We are in the word business.

To create engagement we seek out words and imagery to effectively demonstrate the story of our client brands, to attract an audience through a conversation.

As part of this work, we seek the stories behind words and their use through history. Words and their meaning can be tracked through hundreds, often thousands, of years.

WorldWideWords.org is a handy reference for those you wondering about the backstory behind words such as rantipole or honeyfuggle.

Also, take a look at this bibliography of other words sites, with links to a number of helpful resources such as the Online Slang Dictionary.

A hat-tip to our sister naming group, Igor, for the heads-up.

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As a brand consultancy we are in the word business. To create human engagement we seek out words and imagery to effectively demonstrate the story of our client brands, to attract an audience through market conversation.

To further understand how language and conversation work, reach for How Language Works by David Crystal. Described as “the perfect one-volume introduction to the study of language” in the Guardian Unlimited, there is more in this review from the New York Times:

When I first began reading David Crystal’s “How Language Works,” I was a bit perplexed. It seemed to be moving too fast and too abruptly through topics and sub-topics. There were no transitions and no chatty digressions. It was like being in the back seat of a taxi whose driver had his foot to the floor.

Then I got it. What Mr. Crystal, widely regarded as a leading authority on linguistics, has done is to assume the role of a master distiller of knowledge who takes the whole subject of language and pours it into 73 clearly labeled bottles all beginning with the word “How” — as in, “How we use tone of voice,” “How children learn to mean,” “How conversation works.”

For those interested in the power of language and conversation in brand strategy, add this book to your reading list.

Or listen to us demonstrate Own The Conversation® Strategy within a matter of seconds.

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A handy reference for those you wondering about the origin of company brand names. Check it out in combination with this additional etymology reference, discussed here.

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As a brand consultancy we are in the word business. To create human engagement we seek out words and imagery to effectively demonstrate the story behind any brand.

As part of this work, we often conduct etymological studies of the history, development, and origin of words. Words and their meaning in any language can be tracked through hundreds, often thousands, of years.

More than a dictionary or thesaurus, etymology is an important part of our brand development quiver.

In addition to any number of hardcover etymology reference works, including this one, here’s an example of an etymology dictionary online.

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Too often people buy a “branding” service that is nothing more than advertising. And, the two things aren’t the same. Advertising can reinforce your brand, but it can’t create it and it most definitely isn’t the brand itself.

Another respected voice agrees:

As brand has become more central to the success of most major clients, it has moved further away from the core competencies of advertising agencies.

Niall FitzGerald identified this separation while he was chief executive officer at Unilever. Nine years ago, he gave the keynote speech to the European Association of Advertising Agencies and noted the “alarming discrepancy developing between what our brands are going to need and what contemporary agencies are good at.” His prediction has proved to be accurate.

Today, brand strategy requires a fundamental knowledge of business operations, finances, employees and internal culture - subjects most ad agencies, which often struggle even to understand how their clients make money, are ignorant of.

There are whole subsets of brand strategy that most agencies are completely unaware of. Consider brand architecture, for example. It is probably the single-most important brand issue for most major branded companies, yet most ad agencies would have trouble even identifying what the concept means, let alone advising their client on a major brand consolidation or co-branding strategy.

This is not to deride or diminish advertising agencies. There is plenty of money to be made and work to be done in the area of marketing communications. Indeed, with the gradual disintegration of terrestrial TV advertising and the fragmentation of the market, there has arguably never been a more challenging or interesting time to work in advertising.

But it is time for agencies to recognise that [brand consultancies] offer inherently superior systems, people and solutions when it comes to branding. Just as I would never recommend that a client work with [a brand consultant] to create a communications campaign, I would be equally aghast if they asked an ad agency to work on their brand strategy.

In the long and twisting journey to building a brand, the external communications stage usually occurs late in the day, if at all. Consequently, the initial research, positioning and engagement work will always occur long before an ad agency has any reason to become involved.

Read more here.

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A brand is the most valuable asset of any organization:

Chief executive officers (CEOs) around the world today believe that the brand should drive the business. This is a far cry from the days when most corporate leaders subscribed to the view that the business should drive the brand.

