This time, I thought it would be interesting to find out what drivers like or dislike about new car model names.
To find out, we conducted an online survey with 400 statistically significant potential purchasers. We picked six car model names without mentioning the manufacturers.
They are:
• Cruze
• Forte
• Leaf
• Panamera
• Rapide
• ZDX
We thought it would be an interesting exercise to, from time to time, visit the marketplace and ask consumers directly what they like or don’t like about certain product names.
Introducing the Siegel+Gale Moniker Monitor™.
Each month or so, we’ll select a different product category, do some market research (online survey with about 400 statistically significant potential purchasers), and find out what people think about the names of some newly launched products. This month, we’ve picked cell phone/smart phone names.
What do people think about today’s cell/smart phone names?
These days, so many models are being introduced that it’s hard to keep them all straight. We wanted to know to what degree their names have an impact on what phones consumers buy.
We picked seven cell phone/smart phone names to test (without mentioning the manufacturers):
Comeback
Glance
LX-290
Ozone
Smooth
Surge
Tritan
We asked the following five questions:
Is it a good name for a cell phone/smart phone?
Does it sound cool?
Is it intriguing and does it make you want to find out more?
Does it suggest an innovative product?
Is it a unique name?
And here’s what we found out:
1. The more powerful sounding names scored best. Tritan and Surge consistently did better in response to all of the questions. That is, these names were the most appropriate, cool, intriguing, innovative, and unique. They’re also the names that people said they most preferred.
Why did they do so well? These names not only sound strong, but they capture the promise of power, speed, reach and connectivity—qualities essential to wireless service.
Most Preferred Names
2. Comeback performed by far the weakest against the questions. It’s also the name people least preferred.
Why would Comeback do so poorly? In naming, you need to be careful about unintended negative connotations. People might associate the name with previous performance problems or the fear that they may have to return the phone for repairs.
3. Interestingly, the alphanumeric entry LX-290 did OK. While people didn’t think it was a unique name, it did just about as well as Glance, Ozone, and Smooth on appropriateness and innovation. The letters LX, borrowed from car model naming, implies superior quality and luxury. We’ve seen this well-established naming convention do very well for computers and sporting equipment as well. It would make sense that it would resonate with phone buyers.
4. How important is the company name in driving the purchase decision? Apparently, very. Only 17% of the subjects found the model name more important, while 49% found the company name to be more important. In fact, 19% of those didn’t know the model name of the phone they currently had.
5. At the end of the survey, we asked the subjects to tell us which of the names they remembered. Here the results were a little different. Tritan and Smooth were the most memorable. Least memorable were Surge and Glance. So while Surge was a preferred name, it was hard to remember. Go figure.
So, what can we take from this study? It seems that power and innovation prevail as key attributes. And alphanumeric models, though not exciting, do better than names with vague or confusing brand benefits.
In the end, Tritan seems to be the kind of moniker that’s a good fit and one that consumers remember.
What do you think? Leave a comment or email me (jlapatine@siegelgale.com) with your thoughts.
Leaving my house this morning, I spotted a truck pulling out from the local power company facility. The truck read National Grid.
I thought, wow, National Grid is a powerful name. It sounds like this is the company that controls the national power grid…the company that pulls the switch and turns the lights on for the whole nation. Of course it doesn’t, but the name sort of captures this image.
So how do you come by a name like this?
Essentially, there are four kinds of names for trademark purposes–generic, descriptive, suggestive, and fanciful.
A generic name would be Energy Company. Many companies in the field use this term to define themselves (we’re an energy company). Sometimes, this is known as the industry-standard name.
People have a tendency to ‘hang on’ to things well past their prime. Go take a glance at your attic if you need a reminder. Maybe it is out of comfort, convenience, or fear of the unknown. Regardless of the reason, our fast-paced society often has real difficulty in discarding things.
As brand consultants we see glaring examples of this in, of all places, product naming. To be sure, a quick scan of the media and entertainment landscape is replete with examples of names that people tend to ’stick with’ - names that may in fact need to be put out to pasture.
Consider High Speed Internet. In a hugely competitive marketplace, cable operators (Charter Communications) and satellite companies (Direct TV) alike, offer Internet services as part of their normal product bundles, and market them based on price and speed. The question here is – if every provider is vying for the fastest Internet, and speeds are getting faster every day, is it necessary to continue to refer to the Internet in terms of high speed, as in High Speed Internet or High Speed Data? From a distance, it seems a somewhat redundant brand attribute to highlight within the echelon of selling benefits. For the same reason, one would probably not describe an Indy car as ‘fast’ to a friend — Indy car tells the whole story, right?
How about the fact that the music industry still hands out awards each year at the GRAMMYS based on "Record of the Year" and "Album of The Year", yet most teenage consumers have never purchased either. In this case, the name is a convention and as long as consumers ‘get it’, it probably is not worth investing in new nomenclature.
And why do we still use the term wireless? At one point in time, ‘wireless’ was a breakthrough concept and spoke chiefly to how digital information was transmitted from tower to tower and then on to a device. But now, as wireless is a common part of our routine, and as the platform is capable of delivering more and more services, maybe next generation product names should be more linked to communicating a higher order of benefits? Take for example Virgin Mobile, who by going to market as ‘mobile’ versus ‘wireless’, can better focus the discussion with consumers on lifestyle benefits like independence, choice and control - A smart approach that is relevant to consumer needs.
If this interests you, take a look around and you’ll find a panoply of "dated" names that might need to be nudged off the stage. If you see one, let us know and maybe we can help arrange for its very comfortable, if not overdue, retirement.