What's in a name? Not much without a Branding Strategy (page 1 of 3)

It's a wonderfully prosaic name. Customers know what they can buy there, and if they have a complaint, they know whom to talk to.

But what about companies with names like Agere, Agilent, or Altria? Or Diageo, Monday and Verizon? Or Accenture, Cingular and Protiviti?

Except for Monday, which may be a strange thing to call a company but is nonetheless a real word, all these names are fabricated. What's more, none of them, even Monday, tells potential customers anything about the businesses they are in. Plus, they sound so contrived that you might conclude they will do nothing but elicit snickering and confusion in the marketplace.

According to marketing professors at Wharton, however, that is not necessarily the case. They say peculiar names, by themselves, may mean nothing to begin with. But if backed by a successful branding campaign, they will come to signify whatever the companies want them to mean.

"My general sense is the name doesn't make much difference," says professor David J. Reibstein. "What companies end up doing is a significant amount of advertising and creating an image around the name."

He suggests that relatively new names like Diageo, which owns Pillsbury, Burger King, Guinness and major liquor brands, and Agere, a maker of communications components that was acquired, and later spun off, by Lucent Technologies, can seem strange. But they mean no more or less than Ford, Marriott, Coca-Cola and other venerable brands. Lucent, itself a spin-off from AT&T, means "marked by clarity" or "glowing with light," according to the company. Diageo is based on the Latin word for "day" and the Greek word for "world." Why was Diageo chosen? The company says that every day, all over the world, consumers buy its products.

"What does Pillsbury mean? Pillsbury means a lot because of the doughboy character in those ads," Reibstein says. "What are two of the biggest names that have emerged in the past decade? Amazon and Starbucks. Does Starbucks mean coffee? Absolutely not. For the most part, these names don't mean much of anything. But we get to know a company and that starts to create an image. General Motors tells us something about what the company does, but Ford communicates only the name of the founder of the company."

And how about AFLAC, a large international insurer but hardly a household name until the last few years? "It's amazing the amount of awareness people have of AFLAC because of some duck on television," Reibstein says.

"I don't think the name of a company is hugely important in the long run," agrees professor David Schmittlein. He adds that even fabricated names are "real names" in the sense that "they are pronounceable words. I think of them as largely empty vessels - reliable and durable empty vessels that can be filled up with positive associations."

In the opinion of professor Barbara Kahn, "a lot of these names are oddball." But, in the end, that does not matter, she says. "The success of a name is much more a function of the implementation of the branding strategy" than of the name itself.

Some of the unusual names companies give themselves nowadays are not really much different from the kinds of names that pharmaceutical firms have given drugs (Claritin, Celebrex, Lipitor) or car companies have given automobiles (Corvette, Celica) over the years.

When you think about it, pharmaceutical and technology firms have long had funky names, such as Xerox, Cephalon or ImClone.