This is borne out in a report in the McKinsey Quarterly. According to the report, in 1984 and just 22 years ago, when the top 150 companies in the world were valued, 75 per cent of their worth was ascribed to hard assets. Today those companies’ hard assets account for only 36 per cent of their equity; the remaining 64 per cent are intangible assets. And leading the list of those intangibles is the brand.

Read more about how your brand should drive your business here.

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Our online detectives uncovered this source for brand strategy and other communications resources throughout Asia.

Yes, we are included.

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We previously wrote about how to size up a branding firm. Next question? How best to choose a branding firm.

Organizations are often sold a “branding” service which is nothing more than, for example, advertising, public relations, or some other discipline. The reason is that many identity/design firms, public relations groups, advertising agencies, research houses, architectural firms, human resource specialists, events managment firms, and business consultants offer “branding” services. But they do so from where they sit, so they can sell you their core expertise — their logo design, public relations, advertising, research, architecture, HR, business conference management, and business consulting services. Most of these firms will claim to be brand experts, but the reality is this: branding is a by-product of what they do.

When faced with such options, ask questions such as these:

As suggested previously, how do you define the term brand?
What are the fundamentals of a brand?
Have you ever developed a client “brand” without a new logo?
Without a slogan?
Without advertising?
Without a press kit?
Without also offering new website design?
Without also offering a new HR system?
Without also offering a new organizational planning process?
How do you differentiate your firm from the competition?
How do you apply the fundamentals to branding your firm?

Better yet, reduce the query to this:

Tell us, how did you brand yourself, and how does your own name and branding demonstrate your ability to help us with ours?

If a coherent answer is not offered within a few seconds, you are not dealing with a brand strategist, but rather a firm that uses the label loosely. The reason is the discipline of branding requires skill sets different from those of advertising, PR, or any of the disciplines mentioned above.

So next time, get a true brand strategy consultant to create your brand. Otherwise your branding will look like this, or this, or this.

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Another volume to add to your reading list in understanding effective branding is Gerald Zaltman’s How Customers Think.

Zaltman, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, speaks in his book of finding the information crucial to understanding the mind of the market. It’s all about getting at what people don’t know they know, in finding the unspoken drivers that prompt awareness and conversion resulting in a purchase decision, and in creating the ability to see yourself as others see you.

Robert Burns would be proud.

For us, How Customers Think is the seminal volume to which we point our clients if they wish to further understand qualitative consumer research.

Or, you can listen to us demonstrate it in less than thirty seconds.

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This column in Business Week identifies the first skill a client should look for in a branding firm:

Defining “brand” should be job No. 1 for marketers who want to get their ideas straight. Otherwise, they’re just blowing hot air.

Seems obvious. However, the world is littered with firms offering what are labeled as branding services inept at branding themselves.

The American Marketing Association does not help. Their definition of brand?

A name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name.

We see the answer more simply:

Your brand is your promise. How you keep it means everything.

The ability to define brand is the “canary in the coal mine,” as shared by this writer:

If you’re working with agencies who aren’t clear-headed enough to distinguish between a brand and its derivatives, how will they have the clarity to advise you on building a market? Get rid of them and find a marketer who can think straight. We’ll all be better off.

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One of the most thoughtful reads we have come across is Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. For those, like us, who are Gladwell fans, you know he is also the author of The Tipping Point.

Blink is about thinking that occurs in the blink of an eye, using the same mental shorthand at play with effective branding. As described on Mr. Gladwell’s website:

“When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, Blink is a book about those two seconds…”

We often say that whether a product, a university, a nonprofit, a Fortune 500, or a tourist destination, each has all of a few seconds to convince a prospect to invest their time in listening to you further, and how an audience thin-slices the information you offer.

For more about thin-slicing and rapid cognition, grab this excellent book.

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Three B-school professors from Stanford, Korea University, and Yonsei University, developed a method of calculating brand equity growth based on investment in brand strategy.

According to this report from Stanford University, the three correctly point to a mistake commonly made among those confusing branding with, for example, the corporate sales function: “Having a better product or a larger sales force is not brand equity.”

The report goes on to say:

Simple brand awareness is one source of brand equity. “If you can get your name to pop up in people’s minds when they think of the product category, you’ve won a big part of the battle.”

Exactly.

