August 20, 2008
DEWmocracy Electrifies Mountain Dew's Brand Naming with Voltage
Mountain Dew Voltage has won its DEWmocracy election, handily beating proposed brand names Mountain Dew Revolution and Mountain Dew Supernova.
The DEWmocracy initiative has been a major consumer-driven campaign that collected 350,000 votes (Voltage received 42% of them). Around 1.6 million people visited the site to help design the product, watch indy movies and play games, all of which ultimately made Voltage the "people's Dew" according to one Pepsi executive.
This stuff looks pretty good although there are some bloggers who don't share my enthusiasm.
Voltage and other Mountain Dew brand extensions including Dew's Code Red, Live Wire and Baja Blast, as well as this extensive naming competition, are going to elevate the Mountain Dew brand, which is already known as the best drink to buy when studying late at night.
But this initiative is yet another indicator that some branding is going to depend more and more on social media than it has in the past.
Technorati Tags: DEWmocracy, Mountain Dew Voltage, Code Red, Live Wire, Baja Blast, Brand Name Extension, Voltage, People's DEW
Posted by William Lozito at 8:04 AM
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July 18, 2008
Brand Naming is 60 Milliseconds?
"Even 60 milliseconds of exposure to a brand name" can affect a person's "shopping goals," which says volumes about how quickly we recognize brand naming and product naming as we go about our daily lives.
The authors of a recent article suggests that "this provides the first evidence that such brands can automatically activate purchase goals in individuals and that these behavior can influence consumers' product preferences without their awareness or conscious intent."
What is especially interesting is how one brand name like Walmart, for instance, affects the choices we make in regard to other brand names.
If I am going out to buy a microwave, even seeing the Walmart sign (but not going there) might encourage me to buy a lower priced, bargain brand name.
Matthew Hudson at Psychology Today has concluded that "Advertising is Magic" and extrapolates from this, as others have, that seeing a brand name like Apple might prompt our creativity, while seeing the North Face logo might push us up the stairs faster.
He points to a paper that claimed that people viewed an endurance activity as a "positive challenge" upon seeing a Gatorade bottle in front of them. That's right, after just seeing it.
The way brand naming works on our subconscious is a subject that has been thoroughly studied, but this new research seems to suggest that we are easily affected by the brand naming that surrounds us all whether we are aware of it or not, and that one brand may actually affect the sales of another.
If one thing is for sure, it's that good brand naming has an immediate and visceral affect on consumers, and their capacity to absorb thousands of these a day seems confirmed.
Technorati Tags: Brand Naming, Walmart, Brand Exposure, Brand Strategy, Gatorade, Apple, North Face
Posted by William Lozito at 7:59 AM
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December 18, 2007
Good Brand Name Awareness
A new study by the CMO Council suggests that good brand name awareness in the tech sector is not a guarantee of higher sales because customers are looking for "competence, quality service and support."
Some of the biggest tech brand names like HP, Dell and IBM take a back seat in terms of brand recognizability by people in the industry to lesser known names like NetApp, Juniper, InterSystems, Polycom and Synnex.
Wired has a great post up today that asks "Whatever Happened to the Other iPhone," a perfectly respectable Linksys product with a very recognizable name that people basically do not know about.
Building a good name means embracing every aspect of brand naming, which means, of course, backing up your marketing claims and making sure you satisfy customer needs once your name has attracted them.
Technorati Tags: HP, IBM, iPhone, Linksys, Polycom, Dell
Posted by William Lozito at 12:00 PM
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September 25, 2007
Product Naming: Would You Buy a Himmer?
Strategic Name Development conducted proprietary consonant research that found certain consonants have meaningful association in consumers' minds.
For example, B and C were seen as less complex (think Bounty and Cheerios), while X was considered innovative and L and V were rated more feminine.
Similarly, researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio recently found that vowel sounds are linked to certain adjectives, and can influence the way people see a product based on its name.
