A lesson in brand building

Photo by Yuriy Vertikov on Unsplash

Before a baseball player steps up to the plate, they don’t just stand there waiting. They head to the on-deck circle, slip a weight onto the bat, and take a few practice swings.

Then, when the weight comes off, the bat feels lighter. Faster. More powerful.

That ritual isn’t just superstition — it’s psychology. And it offers a powerful lesson for anyone developing a brand name.

Everything Is Relative — Especially Brand Names

Psychologists call this effect perceptual contrast. We don’t experience things in isolation; we experience them in comparison to what is around them.

A weighted bat feels heavy. A normal bat feels light and fast by contrast.

Brand names work the same way.

A name is never judged on its own. It is judged relative to:

• Competitor names
• Category conventions
• Consumer expectations
• Cultural context

Why Contrast Matters More Than You Think

Imagine evaluating a brand name without considering competitors. On paper, many names sound perfectly reasonable. But place them side by side with everything else in the category, and suddenly the differences (or lack of them) become painfully clear.

Psychologists Zakary Tormala and Richard Petty demonstrated this in a study on persuasion and perceived knowledge. Participants read descriptions of two fictional department stores. One description never changed. The other varied in detail.

What mattered most wasn’t how much information people received — it was how much information they received relative to the other option.

The takeaway? Perception is shaped by contrast, not absolutes.

That same principle applies directly to brand naming.

Using Contrast to Make a Name Stronger

Smart brand builders don’t fight perceptual contrast — they use it.

Consider ThinkGeek. When the company launched in 1999, “geek” was still often used as a negative label. Instead of avoiding it, the founders leaned into it. They used the “weight” of the word geek — its cultural baggage — and transformed it into a badge of pride.

By embracing the contrast, the name ThinkGeek immediately signaled:

• Who the brand was for
• What side it was on
• Why it was different

That clarity didn’t come from explaining benefits. It came from contrast.

Apple: A Masterclass in Contrast-Based Naming

Few examples illustrate this better than Apple.

At the time Apple entered the market, most computer companies had highly technical names — Microsoft, IBM, VisiCalc. The category sounded complex, intimidating, and engineered for experts.

Then came Apple.

The name was simple, human, and completely out of place — and that was the point.

Apple didn’t just choose a contrasting name; it reinforced that contrast through marketing. Early ads leaned heavily on technical jargon from competitors as the “weight on the bat,” making Apple feel lighter, friendlier, and more accessible by comparison.

Later, the iconic “Think Different” campaign doubled down on this contrast — not just against competitors, but against conventional thinking itself.

Apple didn’t win by sounding smarter. It won by sounding different.

Why Many Names Fail Before They Launch

Most naming failures don’t happen because a name is bad in isolation. They happen because:

• The name blends into category norms
• The contrast works against the brand instead of for it
• The competitive set wasn’t deeply analyzed

When every competitor uses similar structures, words, and tones, even a “good” name loses impact. It’s like swinging a normal bat after swinging another normal bat — nothing changes.

The Strategic Question Every Name Must Answer

When evaluating a potential name, the most important question isn’t: “Do we like it?”

It’s: “What does this name feel like in contrast to everything else?”

Ask yourself:

• Does this name add weight — or remove it?
• Does it make our brand feel faster, simpler, bolder, or more human?
• Or does it reinforce sameness?

Effective names use contrast intentionally. They reposition the category around themselves.

Naming Is About Framing, Not Just Meaning

Too many companies obsess over literal meaning — what the name says.

But meaning is only half the equation.

The other half is framing:

• What does this name make competitors look like?
• What expectations does it break?
• What assumptions does it challenge?

Just as the on-deck circle bat swings prepare a player for game-time performance, understanding perceptual contrast prepares a brand name to succeed in the real world.

In the 1967 song titled “People Are Strange,” vocalist Jim Morrison of The Doors sang “No one remembers your name when you’re strange.”  The opposite may be true when it comes to branding. In 2013 David Colman wrote an article in the New York Times titled “No One Forgets a Name When It’s Strange.”

Apparently, Tyra Banks agrees. Last month, she introduced something she called “Hot Ice Cream” as part of a new venture in Australia.

One of the first rules of naming is to make the name memorable. Strange is not always memorable. Consider the fashion designer Natsuko Kanno’s clothing line, which is called “4 Corners of a Circle.”  It is only memorable, it seems, for being hard to remember.  Publicist Erica Roseman says nearly everyone–even those who work on the line– messed it up. “It was ‘4 Circles in a Square,’ ‘4 Corners of a City.’ No one ever got it right.”

