Other Naming Services: Brand Name Development

Global naming can be a minefield. Many marketing creatives—even very good ones—tend to think in English, carry American concepts, and develop brand names designed to resonate in “Middle America.”
In addition to NameBridge field-testing, Prisma’s brand name development services help you create effective, inspired global brand names by bringing together creatives and key stakeholders, including:
global marketing experts (yours or ours)
in-country linguists
global design professionals
international trademark counsel

Our Brand Name Development services include:

• Name Creation
• Name Transcreation
• Global Trademark and Domains
• Global Focus Groups
• Global Ideation

Name Creation
Our global creative team can create the right global name for your product or service, one that resonates across languages, cultures and markets.

We start with the development of a creative brief that captures your goals, key concepts and targets, and we create “cultural profiles” of your target audience(s). We then generate an array of names for your consideration, before moving to the NameBridge testing and validation stage.

Name Transcreation
You may already have developed or selected a brand name or names. In that case, we can transcreate your name, making it meaningful for a given target culture or market.

Transcreation is a creative form of translation, close to copywriting, the result of which is a text that is linguistically and culturally “authentic” for specific countries and/or regions. Transcreated material should have a similar impact on the audience in the target country/market as it has in the source.

Certain brand names may be candidates for transcreation, making them much more palatable for the target market or language. In other cases, transcreation may not be the right approach.

We can help guide you through the multilingual minefield so that your brand emerges intact, and with its best foot forward regardless of where you take it.

Global Trademark and Domains
A naming strategy includes trademark review in all key countries and markets. We can manage your international trademark reviews through our global network of partners, and can prepare all necessary documentation and filings in the local language as necessary to ensure your names and trademarks are fully protected around the world.

A well-developed Web domain strategy is also critical to protecting your brand name both at home and in the international marketplace.

We will consult with you on several critical factors to consider as you plan your Web strategy, and suggest best practices for managing your domain names globally.

Global Focus Groups
Focus groups are highly-structured forums to gain deeper insights into consumer thinking, wants and needs. They also present unique challenges around the world, since different cultures think, act and communicate differently from culture to culture.

How does one conduct effective focus groups that cross cultures, languages and markets?

Our dynamic approach to global focus groups bridges across the cultural divide to deliver meaningful insights that highlight differences, similarities, and opportunities for a deeper connection to your global consumers.

Global Ideation

Thinking outside the box is never easy; creating breakthrough ideas is even harder.

Ideation is the process by which individuals or groups generate new ideas and insights.

Global ideation takes that process to a new level, crossing cultural boundaries and leveraging different ways of thinking and seeing, to come up with ideas from outside the cultural box.

Our team of global facilitators specialize in cross-cultural creative thinking techniques which help ideators to think across cultures and tap into culturally specific insights to achieve breakthrough results.

Bottled water? Unheard of in the US beverage market until that simple idea was brought over from Europe.

Red Bull®? From Thailand, and now part of the multi-billion-dollar energy drink category.

Our Five-step Global Ideation Process consists of:

1. Discovery. An Ideation Facilitator works with you to define and shape your goals;
2. Cultural Mapping. The Ideation Faciliator works with our Global Insights Group to map out the cultural landscape for “mining” insights;
3. Ideation. Our Ideation Facilitators lead a structured “mining” process to bring out new ideas and possibilities, working toward the stated goals using an “outside in” approach we call cultural ideating.
4. Distillation follows Ideation and is focused on refining or shaping the ideas into discrete, polished insights.
5. Delivery is an interactive step during which the insights are reviewed with the client, one by one, and assessed for further possible development.

Some of the ways in which Global Ideation can help you include:

• New product/service development
• International expansion
• Brand extension
• Brand localization
• Rebranding for global markets and cultures
• Adjusting claims for new consumer segments
• Developing Web-based marketing strategies (the Web being instantly global)

To learn more about Prisma’s Global Ideation services, contact us.