Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #2

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #2 -- Customers tend not to remember alpha numeric names.

It’s true that people tend not to remember alpha numeric names.  However, if this guide is true, why do so many companies use abbreviations as their company brand names?  One reason is that end-users, especially Americans, prefer to short-hand their speech.  Generally, people will short-hand names to reduce the number of syllables.  The nine syllable International Business Machines became the three syllable IBM. 

The five syllable Federal Express became the two syllable FedEx.  If the short-handed name has the same meaning to target consumers as the full name, then there’s no danger in a company adopting the short-hand name.  However, if the short-hand name has no meaning to current and/or future target customers and the long-hand name did have meaning, then there’s a risk.

Another example of people short-handing brand names is a brand that I worked on for many years, BFGoodrich Tires.  Those familiar with the brand often refer to it as BFG.  (Three syllables instead of four).  However, the majority of the brand’s target customers don’t have this degree of familiarity with the brand and don’t use the BFG short-hand.  Survey research showed that among target customers there was substantially less association of BFG with being a tire brand than there was with BFGoodrich.

Another reason that short-hand company names have become more popular is to obfuscate the company’s origins.  The worldwide financial services giant, HSBC, wants its target customers to think of it as “The world’s local bank,” not as a bank with locations in Hong Kong and Shanghai (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation). 

DHL wants its target consumer to think of it as “proven reliability” not as a business founded by Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom and Robert Lynn.

It’s interesting that most of the major American advertising agencies violate this guide. For example, the three major agencies making up the Omnicom Group agency holding company are BBDO, DDB, and TBWA. Each of these three agencies are rich in history and have names that are the initials of their founders. DDB was formerly Doyle Dane Bernbach which was named after the three founders of the agency, Ned Doyle, Mac Dane, and Bill Bernbach. Bill Bernback was the creative lead of the agency and the person responsible for transforming advertising from Rosser Reeves-style repetitive hard-sell approach to a soft-sell approach using wit and humor. Examples of this work are the Volkswagen "Think Small" campaign and Avis "We work harder because we're number 2." All of this great history is a brand asset for DDB. However, it's lost in the reduction of Bill Bernbach's name to the letter B in DDB. In my opinion, advertising agencies' use of meaningless letter names reflects that most advertising agencies are specialists in marketing communications rather than marketing generalists. No offense to my many good friends in the agency business, but there is more to marketing than just marketing communications.

If you find yourself in the position of your product names being more memorable than your brand name, then you can use this guide to your advantage.  Acura, the upscale Honda brand in the U.S., found that its products, the Legend and the Integra were remembered by more of its target customers than the Acura name itself.  To get its target consumers to focus more on the Acura brand and less on the model names, Acura switched to an alphabetic model designation – the RL, TL, TSX, etc.