Jean Godfrey June, the former beauty and fashion news director at Lucky, thinks the trend in quirky names can be a mixed blessing.  “It goes one way or the other, they charm or they repel … The offbeat name is a way to distinguish yourself and sound mysterious and underground-y. The trade-off is, purposely making yourself sound obscure can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

When you use unexpected names, you create a “mind puzzle” with your branding. With strange names, the customer will have to find a way to make the connection to the product and will spend time trying to figure out why the name was chosen, which can lead to higher recall of the name later and positive attributions to the product. If you use a slightly ambiguous name, the consumer might actually enjoy the “mind puzzle” and won’t have to work too hard to get your point. When consumers solve the puzzle, they will then have a sense of accomplishment because they were able to figure it out.

The lesson here is that strange is not necessarily a good or a bad thing, but what is important is how the target customer relates to the name and the product itself. Strange for the sake of strange means little on its own, but if the name makes the target customer curious about a product and willing to investigate it further, then strange can be good. In the case of Hot Ice Cream, the strangeness got many people to try the product, but as noted in the New York Times article, the name was not really descriptive of the product experience.

The use of ambiguous names is a strategy that challenges people to think about your product and to have its name on their minds. This can often lead to a stronger response from the customer when the connections are made with the name of your company or product. Don’t assume that strange is necessarily good or bad but do ensure that your branding is focused on your target consumer and is aligned with your product experience.

Hat tip to Duluth Trading for the most “customer centric” branding I’ve seen recently!

Duluth Trading had launched pants that featured a cellphone pocket that was perfect. However, someone decided that a redesign was necessary, and they changed the way the cellphone pocket was designed. Boy, did they hear it from their loyal customers. So, Duluth Trading changed the design and went back to the original layout for the cellphone pocket in the most customer centric way you could. May I present the “We’re Sorry” Pants!

Here is what they say about the product change:

After “upgrading” our legendary Ballroom® Khakis last season, you made it crystal clear that cellphone pocket wasn’t optional. Point taken. This Standard Fit version delivers that essential pocket right where you expect it, plus the improved smoother fabric, enhanced action gusset and a no-gape waistband. Because from hammering out a contract to a night out with their S.O., now and then men just have to look decent. And they should be able to do it without the indecent crowding of their most priceless parts.

Kudos to Duluth Trading for recognizing the product design failure and correcting it in the most customer centric way they could!

ChatGPT is a really bad name for a product. I can’t even begin to describe how bad it is.

The history behind the name is very engineer-like. “Chat” means “chat,” an informal conversation. ChatGPT is a chatbot after all. GPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformer,” or a type of large language model (LLM): a neural network trained on a large amount of text to produce convincing, human-like language outputs.

Engineers might love the name, but professional name developers like me hate it.

But if you think ChatGPT is bad, check out the names for their other models:

HT to The PyCoach

Whoa, somebody needs a training course on how to set up a naming architecture! Seriously, if you are going to build a brand, you need to enable ordinary people to understand it. This is not the way.

How Perrier Tried to Retain All the Good with None of The Bad

I spent over 25 years in Brand Management. One of the realities of hiring a new brand manager is the first thing he/she will do is change the packaging of the product. It doesn’t matter if the product is successful or not.

When I saw Maison Perrier earlier this year, my first thought was “New Brand Manager, eh?”

As I dug deeper into this branding, I realized that it wasn’t a rebrand of Perrier because original Perrier was still on the market. But the story behind the Maison Perrier launch (May 2024) is either sneaky good or blatantly evil, depending on how much truth you want in your advertising.

Perrier probably would have never launched Maison Perrier if not for some nasty contamination of their Perrier source wells due to excessive rainfall plus some tight French laws. Turns out when the French allow a claim like “bottled at the source” they really mean you take the water out of the ground and put it in bottles without doing anything to it. Unfortunately, due to numerous issues with contamination of the source wells, Nestle (owner of Perrier) felt the need to purify the water, which the French do not allow. Hence the branding dilemma.

This is where the “brilliant branding” of Maison Perrier comes into play. The name itself plus the packaging is deceptively similar to the base Perrier brand, which will lead most people to believe that Maison Perrier (house of Perrier) is identical to the base brand. However, Maison Perrier is not identical because it is purified and flavored in ways the French would not allow without the branding change.

The diabolical branding aspect is the ease at which Nestle skirts the truth in its marketing. They don’t explicitly explain why the change was made, nor do they highlight the reasons for doing it. To be clear, they don’t lie…they just let a few things unsaid.

You decide…brilliant branding or diabolical branding?

