Inspiration for a new name - Häagen-Dasz

Which name should we choose? This is the question that unites newborn babies and conceived business ideas. And the name is by no means unimportant, neither for people nor for brands. For the former, it reveals something about the person's social affiliation, age, geographical location and ethnicity. But it can also, deep down in the subconscious, to some extent guide your personal choices. It is interesting to observe that in many cases the choice of profession matches the given name. According to NYTimes columnist David Brooks, Lawrence is a frequent given name among American lawyers. The same applies to Dennis among dentists, a name that can be phonetically confused with dentist.

There are similar parallels to the brand name. It can tell us something about the demographics of the target groups and about the cultural basis of the brand. A good brand name can also have a positive effect on employee motivation. Whether it is really the case that we create the name that in turn creates us must be an assumption. Scholars argue about this.

However, research is full of conclusions about which names are effective or not. According to the authors of the book “Marketing Aesthetics”, the following rules of thumb are listed: The name should be easy to remember. It should say something about the product, the company or the benefits the brand has. It should be easy to write and pronounce in most languages. Names outside your own language area, such as Latin, can be a challenge. Such names are a difficult nut to crack for our brain. We cannot immediately translate the word into an image and therefore we forget it more easily.

Jump into the ocean, said Häagen-Dasz, pointing his nose at what the research put on the table. This brand name is neither easy to pronounce nor to write, and it says nothing about product benefits. But it strongly emphasizes one essential thing that trumps everything else: the association. For the average American and ice cream lover, this brand name has become a representation of the Swiss Alps and something indefinably fresh and Nordic. Good enough to soar high among global brand names. Diesel jeans are another example of a brand name that breaks the rules. It says nothing about the product, but sends associations to the oil field and the pants' original use as workwear.

There are over 25 million registered brand names. At a large shopping mall you risk being exposed to about 60,000 of these. In comparison, our vocabulary is around 6,000 words at best. For the average population, it is around 3,000 words. It goes without saying that space is getting tight for brands seeking a place in the most prestigious of all homes – the consumer’s head.

You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. For brand names, this saying applies more than anything else. For this reason, naming processes should not be a “home alone party” where the company struggles with its subjective input. Then the result will be neither original nor viable over time. A naming process is a process for management where objective foresight replaces the company’s myopia. To avoid this trap, it can be smart to bring in expertise from outside. As the examples with Diesel show, there are no rules for the perfect name. But there is a formula that helps you to think better:

Dare to be different, brave and authentic.