Yet I've heard it said time and again that naming a business-to-business product is fundamentally different than naming a business-to-consumer product. The conventional wisdom is that b2b names should be more functional and descriptive. B2c names have permission to be more creative.
Hogwash.
It’s my belief that b2b and b2c distinctions are false dichotomies, and all branding is really b2p: business-to-people. Because at the end of the day – and in the morning and all times in-between – all business people are people.
Our brains don’t change when we act as consumers for our companies versus ourselves. The specific criteria for choosing one product over another are certainly different depending on the situation – routers and breakfast cereals are selected for different reasons – but our decision-making rationale and irrationale are the same.
Consider these brand names ostensibly for business audiences. I worked on all except BlackBerry.
BlackBerry: This great name, created by Lexicon where I used to work, proves that a name can be utterly irrational, yet beloved by brow-furrowing businesspeople and bureaucrats the world over. A blackberry is not intrinsically serious, yet the product named after one is. [Note to RIM and Landor: Drop the inter-cap B. It serves no purpose except to distract.]
Bracket: Named by Operative Words, Bracket is a business that helps pharmaceutical clients run clinical trials more effectively and efficiently. It eschews a functional name for one that hints at strength, support and precise delineation. Though just launched, the name has been well-received by Bracket’s pharma clients.
Disappointingly, the client rejected the idea of naming the pens after cocktails (“Gee, a mai tai [highlighter] does sound pretty good about now”), so other solutions were adopted: Exclaim! (highlighter), Gridline (mechanical pencil), Pinwheel (stick pen with spiral pattern on grip), Icebreaker (transparent pen), Symmetry (grip pen), Center Stage (white board marker), Fluent (smooth writing pen), Silhouette (contoured pen) and Motif (retractable pen). The client said that after the pen names changed, sales of those pens immediately increased by “double digits”. If ever there’s a testament to the power of a creative name for business audiences, that is it.
Creative names like these demonstrate that just because your product is intended for a business audience, the product name itself does not have to be all business. Remember that all business people are just people. Develop a great name with people in mind, and it will succeed for everyone.