I spent over 25 years in Brand Management. One of the realities of hiring a new brand manager is the first thing he/she will do is change the packaging of the product. It doesn’t matter if the product is successful or not. In some ways, this is similar to a dog or cat marking its territory by pissing on something. The brand manager wants the world to know “This is mine. I did this.”

Our President has a special attraction to renaming things. It started early on when he gave nicknames to people he was campaigning against (e.g., “Crooked Hillary” and “Sleepy Joe Biden”). Here is a compilation of those nicknames (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Donald_Trump ).

But when he became President again, he took his game to the next level.

The biggest name change was renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. But he has not stopped there. Recently he decided he would rename Veterans Day “Victory Day for World War I.” He would also label May 8, known as V-E Day for Victory in Europe, as “Victory Day for World War II,” and vowed to celebrate America’s military wins.

President Trump has seized upon renaming to push forward his view of the world. In some ways, he’s the ultimate marketer. But marketing is not just one-off things like renaming.

As a professional name developer, I too rename a lot of things. But when I do it, I build a name based on solid principles that are based on the strategic foundation of the brand.

I’m not sure “The Great Renamer” can demonstrate the solid strategic principles behind his actions, but I will acknowledge that they make for great headlines!

(A Lesson In Trademark Law)

The Utah Hockey Club has a naming problem.

Rushed into the National Hockey League as an Arizona Coyotes replacement this season, the club decided to use “The Utah Hockey Club” moniker until trademark issues could be resolved on their alternative name choices.

Their original alternative name choices were Yeti (the ownership and fan favorite), Mammoth, Blizzard, Outlaws, Venom and Utah Hockey Club. However, the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected all their submissions. Mammoth and Outlaws were rejected more for clerical issues that are resolvable, despite the fact that both Mammoth and Outlaws are professional lacrosse team names. Yeti was rejected for the likelihood of confusion with YETI® Coolers. In particular, it seems that YETI Coolers, LLC has filed for broad trademark use across many categories, including clothing and apparel which may conflict with potential Utah Yeti hockey apparel.

BTW I’m not a trademark attorney, but my point of view on the Yeti conflict is validated by a real trademark attorney (https://harris-sliwoski.com/blog/utah-yetis-u-s-trademark-lessons-for-all/ for example).

The Utah Hockey Club pivoted to these three alternatives: Utah Hockey Club, Utah Mammoth, and Utah Wasatch (Wasatch is a nearby mountain range). Fans were supposed to vote at the upcoming 4 home games, and the winner would be decided based on the fan vote.

After the first game’s voting, the club removed Utah Wasatch and replaced it with Utah Outlaws (a good decision as nobody outside of a few people in Utah knows what a Wasatch is). The “final three names” are: Utah Hockey Club, Utah Mammoth, and Utah Outlaws. But I bet they would still love to find a way to use Yeti.

So, let’s play the “One of these things is not like the other” game. In considering Yeti, Mammoth and Outlaws, which name would be most confusing to the public.

UTAH YETI HOCKEY vs YETI COOLERS

UTAH MAMMOTH HOCKEY vs. COLORADO MAMMOTH LACROSSE

UTAH OUTLAWS HOCKEY vs. DENVER OUTLAWS LACROSSE

I would argue that Yeti is the least confusing and I’m certain that consumer confusion testing would provide this result. It seems unlikely that YETI Coolers, LLC would field a hockey team, whereas a hockey team called Utah Mammoth could easily be confused with the Colorado Mammoth lacrosse team.

Is this a case of superior intellectual property management by YETI Coolers, or poor intellectual property management by the Denver Outlaws and Colorado Mammoth lacrosse teams?

BTW, shame on the marketing team at YETI Coolers. They failed to convince their management that a joint trademark agreement would generate 20x the benefits for the YETI Coolers brand. Imagine the marketing possibilities!

Thumbzup Logo Per Website

I’m not a big fan of odd spelling of names. Yes, I know using intentionally misspelled names is viewed as a clever thing to do in the startup community (see my previous blog post on this trend).

But what happens when you try to trademark a name that is intentionally misspelled?

Turns out the rules don’t change. The USPTO will apply its standards regardless of spelling. You still have to investigate similarities in terms of appearance, meaning, and sound. Here is an excerpt from the USPTO website that explains the similarity issue.

