A soft brand name could quite literally mean a soft business. Picking the right sounding name when you launch or rebadge a brand has a huge subliminal impact on the way it is perceived and its ongoing success.
Speaking at an event hosted by Vivant ahead of his TedX Sydney presentation this weekend, Adam Alter, author of Drunk Tank Pink and professor of marketing and psychology at NYU Stern, said the names brands choose have huge subconscious impact on consumer behaviour.
There are sounds that sounds stronger, that often mean a brand will be perceived as dominant and the strongest in its category. 'K', 'T' and 'V' sounds are stronger and so sound more powerful than 'M' and 'O' sounds, he said.
"There are very clear maps in the mind between certain shapes and sounds. If you look at the top 200 companies, there is a dramatic over-representation of strong sounds. The hard 'K' sound like Coca-Cola or CostCo – those sounds are over-represented among the strongest companies.
"When Kodak was named and became very successful – obviously it's no doing so well these days – George Eastman the founder said he wanted a name that sounded powerful at the start and powerful at the end."
So in renaming its international arm when divesting the business, Kraft may not have gone with the right name when it chose Mondelez – frequently mispronounced and full of soft-sounding vowels.
The 'keep it simple, stupid' rule applies, according to Alter, who says brand names should be as simple as possible and be relevant to what the brand wants to convey. Standing out is usually top of a brand’s list of priorities, so how to align the two?
There is a classic tussle between the desire for brands to go with familiarity or to choose a brand name that stands out, but playing it safe is the best way to go, he said.
Alter talked about fluency in branding and naming where fluency is a proxy for familiarity – which is what makes people comfortable and able to trust certain brands above others.
“There's so much evidence that unless you're a luxury brand, fluency and familiarity is the way to go. For luxury brands, disfluency can work, but for regular brands that doesn’t seem to be the case. You don't want what sounds like a pharmaceutical company selling children's birthday parties.
“Companies with simple names get a boost – especially when starting out because it's a sense of familiarity that matters. Fluency matters a lot, it matters for all sorts of outcomes.”
Alter did some research with the university of Melbourne into US lawyers and found that lawyers rise up to partnership more quickly when they have simple names than when they have complex names.
The same is true, he said, of US presidents where until Barack Obama, presidents' names tended to be familiar like George, Bill or John. Some of the unease when Obama was in the running was the lack of familiarity many people felt, according to Alter.
“You see the same thing with companies. Companies with simpler, fluent names that are easier to pronounce tend to do a little bit better, especially when they enter the market, they get an extra boost – partly because people feel more comfortable with them. When you go back into human evolution, that sense of familiarity really matters.”
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