What's in a Brand Name?

That which we call a brand by any other name would smell as sweet.  Those of us on the inside know, the value of a name, whether it be provocative, catchy, made up or descriptive, is temporary at best.  The trouble is that to principle stakeholders of a brand, founders, owners, investors, and C-suites, a name either be very personal or overly relied upon.  In truth, a brand or product's name can be useful in the early launch stages as a way of attracting awareness (provocative or made up names inspire the consumer to want to know more, like Yahoo!) or educating the consumer about the product (descriptive names hint to the function within the name, like Build-A-Bear).  However, after the initial PR and press for the brand or product's launch fades away, all that's left is the functionality and value of the actual product.  That's what truly matters, not the name.  Does the name Apple in any way add value to the products it sells that wouldn't exist if the name was Banana or Cherry?  What matters is that they make high quality products.  

Businesses always place far too much importance on names.  That's why it always strikes me as funny when a company either spends thousands developing a name, or better yet, hopes that a new name can save a failed, unwanted or late to the party product.  That's what Comcast appears to be doing.  Noticing that some of it's largest competitors have bundled new services under umbrella names like AT&T's U-Verse and Verizon's Fios, Comcast has decided to rebrand its current suite of offerings as Xfinity.  The problems are as such:

• It's most likely too late to jump on the bundling band wagon craze
• Early and mid adopters who wanted to bundle already have and are in contracts
• Their services haven't changed, so there's no reason for current customers to upgrade accept price, if there is even a price discount
• Since bundling and receiving television and phone digitally over broadband are old concepts, there's no excitement factor for the name the garner

And that's the sad truth of it.  Hopefully Comcast isn't relying on this name to do anything spectacular and realize that they are just playing catch up.  We'll know soon by the amount of marketing and PR they put behind it.