Mobas' Director of Brand Strategy Shelby Haslam looks at the complex process behind brand name creation.
Whether it’s creating a new name for an exciting departure, or transforming a brand or business whose moniker is holding it back, our experienced team knows that a name is much more than a badge. We base name creation on deep strategic understanding of current challenges and future opportunities, ensuring that Mobas brand names fuel business growth.
In a world of brands, a name is so much more than just a badge. Brand and corporate names can excite and inspire: they can engage audiences and create a sense of belonging – but they can also limit and restrict, aging a business, making it difficult to innovate and, perhaps worst of all, being difficult to remember or pronounce.
The brand naming journey is always an exciting one, wrapped as it is in hopes of new offerings and business growth. As ever, the Mobas process is based on insight and a robust strategic approach that enables us to define exactly what the new brand name must deliver and to understand the motivations of audience for whom it’s intended. However, what we’ve come to realise is that brand naming is also a very emotional journey.
We are creating identities that our clients will live with for many years to come. They have to be able to imagine themselves confidently introducing themselves at a networking event as working for Company X, or unveiling Product X to an audience of jaded salespeople. Many clients are entrepreneurs who give us the job of – quite literally – naming their baby!
So however rational the process, we understand that name selection is ultimately a highly emotional event. Paired with the increasing challenge of finding terms that can be trademarked and have available URLs, it is one of the most testing tasks that we face. But by working closely with clients, exploring options openly, drawing on insight and using a process that constantly hones down the positive options to deliver a winning end result, we deliver brands that take their markets by storm.
And critically, we understand the pressure that naming places on a client and encourage them to be both considered and brave. The story is that a very famous branding agency was laughed out of the room when they recommended that BT’s Cellnet operation be renamed O2, but their proposition that mobile telephony would become as important as oxygen has been proved visionary. That’s the insight-backed creative leap that creates world-leading brands.
