- With over 10,000 brand names registered worldwide every day, developing a brand name requires a methodology that goes beyond providing a list of names or brainstorming.
- The main advantage of working with a professional agency is that you get a choice of possible names that are free of rights, i.e. that you can register on a trademark register*** and that gives you exclusive use of your word mark in the desired product classes and markets.
- A professional agency therefore incorporates a legal process into its methodology (see slide 3).
- A professional agency will also check the linguistic and semantic validity of your brand name in the desired languages and markets – i.e. that your brand name has no undesirable connotations in the languages covering the desired territories.
- A naming agency integrates the expertise needed to meet the 4 criteria of brand validity: marketing, linguistics, semantics and legal.
Trademark registers
- Swiss Federal Office of Intellectual Property www.Ige.ch
- Swiss Trademark Register www.swissreg.ch
- International Trademark Register www.wipo.int
5 pitfalls to avoid
- If the agency doesn’t include identical legal checks as well as a minimum of linguistic and semantic checks, they’re not professionals and you’re wasting your time and, above all, your money.
- Make sure the agency is professional, with creatives from language/literacy backgrounds and not graphic designers working on names.
- For an international brand, make sure the agency has a sufficient pool of naming creatives – you need a minimum of 500 possible name candidates to get around the legal hurdle – at the end of the legal process, only 10% will be registrable.
- Naming requires cross-disciplinary expertise in marketing, linguistics/languages, intellectual property and trademark law, which justifies the high cost of developing a brand name.
- The naming process requires criteria defined in a concept board upstream of the creative process, so that the selection of names is not limited to a “like – dislike” of each individual, but to the alignment of a team around a common ambition.
The brand development process
- Concept board + International creation, 600 / 800 name variations
- First selection within Admarka, First presentation to JTI – 60 names, First selection with client
- Second creation – creation recentering, Legal check at the identical, Second presentation and selection with client
- Final selection of 3-5 names, Full legal check, Linguistic & semantic checks
- Name registration, Name argumentation, Name Design
Get quote in naming agency
To draw up an accurate quote, the naming agency needs the following information:
- Description of the activity or product classes concerned
- Communication on the markets targeted by the trademark registration – either national (Switzerland), European or international.
- Clarification of the purpose of the brand name development – i.e. product/service brand, corporate brand.
In fact, the pool of candidate names is much larger for an international brand than for a national brand, because of the legal obstacles posed by names already registered. This process becomes even more complicated if the brand name is to represent a company name, which will also be registered in the commercial registers of the countries/markets concerned.
