Brand Naming Exercise

As a part of my summer internship, I got a chance to work on Naamkaran of a brand, a.k.a. brand naming exercise. In the first year of my MBA course, I learned about branding (just the basics). But it was a completely different experience to study the process first-hand.

Competitor analysis:

When on an agency side, everything starts with a competitor analysis (trust me, even when the agency wants to buy new paper towels, a competitor analysis will be done for all the brands of paper towels). We gathered following key information about competitor brands:

• Name
• Origin (rationale behind the name)
• Tagline
• Positioning in the consumer's mind 
• Overall brand proposition
• Print and TV ads 

This exercise gives us a fair idea of positioning of competitor brands and general trends of brand names in the category.

From here on-wards there are many ways to figure out the new brand name. I am explaining the two approaches we used to achieve our goals

Approach one:

• Figuring out the routes behind competitor brand names
• Choosing a suitable route and developing brand name and positioning relative to that route

Approach two: (Reverse processing)

• Figuring out suitable positioning for your brand,
• Then reverse engineering name options for the brand

Once a few names have been shortlisted to be presented to the client, you need to build a rationale around each name. This should include following factors in detail:

• Name
• Basic concept or the "big idea" behind the name 
• Descriptor based on concept
• New positioning sought by the new brand (if to continue with the old positioning, or reposition is upto the client)
• Narration based on concept or an AV that will explain the idea in detail
• Various ideas that can be implemented for branding (this is an optional feature)

Thanks for reading guys!