Naming (or renaming) your brand & creating a tagline: a how-to guide

Naming and brand taglines are the first steps in your external messaging process. How to get from A to Name when it comes to naming (or renaming) your brand.

by Anna Bogdanova and Kathryn Reynolds

Your positioning statement and brand’s unique value proposition (UVP), along with your voice, tone, and style guide, are all internal messaging tools or frameworks from which you create all your external messaging.

What do we mean by external messaging? We made a full list here in our first blog post! (Did we miss any? Comment below!)

External messaging includes everything from naming and taglines, to blog content and newsletters, from website content to pitch deck proposals. It’s all the written content that your customer reads as they go through the buyer journey and interact with your brand. We call these “brand touchpoints”.

Your brand name and tagline are some of the first brand touchpoints your customers interact with. So let’s start there, at the very beginning.

Naming (or renaming) guidelines

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, to be fair!

And how does a team decide on a name for their brand? Where do you even start? It might come to you in the middle of the night, or it might take weeks of brainstorming and veto-ing, and coming back to the drawing board again and again.

A name can come from a few different sources:

• it might be descriptive of the product or service,
• it might be an evocative sound or strong image of a brand,
• it might be experiential, ie. related to some kind of experience, or
• it might be an invented word that makes perfect sense for your brand!

So, how do you get from ideas to a name and get there in a team-led way?

Here are some “naming” exercises we’ve used in workshops with our clients:

• Set a naming goal, what do you want to achieve with this name?
• Set considerations, what do you want from the name. As importantly, what do you not want?
• Brainstorm the brand attributes you have established and come up with a list of words through free association.
• Create some two-word descriptions of what it is your company actually does.

Some advice from Prophet on what a name (or rename should be):

• Easy to pronounce
• Easy to spell
• Not used by any other brand, but especially competitors in the same categories and markets
• Short
• Easy to recall
• Not have unintended or negative meanings, including in other languages/cultures
• Broad enough to outlive a product category or a business owner
• Easy to trademark (and still available to trademark)
• Available as a “.com” or “.org” or .edu” URL, depending on the type of brand

Whatever the name, keep Branding Strategy Insider’s advice in mind: always consider your brand’s DNA and your customer’s journey when choosing your name.

Further renaming considerations

Renaming can be a whole other ballgame to the initial naming challenge. Your product or service is already out there, so this needs to be approached carefully.

Here are two important principles to consider when renaming:

#1 Why are you changing the name — what’s the goal?

#2 What will be the impact of this change, looking at all the pros and cons?

Your brand renaming shouldn’t be something you shy away from explaining to your customers. Your customer is part of your buyer journey, so let them know that, and let them know of any changes you are making. Especially something like a rename.

And as Marshall Strategy advises, once you have chosen your company’s brand new name it’s important to own it and to follow through on the renaming transition with confidence. If you don’t believe in your brand name, then why should anyone else?

Taglines (aka the one-line version of your UVP)

Taglines are “an effective way to communicate the brand’s “unique value proposition” powerfully, succinctly and memorably.” — Branding Strategy Insider

What do you need to consider when drafting up your tagline? Your tagline should portray your unique value proposition (UVP) in a few words (or less), like these:

• Bitly: Short links, big results
• Mailchimp: Smarter marketing for big ideas
• Evernote: Your notes. Organized. Effortless.
• Slack: Slack is where work happens.

Taglines versus slogans, what’s the difference?

This gets us sometimes too. KAPOK Marketing has written out a helpful definition to differentiate them. A tagline is a (quasi) permanent reinforcement of your brand, whereas a slogan can be used more temporarily for specific marketing campaigns.

Example of Disneyland’s long-established tagline versus a 2020 slogan:

Disneyland’s permanent tagline is: “The happiest place on Earth.” Read Disney’s story here.

Disneyland Paris’s phased re-opening slogan 2020: “There’s no magic without you.”

Your tagline needs to cover the value of your brand at a much broader level, whereas slogans when used right, can be a very important tool in more specific situations to get across a transitory message.

Getting the name right makes a difference, but it’s not always easy

Putting a name on your brand might require a lot of thought or the name might come to you and your team instantly. Or, you may decide on a name and then change your mind a few weeks (or years) later when it no longer fits or represents your brand. The tagline develops alongside your brand positioning and your UVP and can also be re-developed to fit re-positioning.

The task of naming and giving your brand a tagline is not for the faint-hearted, especially when more than one team member is making the decision. In a situation like this, it can be good to bring in some outside help to workshop your options.

At Shiba500, we have successfully guided our own clients through this process, and we’d be delighted to help you find the perfect name and tagline for your brand.

Previously in our verbal branding series:

Verbal branding: what do your words say about you?

Brand discovery: why would you bother with that?

How to discover your brand identity — step one: soul searching

How to discover your brand identity — step two: market research

Brand messaging: getting your value proposition just right

Brand messaging: Developing your company’s voice and tone, and style guide

Next week’s verbal branding post: is about extending your UVP, and your brand voice, tone, and style into your overall brand content strategy in practical steps.

Shiba500 is a boutique marketing agency that helps startups and scale-ups navigate brand building, storytelling, and growth marketing. We act as a bridge between growth companies and new business opportunities.

Follow us on Instagram

Sign up to receive our insights