Crowd-Sourced Branding Is Not Your Friend

Early in my career, I learned a lesson about brand strategy that has stayed with me for decades. The company I worked for at the time was preparing to introduce its first industrial Drop-on-Demand small-character inkjet printer. This was a significant product launch for the company, and it needed a name. So, they held a contest.

Employees submitted ideas. Some were pretty good. Some were…less good. And this was an acronym-happy company, as many were back in the day.

The winning name was SCI FI 3200. SCI FI stood for Small Character Inkjet for Industry. On paper, I suppose you could see the logic. It described the product, created a convenient acronym, and had a futuristic sound. There was just one problem. Nobody had started with the brand strategy.

When the brand team inherits the decision

Once the name had been selected, it became my department's job to build the branding around it. That meant developing the visual identity and thinking through the logo, packaging, advertising campaigns, photography, media opportunities, and all the other pieces needed to introduce an important new product to the market.

We weren't being asked, "What should this product represent, and how can the name help us communicate that?" We were essentially being asked, "Here's the name. What can you do with it?" Those are very different assignments.

A strategic naming process should consider the audience, competitive environment, product positioning, differentiation, future product architecture, visual possibilities, legal considerations, and the story the company wants the market to understand. Instead, one of the most consequential brand decisions had already been made before the people responsible for developing the brand system had much opportunity to influence it.

Then we saw the product.

SCI FI meets reality

I still remember the first time the photographer and I got a good look at the 3200. We just sat there for a moment.

For a product called SCI FI, it looked remarkably like a prop from an old episode of Doctor Who. It was essentially a large stainless-steel box with a too-small screen centered on the top. This was what we had to make look futuristic.

So, we got creative. There was gel lighting. There was dramatic photography. I seem to remember fog making an appearance. We worked very hard to make that decidedly un-sexy metal box look sexy.

And to be clear, that work had value. Good creative direction can absolutely change how a product is perceived. But creative execution shouldn't have to compensate for strategic decisions that were made without considering what comes next.

And then came the trademark

There was another problem waiting for us. As we worked through the trademark and legal process, the SCI FI name apparently created a conflict with the Sci-Fi Channel. The name couldn't remain SCI FI as we had originally envisioned it. To differentiate the wordmark, we were required to close the space and add periods between the letters.

SCI FI became S.C.I.F.I.

Suddenly, a name that had been selected through an internal contest was dictating not only our positioning, but the visual treatment of the brand itself. And S.C.I.F.I. 3200 wasn't exactly the cleanest name to build a visual identity around.

Fortunately, we had paused before mass production to make sure the legal clearance was complete. We didn't have warehouses full of packaging or stacks of collateral that had to be thrown away and recreated. That part of the process worked exactly as it should have. It reinforced the larger lesson.

A name isn't just a name.

Brand strategy shouldn't begin after the name is chosen

I've seen versions of this problem many times since. Someone names the company before thinking about positioning. A leadership team falls in love with a tagline before talking to customers. Everyone in the company gets a vote on the new logo. Or a committee tries to make a brand decision by finding the option nobody strongly objects to.

The result is often something acceptable. And "acceptable" is a low bar for such an important business asset.

Good brand strategy requires input. It may require a lot of input. Leadership, sales teams, customer-facing employees, subject-matter experts, and customers themselves can all provide information that makes the strategy better. But input and decision-making aren't the same thing.

The people contributing ideas don't necessarily have the same understanding of the competitive landscape, customer perceptions, brand architecture, positioning, trademark considerations, search implications, or creative system that the people responsible for brand strategy should bring to the decision.

That doesn't make their ideas bad. It means ideas need to be evaluated within a strategy. Collaboration is useful, but consensus is not a strategy.

This is where I think companies sometimes confuse gathering input with making a strategic brand decision. You want people involved. You want to uncover the language employees use, the questions customers ask, the reputation the company has earned, and the aspirations leadership has for its future.

Those are valuable inputs.

But asking everyone, "What should we call it?" is different. So is asking everyone to vote on five logos without giving them a meaningful framework for evaluating those choices.

A brand strategist's job isn't simply to collect preferences and determine which option gets the most votes. The job is to understand the business well enough to establish criteria for the decision.

• What does the name need to communicate?
• Who needs to understand it?
• What position do we want to occupy?
• How will it work within the company's existing brand architecture?
• Can people pronounce and remember it?
• Does it create unintended associations?
• Can we reasonably own it?
• What happens when we turn it into a visual identity, a website, packaging, a trade-show booth, a sales presentation, or an advertising campaign?
• And has anyone checked whether we can even legally use it?

Those questions are much less exciting than a company-wide naming contest. They are also much more likely to produce a brand that works.

Strategy gives creativity somewhere to go

I don't tell this story because I think the people who submitted names all those years ago shouldn't have been involved. And I certainly don't tell it because I think every creative decision needs to be made by one person behind a closed door. Quite the opposite.

Some of the best strategies come from listening broadly. But someone still needs to connect what you learn to the business objective, the audience, and the larger system the brand must live within.

Looking back, what strikes me about the SCI FI 3200 was that the entire sequence was backward. Yes, the name was awkward, and its appearance wasn't particularly futuristic. The chosen name became a literal guardrail for the strategists.

We did what good creative teams do. We figured it out, made the photography work, developed the identity, and navigated the trademark complication. We built a system around the decision we'd been given.

But imagine starting the other way around.

• Understand the product
• Understand the customer
• Understand the competitive landscape
• Define what the product needs to mean in the market
• Establish the naming criteria
• Check the practical and legal constraints
• Then start generating names

That's brand strategy. Because the best time to bring in the brand strategist is before everyone starts voting.