports brand.
With their first shipment of shoes going out the next day they needed a decision — fast!
Jeff Johnson who ran the company’s East Coast Factory suggested ‘Nike’. He’d read in an in-flight magazine that lots of great brand names had no more than two syllables and at least one ‘exotic’ letter or sound in them with a Z, X, or K, such as Kleenex and Xerox.
So when he saw the word Nike and then also found out it was the Greek for ‘winged goddess of victory’ he was convinced he’d found the name they were looking for.
However, Knight wasn’t so keen.
“I guess we’ll go with the Nike thing for a while,” Knight said. “I don’t like any of them, but I guess that’s the best of the bunch.”
They already had the famous Nike Swoosh, designed by graphic design student Carolyn Davidson for just $35 (although she did get paid in Nike shares later on!).
Knight wasn’t particularly enamoured with that either: “Well, I don’t love it, but maybe it will grow on me.”
The question is, would it still have been successful as a brand if he’d chosen another name? Maybe not if they’d plumped for ‘Dimension Six’, but if he’d been a little less imaginative and a little more egotistical and named the brand ‘Knight, I think they would still have been just as successful.
How many people are aware that Nike means winged goddess of victory. Not many. Knight follows the same brand rules that Jeff Johnson read about, but what’s important is, it’s not trying too hard to be cool, unlike ‘Dimension Six’. Dimension Six might have been a good name in the 1980’s, but it would have felt dated very quickly.
Although your brand name doesn’t have to be exciting, it does have to be distinctive. This is something many current startups don’t seem to have taken into account when thinking of names for their brands. They all seem to use the same formula. Think of the category of your brand and then one of the following suffixes: ‘ify’, ‘io’ or ‘ly’. Instead of Nike, we would have, Sportify, Sportio or Sportly.
At the end of the day, a brand is more than just a name. It’s about a customers gut feeling about your product, service or company.
Just don’t choose a name that could change a customers gut feeling like…mould juice. Definitely enough to change the feeling in anyone’s gut.
