You don’t need to be a career marketer to know how important branding is to your business.  Colors, logo, tone, culture, mission—all of these and more represent who you are to the world.

But, it all starts with a name.  Strong, catchy names can perform up to 33% better on the stock market than weak ones.  I’ve yet to see data suggesting the same for orange versus blue.

Branding internal departments may be important to your business for marketing, employee, or customer success reasons as well.  Coming up with an impactful moniker for your business unit (BU) shouldn’t be a dart-throwing exercise.  It should receive the same care you’d give to naming your whole shop.

There’s a lot of material out there about how to brand your company, but not a lot about branding your BUs.  So, I’m going to give that a little love today using a case study of one of my own projects.

Background

One of the world’s premier CRM services contains a group dedicated to bringing to bear the full power of the company’s resources for its top clients.  Unfortunately, the BU’s name had lost its appeal after a few years for various reasons:

• It didn’t adequately reflect the team’s function and importance.
• It wasn’t “sexy”—i.e., employees didn’t aspire to join the team.
• It confused customers since its acronym resembled that of a new sales approach that had quickly become embedded into the business lexicon.

Strategy

Branding, or rebranding in this case, always begins with thinking critically about the business.  We considered four main areas.

Venture

Since your name should be fit for purpose, re-establish that purpose first.  We took stock of the broader organization (i.e., mission, audience, product) and then reflected on how the BU fit into it (i.e., role).

Value Proposition

Your role is your function, but your value prop is your benefit to stakeholders.  These stakeholders can be both internal and external, as in our case where client customers received added support from the BU.

Brand

Account for all aspects of the brand.  Corporate ethos, long-term marketing campaign, characteristics of the individual BU—it was critical for us to factor in all of these types of things.

Name

“Namestorming” should be just as practical of a step as Venture, VP, and Brand.  There are at least 15 different types of naming conventions.  Some we crossed off right away as poor fits for our group.  Examples of off-brand approaches included things such as surnames (e.g., Ford) and invented names (e.g., Kodak).

In general, you want to avoid choices that would be considered weak or even neutral in your specific industry.  Take a random word like “Sunflower” – sweet for a line of infant products, unmitigated disaster for a bodybuilding supplement.

Rule of thumb:

• Weak names undermine your position, send the wrong message, and invite questions or even derision.
• Neutral names fail to distinguish you, lack appeal, and are hard to build a brand around.
• Strong names convey culture, speak to your audience, and offer recognition and differentiation.

Methodology

These guardrails begin turning an otherwise subjective task—choosing a name—into an objective one.  We took this further by building a scorecard.  Based on our strategy, our main categories were Clarity, On Brand, and Originality, each containing relevant criteria tied directly to the business.  For instance, On Brand included the following criteria:

• Generates excitement among an employee base accustomed to an innovative, uplifting culture.
• Demonstrates authority and reliability among a blue-chip roster of brand customers.
• Integrates its primary in-market campaign thematic.

We weighted each line item (eight total for this one) according to which features were most important to the client.  This also helped sanity-check the model.  Criteria for Originality made up less than 20% of the overall score, whereas Clarity was worth nearly half.  That made sense based on their existing challenge and general priorities.

Results

Clear trends emerged from running our 66(!) potential names through the scorecard:

• Top naming conventions were descriptive, symbolic, and acronym.
• Names that were too business-jargony on one end or too abstract on the other didn’t perform well.
• Those originally considered exciting and catchy scored poorly because they were ultimately off-brand.

The card gave us a usable consideration set.  We plugged the top 15 into a scatterplot to evaluate them across all three categories at once and then presented the five strongest options.  The BU ended up choosing the top-ranked name.  As final steps, we helped create the look and feel associated with the new name and then built the dog-and-pony presentation to shop it around internally.

The great part about this process is that it really gets you thinking more deeply about your business than you may have to that point.  And don’t let all the steps and metrics fool you.  This can (dare I say should) be a fun process for everyone involved.

Including your consultant.  Naturally.

Strategies, scorecards, and scatterplots, oh my!  If the time’s come to build or refine your own brand, let’s connect to kick around some ideas (or 66).