Which is why in ANY branding or rebranding project it is crucial to focus on the brand tip of the spear, as discussed previously on these pages. Only through awareness is it possible to engage a prospect in conversation.

Great brand strategy in and of itself creates awareness without, for example, advertising. Skeptical? Just ask Amazon. Or Google. Or Flickr. As each will tell you, brand awareness, and profit growth, IS mighty sexy.

You can read more in “An Approach to the Measurement, Analysis, and Prediction of Brand Equity and its Sources,” published in the September 2005 issue of Management Science.

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We found this country slogan analysis performed by the Wall Street Journal.

From Incredible India to Uniquely Singapore, each of these place brands make the often repeated mistake in believing that cheerleading is branding. An approach of “let’s trump the competition by use of a chest thumping slogan” is a zero-sum game. The reason is any nation competing for business development and tourism dollars can trot out a one-up message such as Korea’s Something More.

Trumpeting a country or other place brand as unique does not make it so, as any effective brand strategy offers a demonstration rather than an explanation of uniqueness.

In addition, each of these exotic and dynamic slogans are all about me, me, me…rather than about the tourist or business audience a country seeks to attract. The only way such messages have any chance for a cultural breakthrough is if they are supported by large advertising spends over a number of years. For any country seeking a breakthrough onto the global stage, an advertising strategy is a money loser.

The solution is for government leaders and tourism officials to grasp the stark difference between advertising and branding. Unless they wish to don those cute little cheerleader outfits.

In commenting on the many problems facing General Motors, we excerpted a portion of a column authored by Jack Trout in Forbes.

In 1981, Jack Trout and his partner at the time, Al Ries, published what would become the classic book on the topic of brand positioning, Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind. As a retail company CEO earlier in my career, struggling with a real world business problem, Positioning opened the door to an entirely new way of thinking about marketing, and the realization that the three advertising / PR agencies our company was then working with were incapable of the critical thinking necessary for world class brand development. Shortly after reading the book, we fired each of the agencies.

Branding was so different from advertising, and from public relations; the realization was like a bolt out of the blue. This simple realization changed a company’s fortunes, and it changed a career.

The book purchased some years ago is still around. It’s since become a dog eared volume filled with scribbled margin notes, and remains a great read.

Similar to the book, in the Forbes column Mr. Trout offers these contemporary nuggets on positioning and brand extension:

A successful brand has to stand for something. And the more variations to attach to it, the more you risk standing for nothing. This is especially true when what you add actually clashes with your perception. If Altira’s Marlboro stands for cowboys out in Marlboro Country, how can it sell Marlboro Menthol or Marlboro Ultra Light cigarettes? Real cowboys don’t smoke Menthols or Ultra Lights.

Should Wal-Mart Stores try to sell more up-market products to compete with Target? No, that’s not its market.

Should Porsche risk its sports car image by selling SUVs? No, it’s an iconic sports car brand.

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The naming conventions of auto makers are the topic of this story in the Wall Street Journal:

For decades auto makers preferred to give comprehensible names to their cars. To lend an air of prestige, Lincoln called its top-of-the-line model the Town Car. Cadillac was already playing that game, with models including the DeVille and Eldorado. But in the past several years, car companies, particularly luxury auto makers, have favored combinations of letters and numbers, like the BMW X5 and Lexus LS 450. Their thinking is that this builds the image of a whole brand, not just one model.

But with a finite number of letters available, and some of them way sexier than others, car makers find it more and more difficult to think up letter combinations they can call their own and that haven’t been taken by products in other industries.

This approach to product naming is often copied in other industries, such as home builder products emulating the BMW 3/5/7 series naming architecture.

It’s a system calculated to direct brand equity to the umbrella brand such as Audi, Lexus or Mercedes Benz, rather than to a particular model, and in stark contrast to, for example, GM’s naming convention. It’s an effective strategy owing to its simplicity.

When competitors become copycats, however, those who do it first usually win the hearts and minds of consumers. Which means Bayerische Motoren Werke AG is feeling good about their naming architecture, first used in 1929 for the second car produced by the company, the BMW 3/15.

As far back as 1903, an automotive manufacturer used an alphabet naming system. Today, Henry Ford would feel right at home.