–Ben Kwan, Attorney
The other day, my better half and I were brainstorming the next great social media app. You know, the one that would propel us from our employers’ payrolls like circus performers out of a cannon? We had the concept down — there was a social component, some cool location-based features, and a great swath of would-be users (we think, anyway). The conversation eventually turned to the obvious: what would we call it?
[radio silence]
[crickets]
That was the hardest part of the little shared daydream of ours. All the ideas reeked of mediocrity. They were generic. Bland. All the makings of a battle before the folks at the USPTO for legal protection. Good thing I have my colleagues here at the law firm. But we wouldn’t just want trademark rights. We want that multimillion dollar payday! So we’d need more than a name. We’d need an identity — the kind that leads to icon status.
Enter the company that has helped turned so many brands into BRANDS — with a capital ‘B’ — the same ‘B’ in Billion. Billion dollar brand names don’t just appear out of thin air. Lexicon Branding, founded in 1982, has been helping companies come up with killer names — the likes of which we all know (and often love). BlackBerry®. Febreze®. Dasani®. Some have staying power (the latter), others don’t (the former)–but all bring in the bucks (or once did).
You’ve got to wonder whether some of these companies with the super-unique names just yank Scrabble® pieces out of a hat to come up with the monikers they do. Well they don’t — and the folks over at Fast Company have a great account of Lexicon’s process a few years ago of coming up with the name for the new Colgate® mini portable toothbrush. Before you click on that link — do you know what it’s called now that it’s been on the market for a few years (test that brand strength)?
Lexicon uses a nice little story on its website to illustrate the importance of branding — I removed the “brand name” so you can test yourselves:
While speaking at a small scientific conference in 1969, Cambridge physicist Sir Roger Penrose announced his discovery of what he called a “gravitationally completely collapsed object.”
The world yawned.
Months later, he changed the name of his discovery to [] and the news of his discovery raced around the world.
Today, the term [] is a part of the world’s working vocabulary.
I don’t think we’re ready to hire Lexicon Branding for our app just yet — but we may need them if we’re ever going to make it big.