A couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the challenge and importance of naming a company, and the role of a company’s name in positioning it in the minds of customers. If memory serves me, the article was focusing on naming a new enterprise, but it seems to me to be equally relevant in modifying or renaming a company.

The gist of the piece was basically that one should give the name of a nascent business more than a little thought before you invest in a logo, stationery, signage, ads and a website. Does that seem like a “Well…duh!” to you? If so, you might be surprised that – in my experience anyway – business folk put more effort into naming their bowling teams than they do to naming their businesses.

When driving through this part of the world – Sonoma County to be exact – one will note the increasing density of fir trees, redwoods, cedar, pines and the like as one progresses north. Years ago some real estate promoter seeking to glorify the locale coined the term “Redwood Empire” – a phrase that would be equally appropriate for any of the coastal lands stretching from Big Sur to Valdez, Alaska. Still, countless businesses have adopted Redwood Empire or Redwood this or that for their moniker. In like fashion, because Sonoma County is one of several counties immediately north of the San Francisco Bay, innumerable businesses dub themselves North Bay something or other.

And whose business is it anyway what anyone calls their company? If you say, it’s their business I’d completely agree. So why comment? Because mundane, unimaginative names make a business invisible – or worse – cause it to be confused with another unrelated concern. What would you think if the entire 6^th grade roll call began with the name Empire? As in, Empire Jones, Empire Gonzales, Empire Fredricksen, Empire Rosenblatt, etc.? Make it kind of hard to summon kids individually, wouldn’t it?

Naming a company is a great opportunity to begin a process that is essential in a market crowded with competition – the process of differentiation. Personally, I think a visit to the Internet or the Yellow Pages is a prudent place to start any name search, with the idea that any name you find there should not be your first choice, and any name you find there more than once should be totally off limits.

There are a couple of time honored ways to proceed: One is create a new word, or neologism. Also one can use words out of context – non sequiturs. And, of course you can use personal names.

Neologisms – some famous examples include Kodak, Xerox, Clorox and Jacuzzi to name a few. One word of caution if you are going to take this route – do some research beforehand. Just because something is new to you doesn’t mean it’s new to everyone else.

Non-Sequiturs – the world-famous on-line purveyor of nearly everything, Amazon, comes immediately to mind. The Internet is full of examples: Google, Yahoo, YouTube, eBay…

Personal Names – that’s what we did when naming the current iteration of our company some years ago. Rustad is a fairly uncommon name in these parts, so Rustad Marketing had the virtue of being unique. If your surname is more common, you can use a first or middle name if they are more distinctive.

Or course you not only want your name to be unique but once your company starts to make money, you want to prevent your competitors from copying it. That’s what Trademarks are for. If you intend to apply for a trademark I suggest you check out www.uspto.gov beforehand. They have a great little tool that allows you to research existing trademarks. Also, visit www.godady.com and do search on URLs (.com, .org, etc.) before you get too far down the naming road.

Whatever you choose to do, when all is said and done, it’s the product or service which you deliver that gives name its real meaning and value.

Make no mistake about it. Logos are the hardest “easy” thing to do in the area of branding and/or graphic design. Now, every graphic design / branding professional knows that logos are very difficult – in part because people freight them with such import.

I used the word “easy” because so many people seem to think that logos are the perfect DIY project. Why hire an “expensive” (read: over-priced) professional when all you have to do is just put your business name in some cool font, add some clip art and slap it all together courtesy of the free graphics program that came with their computer?  Here’s the challenge: Because we live in a media saturated world, all of us – graphic design pros and laypeople together – can tell the difference between professional and home-made whether it be ads, labels, TV commercials, book covers, brochures and – of course – logos.

And here’s the reality that goes with the challenge: Unless you’re a professional designer, you’re fooling yourself that you can do a professional-looking logo. To use one of my favorite analogies; when appearance counts, people who count on having an attractive appearance hire a professional. In other words, they don’t cut their own hair.

Okay, if I’ve convinced you to hire a pro, here are a few simple rules that will help you get the best result without making the designer wish that he or she had chosen a different line of work. 

Rule One: Don’t over think the “marketing” power of a logo, which is to say, the logo’s ability to sell the purpose and value of your product or service. Some of the logos of the world’s most famous and successful companies really have no marketing significance whatsoever. Consider the Mercedes Benz star, Google’s “circus” letters, Walt Disney’s stylized handwriting, to name a few logos that lack a marketing message. Also, consider this – without looking it up, can you recall Amazon’s logo?  

Rule Two: Concentrate on logo basics. For my purpose I’ll focus on three: differentiation, professional execution and attractiveness. I wouldn’t dare attempt a definitive list of logo features and necessities. My purpose here is to offer guidance to the majority of small to medium-sized businesses who are confronting the challenge of created a new logo without throwing themselves upon the tender mercies of a self-important Branding Company. 

Logo Basics: Ultimately, the function of a logo is to differentiate one enterprise from another so the first job of a logo is to be distinctive. That is to say, a company’s logo should not be easily confused with someone else’s logo. Next, the logo needs to look “professional” because it is supposed to represent a professional organization. Lastly, a logo should be attractive – whether it’s elegant, amusing, friendly, appealing depends on the enterprise. 

