In a recent article from Crain’s Chicago Business, Joseph B. Cahill suggests a bold move for Sears Holdings Corporation – changing their name. Why this bold suggestion? Nothing is working for Sears. They have tried to make acquisitions, switched marketing strategies several times, tested new formats, and reconfigured stores. Sears is a 814-store chain that [...]
Author Archive > Neil
How Naming Can Make or Break a Motion Picture
A recent article on motion picture naming called “What’s In a Name?” came from the Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Dodes. The article gives great examples on how naming affects a motion picture, which we found similar to how naming affects any brand. Below you’ll find various parts of the article that we found interesting to [...]
Internal Naming: Why Naming Contests Suck
More often than not, companies of all sizes, start-ups to billion dollar giants, will attempt to develop a new corporate or product name with an internal team. Clearly many successful names have been developed internally, or by a legendary founder. However, companies should be aware of the many factors and issues, best practice processes, and [...]
Renaming An Existing Brand: Case Study - AfterMath Claim Science
IdeasBIG, the branding sister agency of Modern Marketing Partners, recently took on the challenge of renaming an existing brand. OBJECTIVE: Rename a corporation to achieve a compelling repositioning in a conservative (health insurance) industry and create a tagline that complements the name. BRIEF: A successful, three-year-old company was feeling growing pains with a legacy name Cannon Cost Solutions, based [...]
New Product Launch Checklist
Improving the effectiveness of new product launches is of critical importance to most companies and brands as development costs can be stratospheric, coupled with extremely high failure rates. Some estimates of new product failure as high as 90%! Certainly the new product development process is complex and multi-functional—not just marketing—but typically involving many departments such [...]
Tips for Effective Taglines
Developing effective taglines is a disciplined process that melds insight with positioning strategy and creativity. So what is a tagline, and how can tagline development deliver a breakthrough? Sometimes called tags, positioning taglines, slogans, jingles, unique selling propositions or descriptors, taglines distill your corporate or brand position to a few simple and memorable words—ideally from [...]
5 Steps to an Integrated Brand Identity
A company’s corporate or brand identity is one of its most valuable assets. Consequently, periodic evaluation is recommended to ensure this asset remains relevant, progressive, and reinforcing of desired positioning. By defining identity to include not only logos, but messages, graphic themes and images communicated by a company using numerous mediums and vehicles, it’s clear [...]
Brand Naming Tips: What’s Your Name Type?
Before jumping into brand name development, it’s important to understand the different types of names. Why? Because without this knowledge, there is a tendency only consider certain types of names. In addition, mapping competitor’s name types supports positioning strategy. IDeas BIG categorizes names into three (3) basic types: Literal, Synthesized and Metaphorical. Please note that [...]
10 Steps to Effective Business or Product Naming
Naming a business or product is one of the most important and strategic decisions ever made. No other marketing decision can have as great an impact on success, the level of marketing investment required, or is more expensive to change. In addition, naming is becoming more difficult with record trademark filings and domain registrations. Despite [...]