Brand Name Decision

While currently working on the presentation of brand equity, came across the creative area of how the organizations become successful in making a new identity for them, their product, ideas and services.

When speaking of brand "Consumerism" is what firstly comes on mind, which is dominating this ever changing global market. And in todays world "One is definitely known by what one portrays and not what one really is".

Now technically speaking Brand can be defined anything from a name to symbol, a sign to a design which helps in differentiating the product from its competitors and also establishing a budding crescent identity of its own. The Brands not only represent the symbol of the company or product but to a larger extent define the general life of a person.

So the brand name decision thus is quite an important decision to arrive on for the manufacturers and service companies because associating a product or service with brand name has become a part of pop culture. This actually describes power of brand.

There are many strategies for arriving at the right brand name for the product or service.

Individual Name: The name of the organization becomes a brand. Its major advantage is that the company doesn't have to tie its reputation with the product, if in any case the product fails, company's name or image is not hurt. For instance watches by Seiko or Titan, if it introduces a low range watch its reputation remains the same.

Blanket family Name: This is also quite an effective strategy. Advantage on its part is that the cost behind the new brand name like advertising expenditures to create brand recognition, and sales is also high if the manufacture's established brand is powerful. For instance the new range of laptops under Dell, new range of soups under Knorr etc.

Separate Family Name: This policy is adopted when the company follows quite a wide range of products because then its not desirable to blanket name. Companies generally conceptualize family names for different quality lines within the same product class.

Corporate name combined with individual product name: The company name legitimates and the individual name individualizes the new product. for instance Honda, GE etc.

Once the company chooses which strategy or policy to go with it faces the real task of choosing the brand name. It can name in many styles like name it behind a person like Disney, place like Cisco or Fuji film, acronym like IBM and Amul, foreign word like Volvo, completely made up new words like Kodak etc. Here the real catch of creativity is tested.

This was a very little glimpse of what goes behind the emergence of a new brand name.