For instance, front vowel sounds (like the "i" in mill) are associated with ideas like small, fast, sharp, light, hard and angular. Back vowel sounds (think "a" in mall) connote adjectives such as large, slow, dull, heavy, soft and round.
In this study, 70% of respondents chose a name with a back vowel for the SUV product name, while 66% selected a sharper sounding front vowel name for the knife product name.
I had the opportunity to weigh in on the ability of a product name's sound to make or break the product.
Technorati Tags: Vowels, Consonants, Bounty, Cheerios, Product Naming
Posted by Diane Prange at 2:36 PM
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September 21, 2007
Intel Struggles in Naming New Products, Nixes New Product Naming Strategy
I have followed Intel's increasingly confusing brand naming strategy for some time and was distressed to see that their new product naming strategy has been put on hold because it "did not achieve its goal to simplify brand names and even worsened the situation in the CPU realm."
There seem to have been market protests over their naming convention changes although a few name changes will occur, not least the Intel Viiv products will be called Core 2 Viiv and Intel vPro will become Core vPro.
This news comes on the heels of news that Intel's naming woes have helped cause confusion in the Mac market... the latest Macs have been called Santa Rosa by many misguided experts who use the name to differentiate these new, sleeker Macs from their immediate predecessors.
Application of the name Santa Rosa to these machines, which "are not part of the platform" according to TidBITS, is a symptom of how Intel's nomenclature has grown so complex that even computer followers are confused.
Simon Leeman also accuses Apple of being a little negligent in the naming field: after all, the new Mac really doesn't have a new name... Apple calls it, clunkily, Mid 2007.
Intel is one of the few chipmakers that enjoys brand name recognition among the average computer user and I sympathize with their struggles.
They have a daunting challenge... differentiating an increasingly complex and many branched product line while at the same time retaining brand equity and partnering with the iconic Apple brand.
I will be watching how things develop with interest.
Technorati Tags: Intel, Intel Viiv, Core 2 Viiv, Intel vPro, Core vPro, Mac, Santa Rosa.
Posted by William Lozito at 8:34 AM
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September 18, 2007
Reventon Brand Name a Blowout
Lamborghini has just introduced a $1.6 million car, and named it after a bull.
While bulls are symbols of power, speed, and virility, and the bull Reventón was particularly aggressive, the name Reventón doesn't have anywhere near enough sex appeal to match the car itself.
Reventón is Spanish for burst, which is fine if you think of a burst of power, but the word is also used to mean a blowout, as in a flat tire. It also means outburst, as in an emotional display.
Those connotations would have been lost on non-Spanish-speaking auto-fanciers before the Internet.
Now bloggers have the power to spread naming gaffes around the world in mere minutes, and the Reventón is likely to go down in history as second only to the Nova in awkward auto naming experiments. And, indeed, if you have a reventón, your car will no va.
Even without that problem, however, the name just sounds too clumsy. It doesn't have the smooth, rolling power of, say, Lamborghini. Even removing the n from the end of the word would give it a better sound, though for a car like this, a one-syllable name that whips past you at high speed might be more appropriate.
Too often, we buy products that don't live up to their names. In Lamborghini's case, the name doesn't live up to the product.
Technorati Tags: Lamborghini, Reventon, Product Naming, Brand Naming.
Posted by Diane Prange at 9:40 AM
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September 14, 2007
The Influence of China on Brand Perceptions
It's no surprise to anyone reading this post that China has been in the news the last few months regarding numerous product recalls for pet food, prescription drugs and toys.
This prompted us to conduct primary research among 503 consumers in the US. The sample was balanced by gender, age, household income and census region.
This week, some of the findings of our study were the subject of a cover story of Brandweek.
Next week, we plan to publish more of our proprietary research findings on the influence of China on brand perceptions.
Technorati Tags: Brandweek, Strategic Name Development.
Posted by William Lozito at 12:34 PM
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