Notes

And so it affects the growth potential of
the firm, and it affects investors.
So just, investors are people too,
and they can be very much affected without
even realizing it by the brand name.
about using the value of the brand name to
infer make inferences
about the merits and strengths of the firm
as an investment opportunity.
So the brand name matters a lot in lots of
different ways.
So, what are the different types of brand
names?
There's lots of examples, and I'll just go
through this kind of quickly.
We can look at
this chart here.
You know, there's a descriptive brand
name, where
it just basically describes the product or
service.
Lean Cuisine is like that.
It's about non-fattening food.
You know exactly what the product is by
the brand name.
There can be brand names that are
metaphors,
that represent some kind of symbolism like
Nissan's Infinity.
A lot of the legacy brand names are based
on people's names.
So Ford or Ralph Lauren, those are real
people.
And the brand name
was chosen for, because it's based on a
particular person.
Sometimes there's brand names where the
word means something, but
it's not really clear how it applies to
the product.
Apple's a great example of, of that kind
of.
Or Camel, what are those, those are brand
names.
You know what the words mean and now,
certainly, they're
very famous brand names, so you understand
what they are.
But they don't really have any direct
connection with the product.
Then there can be brand names that are
altered.
They kind of sound like they're a real
word, but actually they're not, like
Lucent or Spotify.
You kind of have a sense what those brands
mean, and
you think you know what those words are,
but they're not real.
Or you can have a new word that's created
by blending together two other words.
Facebook is a great example of that that,
that's not a
real word, but you know what it is, a book
of faces.
And then, of course, there can be invented
words that
are not at all real and you have no idea
what
it means, and you can't even guess, like
something like Exxon.
Let me give you just three examples of
modern brand names that follow all
of these things, and you can see, these
brand names were extremely strong choices.
and they worked very very well, and they
were all very different.
So I'll start with Richard Branson's
Virgin.
He explains that the origin of that brand
name was when he was 15, he was sitting in
a room with other 15 year olds, and they
were trying
to think of the name, of a name for a
record company.
And a couple of the girls said, well,
we're all virgins here.
And somehow or another, that name just
seemed
to spark interest, and they said, well, if
we started a record company, we'd be
virgins
in that business, so let's use that name.
And apparently that's how that name was
chosen.
He mentioned that, at the time, it was
considered a pretty
risky brand name and it was hard to
register for a while.
But now, it's become an extraordinarily
strong brand name.
And, it, there, it's a funness to it that
actually
works really well with a lot of his
products and markets.
Priceline's a different type of brand
name.
That's a brand name that's quite
descriptive.
you know, if you know what that business
is,
you know it's absolutely about
establishing a line of prices.
It's quite clear what it means and it has
been very
useful in that way, in, in a different way
than Virgin.
And finally Google, which you know has now
become a verb, people
Google things, with, it's interesting that
brand name was chosen by mistake.
they meant it to be the word Googol, which
is not spelled the
way the brand is spelled, and that, that's
a very, very large number.
It's 1 with 100 zeros after.
So this was a mistake, they meant to spell
it right and they didn't.
Google's a very, very interesting brand
name from a marketing point
of view because one of the things that we
argue is extremely
important in brand names is consistency.
And Google has met, because it is so well
known, and
people identify it in just little pieces
of the brand name.
They identify the colors, they identify
the
typeface, that Google plays around, as
I've showed
you on this screen, where they'll show
you its trademark differently everytime
you see it.
Whenever you go to the browser, you'll see
a different version of the brand name.
That's a sign of an extraordinarily strong
brand name that has very, very high brand
awareness, that you can
see it even when it's not exactly the same
every single time.
But these are all fairly new brand names
that have been very, very successful.
When you look at new startups now, a lot
of the trend in
the new startups, and there was a recent
Wall Street Journal article about this.
the new startups are, are making up brand
names,
and so a lot of the new businesses come
up with brand names that are, just these
invented
words like Mibblio or Kaggle or Shodogg or
Zaarly.
You don't even know how to pronounce some
of these words.
Why is that happening?
Part of the, part of the reason is, in
today's world, when you
have a, a brand new business, you need a,
a website right away.
And most of the recognizable URLs have
already been taken and so one of
the ways to get a URL that's
uniquely identified with your business, is
to invent
a new word.
