SERVICES | NAMING

Company and product naming

The right brand name distinguishes you from your competition, creates an emotional connection with your audience and helps build desire into the brand…naming is one of our strengths.

THE CRAFT OF NAMING

As we work on your naming project, it’s essential to understand what you want your new name to do for you. Some possibilities might include:

  • Define and own your category
  • Be unforgettable
  • Achieve separation from your competitors, demonstrating to the sector that you are different.
  • Create positive and lasting engagement with your audience.
  • Provide a deep well of marketing and advertising material.
  • Be the genesis of a brand that rises above the goods and services you provide, so that you’re not selling a commodity and/or competing on price.

“Take care to get well-born.”

George Bernard Shaw’s advice can equally apply to naming and creation of brands too

Naming Process Outline

Before we start generating new names for your architectural practise, furniture workshop, or interior design studio, we will have already explored the following areas with our band discovery workshop.

  • Positioning – The more specific and nuanced your positioning is, the more effective the name will be. All great names work in concert with the positioning of the brand they speak for.
  • Competitive Analysis – The next step is a thorough competitive analysis, in which we quantify the tone, strength and messaging of competitive names. This is essential for refining brand positioning. It tells you exactly where you need to be in order to dominate the competitive landscape.
  • Name/brand Development – Name development begins by applying the positioning strategy and competitive analysis results to determine all of the things your new name needs to do for your marketing, branding and advertising efforts.
Kassavello naming and iidentity
New Name and Tagline for Open Plan Living

Example 1 | Fabricated Name

Open Plan Living required a new name and strapline, in light of a mediocre generic-sounding start in life, we helped reposition the new name to evoke a high-end Portuguese feel. Our work provided them with a fabricated name, fit for purpose, easily trademarked and also allowed them to secure their unique top-level domain name for the company.

View Kassavello brand project ⟶

Sonlevo brand identity
New name, tagline, and identity for mattress brand

Example 2 | Fabricated Name

The Foam Company were looking to add an elevated proposition to their own-label portfolio – something that would capitalise on growing health-conscious consumer demand for high-quality sleep. We created a fabricated name.

View Sonlevo brand project ⟶

Sonlevo sub brands idenities
Sub brands, part of Sonlevo

 

Example 3 | Fabricated Name

Following on from the original naming of Sonlevo, further sub-brand names were required to differentiate between the specification levels of products in the collections. Both are fabricated names.

View Sonlevo brand project ⟶

Naming and identity for Bater & Co
New name and tagline for the luxury cabinet maker

Example 4 | Founders Name

The new name took the original founders’ name; providing provenance and an authentic story for the business. It was important to highlight the age of the company and the generations of family members involved.

View Bater & Co brand project ⟶

Alfie & George logotype
New name and descriptor for the online kitchen cabinet maker

Example 5 | Fabricated Name

The new name took historical family names; providing provenance and an authentic story for the business. We were able to create a unique personality for the business based on the characters’ names.

View Alfie & George brand project ⟶

Beaufort Bond identity
New name for investment partners

Example 6 | Fabricated Name

The new name made reference to historical names, unrelated to the founders, but providing the heritage and gravitas that such names afforded a new company looking for an instant heritage in the world of property investment and brokerage.

View Beaufort Bond brand project ⟶

Themes explained

We have tried to cluster these high-end Interior brand naming types into three distinct categories: Literal, Fabricated and Metaphorical names.

 

Literal Names

Most names in the premium Interiors and Home-interest sector fall into literal or Descriptive name types. Literal names are purely descriptive of what a company or product does or its function. We would consider sub-categories within this Literal category that would include Founder names; Place names or geographic reference; Acronyms of earlier descriptive names, that over time have been shortened. Collectively these names have never been the most powerful in general branding terms but certainly, within the premium and luxury strata of the industry we focus on Founder names carry the same Prestige and Heritage as other Luxury fashion categories. Unfortunately, since the rise of the Internet and online searching, it has become nearly impossible to build an effective brand around a new Descriptive name.

 

A name rarely has to describe what the brand is all about — that will become evident by the context surrounding the brand. The job of the name is to get your brand noticed, remembered and talked about, and that is rarely achieved by Descriptive names.

Positives of literal names include ease of understanding, and in the case of a founder’s name they tend to be high-imagery names that produce vivid mental pictures that aid recall and so are more memorable, trademarking is easier. Many of the leading luxury brands are born out of the original atelier’s family name and today carry great brand equity. Capitalising on their history and original craftsmanship. Negatives are a lack of differentiation with purely descriptive names (common keywords), and lack of depth or meaning, or story associated with the product or service.

 

Fabricated Names

These tend to be a combination of two words or keywords. These synthesized names can be derived from Latin or Greek roots, often as prefixes or suffixes. These tend to be low-imagery names. A sub-category we find is Abstract names these can be based on alliteration (repeated sounds) or rhyming. Most made-up names can sound important or intelligent and usually obtain trademark and domain name availability.

 

Significant negatives include difficulty in understanding and, often, a lack of meaning or emotion. As a result, fabricated names may require significant marketing spending to be successful.

 

Metaphorical Names

Metaphorical names create an association, or ideally, an emotional response that somehow relates to the company or product in an intuitive or relevant way. They relate to the desired positioning and are aggressively different than most competitors in any given category. They are by definition unique and differentiated—a key to effective positioning.

Indeed, of the three name types, Metaphorical names can be highly memorable, offer the opportunity to change whole business categories or industries, sometimes with the name itself generating publicity far greater than paid media exposure. The negative of metaphorical names is when no perceived meaning or relation to positioning exists; the name can seem random or odd.

Get in touch

Find out how we create distinctive brand names for interiors, furniture and property clients. Give us a call, drop us an email or just pop by our studio.


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