When you search our trademark database, ask yourself these questions about each trademark you view:

• Is the trademark confusingly similar to yours? Trademarks may be confusingly similar if they look alike, sound alike, have similar meanings, or create similar commercial impressions.
• Are the goods or services related to yours? In other words, could a consumer mistakenly believe the goods or services come from the same source? Goods or services may be related if they’re used or sold together, used by the same purchasers, advertised together, or sold by the same manufacturer or dealer. They don’t have to be in the same international class to be related. 

If you can answer “yes” to both questions for any trademark in our database, check to see if the trademark is live. If so, there may be a likelihood of confusion, which means you might not be able to register your trademark. 

So no, you could not start a technology company called SISCO because it would be viewed as too similar to CISCO^®. A manufacturer of appliances could not choose ELGEE as a name because it is too similar to LG^®.

When I read that Thumbzup^® had been invited to ring the Opening Bell for the NASDAQ exchange, I thought “Great. Another tech company using the intentionally misspelled approach.” My next thought was “good luck getting a trademark on that!” because I thought the name “Thumbs Up” would have been in use already.

Turns out I was wrong. Thumbzup does have a trademark.

But the awarding of a trademark to Thumbzup is probably more likely due to the fact that there were no registered trademarks with a high degree of similarity rather than its misspelling. I’m not saying the misspelling was not a factor, because it probably did help differentiate the name versus the generic saying of “thumbs up.” But I’m sure the same rules about similarity applied in granting the trademark to Thumbzup.

Side note: Thumbzup looks like an interesting company with some unique technologies in the field of social media! Check it out: https://www.thumzupmedia.com/

Spencer County Visitors Bureau

Full disclosure. I’ve been to Santa Claus Indiana, a small town of about 2600 people. It is a big deal if you are a fan of Christmas. And even though I am a professional name developer, I did not know the origin of its name.

Seems obvious, right?

Actually, nobody really knows.

Here is the background. When the town was established in the 1850’s it was first known as Santa Fee. However, the town could not get a post office because it was believed that Santa Fee was too close to an existing town in Indiana, Santa Fe.

There are two theories about how the Santa Claus name was chosen. One theory is that the person who completed the name change application for the post office just wrote Santa Clause as a joke on the naming document. The other theory is that during a Christmas Eve discussion with the public about the name change, the wind blew open the door and a young child shouted “Santa Claus!”.

If I had to choose between a prankster bureaucrat and a small child experiencing the magic of Christmas, I’d side with the small child 10 out of 10 times.

Merry Christmas everybody!

P.S. If you write a letter to Santa and send it to the post office at Santa Claus, Indiana, local residents will write back (the town gets over 20,000 letters to Santa each year)!

HT Morning Brew

Startups have a bad habit of using intentionally misspelled names. This is not a new trend, but the fact that it continues shows their ignorance of the science of branding. Crunchbase looked at names of recently founded startups and showed that founders are still using offbeat spelling in their company names (https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/offbeat-misspelled-names-ai-skild-lyft/).

A 2023 study at The Ohio State University (https://news.osu.edu/unconventional-spellings-are-a-badd-choyce-for-brand-names/) showed that deliberate misspelling of a brand name was almost always a bad idea. One example used the name Clear and Klear for a seltzer, and Clear was overwhelmingly preferred. Researchers concluded that “Results showed that participants thought the unconventional spelling was a gimmick or marketing tactic designed to make the brand seem cool or trendy. They also thought it made the brand seem less sincere – less honest, down-to-earth and wholesome.”

There were exceptions though. The researchers found that deliberately misspelling words can work in some limited cases, such as when the reason for selecting the name is seen as sincere, or when consumers are seeking a memorable experience. In one study, the researchers found that a bar called “Xtra Chilld Lounge” did appeal to consumers looking for a fun, memorable evening.

In my experience, when you use intentionally misspelled names, you create a “mind puzzle” with your branding. Consumer reaction to the mind puzzle ranges from “rejection to acceptance to confusion.” If your misspelling is seen as trivial (such as Klear versus Clear), then the consumers seem to reject it. If your misspelling is clever (but not confusing), the customer will often spend time trying to figure out why the name was chosen, which can lead to higher recall of the name later and positive attributions to the product. The consumer might enjoy the mind puzzle if they don’t have to work too hard to get your point. When consumers solve the puzzle, they will then have a sense of accomplishment because they were able to figure it out. However, when you go too far, consumers may just get frustrated and confused and move on. Finding the sweet spot of intentional misspelling is not easy!

The lesson here is that intentional misspelling is not necessarily a good or a bad thing, but what is important is how the target customer relates to the name and the product itself. Misspelling for the sake of misspelling (or domain acquisition) can be bad, but if the name makes the target customer curious about a product and willing to investigate it further, then misspelling can be good.