Then you're going to have to use the other
elements of the brand
mix to try to give some kind of identity
to this brand name.
Let me talk about an interesting hap,
thing that happened with brand names
somewhat recently.
The Gap brand name, a few years ago now,
I'm not sure exactly when.
But Gap wasn't doing very well with their
same store sales, revenues
were down, they really needed to do
something to turn the business around.
And one of the things they were trying to
do
to modernize it was to change the
trademark, or change the brand logo.
So the original brand logo as shown on the
screen is a blue square with the word Gap
in
white on that blue square and you can see
the new logo that they put out, is very
different.
The blue square has shrunk, the typeface
has changed it's now on a white
background.
And they put that
brand name out in, into their social media
market, and
instantly got very, very negative reaction
to that brand name.
The consumers hated it.
Within, that brand name was out there,
just tentatively, as a test, for one week.
The reaction was so negative that the
company pulled
it back and that was the end of that.
So it ended up actually being a, a pretty,
it was,
you know, they got a lot of publicity at
the time.
But it was a pretty
inexpensive way.
A lot of times, if you try to change your,
your
brand image, it's extremely expensive to
change it, especially for a retailer.
There's signage, there's bags, you know,
the, the packaging.
And all sorts of things that would be
very, very expensive.
So actually, that this got such a negative
reaction, that they
found out so quickly, it was, was a
benefit for the company.
But because this was somewhat of a famous
incident some market research was done,
and some
fMRI studies, and neurostudies were done
to figure
out what was so bad about that image.
Why did people not like it.
And there's a couple things that they
identified that
when I show you, you can see make sense.
One of them is, if you have visual and
verbal
things in conflict with each other, people
read the visual first.
And so where that blue box is, behind the
P, it, you're,
it actually kind of blocks out the P, and
you see a hole in the
P, and the P is not as strong because
you're attracted first to the vision.
So that weakened the whole idea of the
brand there.
because the P was kind of weakened because
of the visual block on it.
The other thing that, that's different
between the
two logos is that instead of being all
caps, which is in the original one, now
this is an initial cap and then smaller
letters.
And what that ended up doing was making
people think
of it as a word, rather then a brand name.
And if you think about it, the word gap,
that means
a hole, that's, you know, you have, that's
not so positive.
So when we're looking at these things in
hindsight, you
can kind of see why that wasn't a good
choice.
And people just didn't have a very strong
emotional reaction to it, also.
There were negative emotions to it that
were kind of more on
a visceral level, and what I'm explaining
here is, you know, more thoughtful.
and the last thing I want to mention in
thinking about brand names,
is a lot of people now, you've got to
think about global business.
And a lot of the business, the future
business is in China.
And that's tricky to think about how your
brand names might translate into Chinese.
And there's a number of issues there.
A number of different ways to do it.
One way is to keep your brand name in the
English let
or, the French letters, or the English
letters, or the non-Chinese letters.
some of the
luxury brands do that.
So, Chanel, or LV, you know, Louis
Vuitton, will do those kinds of things.
They keep them in their native language.
But other brands try to change their brand
name into Chinese.
And this is tricky because you can do it,
Coca-Cola, for example.
what does Coca-Cola mean?
How do you translate that?
And if you just go and look for
the Chinese characters that kind of sound
like Coca-Cola,
well, the characters themselves may mean
something.
So when Coca-Cola first did that and tried
to pick Chinese
characters that sounded like Coca-Cola, it
had a very bad brand meaning.
And they had to take that one off the
market.
The one they currently had, have means
tasty fun, so it kind of sounds
like Coca-Cola, and it means something
that at least makes sense with a drink.
Reebok did the same kind of thing, the
Chinese characters
that they chose kind of sound like Reebok
and it means, quick steps, which again
makes sense.
Colgate did something different.
Colgate picked Chinese characters that
they thought was
consistent with their brand image, which
meant superior cleanliness.
And then the Chinese characters, if you
said
them, didn't sound very much like the word
Colgate.
And Cadillac did it the opposite way.
They took Chinese characters that sounded
like
Cadillac, but they didn't mean anything in
Chinese.
So, when you're translating to a very,
very different language, and an important
language
like China, because of the size of the
market, there are some big issues.
And there are a lot of agencies now that
are developing
to help you choose a name that will make
sense in China.
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