Starting a Brand

Brand, happens to be a buzz word these days, with the world getting more and more conscious about the product they are using, and companies spending millions of dollars to promote their brand. Brand, positioning in all true sense is but a tradeoff between, the dollars the companies spend and how easily consumers associate themselves to the brand. There have been cases when companies have spent copiously on, brand building exercise to gain almost nothing except declining bottom lines on their financial statements, there have also been cases when consumers say, that the product quality speaks for itself and the companies flourish with very little or sometimes without any brand building exercise. So what should one do? How does one start a brand? The answer lies somewhere in the midway, when your brand is easy to associate for the consumers, and you push just enough to attract new consumers who can associate themselves to the brand.

So, the exercise one of starting a brand is also an answer to the question,”How to name a Brand?”

Simple, as it may appear, this is sometimes not given its due credit, and as a result the brand suffers. One must put in a good amount of time to decide the name for the brand, because, naming a brand is the first step to marketing the product.

When deciding on a name for a brand, one must consider the Retention Quotient (RQ) of the name, RQ is simply a measure of how easily people who are advertised your brand remember your brand name. Simple names are therefore preferred, like Facebook- Social networking, Caterpillar- earth moving equipments etc. Sometimes abstract names also do the trick for example- Google, Yahoo. It is strongly recommended to have a small name for your brand; too long brand names usually have a low RQ.

Second most important thing is to decide the segment your brand aims to target to, for example, brand like “Madame”, clearly shows shall be clothing line for women, so it is a perfect fit, imagine a what shall happen if a popular brand like “Mustache”, suddenly enters into a women’s clothing line? Makes little or no sense right? So it is advisable to choose an un-biased name unless you are super-sure of the fortunes of your company.

Using a fusion name, is a very common example these days, for example Wikipedia, the root word for which is the encyclopedia, which means a book that gives information about various subjects, pretty much like what Wikipedia does. The name therefore gives you an association of what the brand is, it’s a web based encyclopedia. It has been observed that short forms for example WESCO-Westinghouse Electric Corporations have a higher RQ as compared to the full forms.

Sometimes we also refer to what is known as the Attention Quotient (AQ), which is a measure of how much attention your brand name can capture, for example a brand name like “Obsession Night form Calvin Klein” shall grab more attention than other brand of perfumes, but what is next to grabbing the consumer’s attention? It is consumer’s retention. Business spend a lot on branding and branding gathers no mileage without a proper brand name, so sit-back, think-over before you decide on your brand name.