Brands have been having a bit of fun with names lately. (originally published by Mumbrella)
Brands have been having a bit of fun with names lately, not
to mention a fair bit of success. Interbrand named a headhunting firm Cloak
& Dagger. And ‘Share a Coke’ showed how much power there is in a name.
The Coke campaign effectively short-circuited the usual
mechanics of communication. It undoubtedly stroked people’s egos. But, I
believe, its success stems from the fact that it directly and automatically
affected people’s behaviour, rather than doing so indirectly by shaping
attitudes.
It used a type of behavioural economics, which is a rather
fancy name for a simple theory. When our names are called out, we’re hard wired
to respond. It’s a simple nudge, a Pavlovian response. And, with the alacrity
of hungry dogs, we fought the other Kates and Adrians and Matts down to the
last bottle – and cried for more in social media.
We sense the potency in names.
Qualitative researchers address respondents by name to
engender trust and encourage participation because there is no word more dear
to us, or more likely to wake us up. When naming a baby – or brand – people
painstakingly deliberate about what the name denotes, infers, implies, sounds
like, whether it’s friendly, serious, classy, but not arrogant, distinctive,
but not too weird, reflective of family history, or not, ambitious, hopeful, or
successful-sounding, easy to pronounce, befitting the subject, unlikely to make
them a laughing stock, etc.
What it boils down to is the desire for a name to be
memorable and meaningful. New brands, the business of SEO and SEM, our egos and
legacies depend on it!
Yet, for many people, names are notoriously hard to recall.
Meeting you for the first time, there’s a 95% chance that I won’t remember your
name and, for added comedic value at my expense, I’m not too hot with faces
either. Compounding my embarrassment, people usually remember my name because
it requires a fair bit of effort. So I smile at everyone and stick to pronouns,
or safe bets like “mate”.
Some research suggests that people’s names are harder to
recall than their jobs, hobbies or home towns. Names are, semantically
speaking, a bit rubbish because they’ve become dissociated from their meanings
– those very jobs, hobbies and home towns that were once relevant, identifying
things about a person. A name used to tell you what they did, for example,
“Cook,” or where they came from, “Pontefract” perhaps. A name might have evoked
a person’s ancestry, “Johnston” being the son of John.
Today, there are more names than ever and little to remember
them by. There’s even a name for the memory loss associated with names:
clinical trials company CPS Research calls it “Busy Lifestyle Syndrome.” The
more stimuli we encounter, the more likely we are to forget things; in fact the
more we need to be selective about what we do and don’t commit to memory. And,
with the added help of digital devices as memory aids and directories, there’s
no need to remember a lot of the things that we used to.
With all these obstacles, how do we hit upon a memorable
name? There’s a clue in nicknames, which, in the way that surnames used to do,
often reflect a personal trait or behaviour, making them automatically more
meaningful and memorable. The same goes for our virtual names and wi-fi network
names. We choose multiple online identities based on our personality and
passions, for example, “fashionista” or “suspicious dancing” or “your creepy
neighbour”. Avatars are relatively anonymous, allowing us to express ourselves
unselfconsciously. So, they’re often more candid, irreverent or extreme than
given names.
Names have become less formal, more playful, more flexible.
In a digital world, we wear them lightly and adopt new personae at will, each
reflecting a different aspect of our life story. Coke has been riding this
cultural wave. By taking on the names of its customers, giving them a sense of
importance and belonging, Coke became the archetypal Everyman. Yet far from
losing its identity, the success of the campaign was testament to the strength
of Coke’s identity.
An extract from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline goes:
“What’s your name,’ Coraline asked the cat. ‘Look, I’m
Coraline. Okay?’
‘Cats don’t have names,’ it said.
‘No?’ said Coraline.
‘No,’ said the cat. ‘Now you people have names. That’s
because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need
names.”