Beyond these three basics, everything else is subjective, and people being the individuals they are, it’s often difficult to achieve consensus, much less agreement, about any one design. In case you didn’t pick it up, this is a big hint – don’t create a logo by committee because the process of reaching consensus will kill any originality or spontaneity the design might have had. The reason for this is simple: the compromises necessary to achieve consensus among people with different tastes and agendas most often creates what I call a “Franken-logo.” 

The way to manage everyone’s input is to create some simple criteria that everyone agrees on. Doing this often results in so much blood-letting that the survivors want to get as far away from the rest of the logo process as they. Once you have defined the criteria for the logo design, designate someone to hire and deal with the vendor from whom you get some designs – the number of which is generally limited by time, budget or both.

The resulting designs that meet the agreed-upon criteria are presented to the approval group with the proviso that they must pick one and, no, they cannot graft elements from one to another…remember, “Franken-logo.”  The winning candidate is the company’s logo. If no candidate wins out start the process all over, perhaps reviewing the design criteria and extracting elements that produced results on which no one could agree. One final word. Once the new logo is adopted, prepare yourself for an onslaught of Monday morning quarterbacking. The new logo will be an unwelcome guest – perhaps for years – until the time comes to get a new logo and then all of the former nay-sayers will tell you how much they loved the old one.

The other day I was taking a coffee break with a fellow who is as passionately anti-business as I am passionately pro-business. Some day I’ll write about why I love Capitalism, if not necessarily some capitalists, but this topic is about the one thing that my companion and I totally agreed on. Namely those corporations have no soul.

Now before you get all red in the face, please note that I’m not saying that the PEOPLE who inhabit corporations have no souls. That is, unless they give their souls up in service of the corporation’s fiscal goals…not to mention their personal wealth. Think Enron. No, I’m talking about a how legal concept can have both good and bad consequences. Imagine that…

As any first year business student knows, the law treats corporations as if they were living people, in effect giving an idea…life…in fact a potentially immortal life. A corporation is not only the legal equivalent to a human being it can theoretically go on forever – long outliving its founders many generations over.

But in giving corporations life, in the legal sense anyway, the Law couldn’t imbue them with a moral core. Vacuous Mission Statements and intricate corporate bylaws not withstanding, all too many corporations lack a genuine commitment to any concept beyond their survival and (hopefully) growth, and to any real people beyond their stockholders.

Question: What do you call an entity that can’t die but has no soul? The word “vampire” comes to mind. And like vampires, corporations can and do regularly refresh themselves on the blood of the living. “Good morning, Dracula Corporation, a subsidiary of Vlad the Impaler Worldwide. How may we bleed you?”

“Yah, yah! What does this have to do with branding?” says the only person who hasn’t stalked from the room. Here’s what…

As any soul-less entity might do in order to avoid calling negative attention to himself some corporations will go to great lengths to hide the truth about their condition. Oft times this takes the form of a disingenuous or outright false brand-marketing campaign. Fortunately (especially for the concept of marketing) this sort of propaganda always fails in the process often doing more damage to the corporation’s reputation than would have occurred had the organization merely gone about its survival without attempting to convince us that it was acting for our benefit.

If you have the unenviable task of marketing a company whose sole focus is its own survival, its better to trumpet product virtues, wax poetic about corporate growth, or show pictures of the palatial vacation homes owned by the CEO and Board Members and be done with it. At least, your campaign will have the virtue of being honest, if not particularly humane or compelling.

But if you’re charged with the task of creating a brand that resonates with people, or sending a message that creates a relationship between your company and customers, best base it on a true connection with, and care for, real people’s needs. In other words, to touch another human you have to communicate your humanity. Of course that means you better have some humanity to communicate.

At this point, a good didactician would have a cautionary tale to spin about how this or that company cratered its stock price and reputation with an egregiously expensive and gaseous ad campaign. Anyone who lived through the “dot-bust” should be able to recall many, but I’d rather focus on a business that I’ve known for 20 years and had some small role in influencing: Bubbies Pickles, www.bubbie.com.

Bubbies is owned and operated by John and Kathy Gray, bankers by training who decided to try their hand as entrepreneurs back in the middle-late ‘80’s. Prior to that I’d already known John for 15 or so years.

Since the Bubbies business was functionally bankrupt when they bought it, John and Kathy have created a genuine success story and in the process survived countess near (business) death experiences. They’ve done it all by being authentic, honest and humane.

Though the Bubbies name preceded their ownership, they transferred the brand’s persona, Bubbie (Yiddish for grandma), to that of Kathy’s immigrant grandmother who also happened to be “Bubbie.” After that, they proceeded to base their product, marketing and business decisions on the ethos of a smart, determined, kind-hearted, resourceful, no nonsense, tradition-loving matron.

It doesn’t hurt that they’re both warm and intelligent people, but the beauty of John and Kathy’s brand-building is that it has always reflected a genuine love for the products they make and the people who eat them.

To anyone who wants to build a successful brand that resonates with current customers and generates new ones daily I would say, “Go forth and do likewise.”