We know that naming is hard, and we realize that nothing new has been created since Shakespeare, but this name does draw an awful lot of attention to itself as a made up name (as opposed to the product it is naming).

Partly because of some other high profile rebrandings to made up names starting with A:

formerly Andersen Consulting

formerly Philip Morris Companies, Inc.

formerly Norwich Union

And partly because of the very public failed rebranding of another venerable British institution, originally:

Then:

And now:

But maybe those are cheap shots. There’s nothing inherently wrong with brand names that start with A. In fact they have a few things going for them:

• Alphabetically speaking, they get your organization or product near the front of the line
• They can convey a vague, if forced, feel of contemporaneity – especially if they start with Av
• They can make for a nice, gentle, non-threatening brand name and identity

And as the name for a program having to do with flight, Avios clearly makes sense. But is it effective enough to ditch the Executive Club and Iberia Plus names?

Yes.

The facts that they now want BA program members to call them ‘points’ instead of miles’, that British Airways needs to start finding more ways for people to offload all of the 100k mile awards they’ve accumulated with new credit cards recently and that British Airways and Iberia merged early this year (merged as an enterprise, but didn’t merge their airline brands) mean that the company had two choices:

1. Keep separate program names, try to extend their equity beyond simply flights and resign themselves to the user-unfriendliness of the name Executive Club in other languages.
2. Come up with a new name that could potentially extend beyond the individual airline brands and even beyond flights, and that speakers of multiple languages could easily recognize and remember.

Name changes are hard, but let’s not forget that in this case British Airways and Iberia have not only the email and physical addresses of their members, they have their rapt attention (nobody ignores changes to their mileage program. NOBODY!).

American mobile service provider AT&T has announced that it will be launching its new 4G network in 5 cities this summer. Except that AT&T already has a network that it calls 4G – but that one is currently an HSPA+ network, which is technically 3G. And the new one is an LTE network, which is technically called 3GPP and “does not fully comply with the IMT Advanced 4G requirement.” And also the new “4G” network might not actually be as fast as the old “4G” network.

All clear? Of course not, but that’s actually great news for AT&T.

In classic brand architecture terms, this is what we in the business call a “complete mess”. Your average consumer has no way to make sense of the service being provided or compare it to competing offers.

AT&T and Other Mobile Providers Don’t Want it to Make Sense

This isn’t necessarily a conspiracy on the part of the wireless carriers. It’s just that real-world performance is inconsistent, unpredictable and impossible to compare beyond specific hardware in a specific place at a single moment in time. So instead of trying to make clear claims that their customers may then hold them accountable for, these companies intentionally use an indecipherable alphabet soup of acronyms, standards, metrics and buzzwords to imply innovation and performance.

And it works. 4G sounds better than 3G, two 4G networks sound better than one and you’re telling me I can have both HSPA+ and LTE at my disposal? I don’t know what they are but how did I ever live without them?!?

Sometimes There’s No Such Thing as Too Many Features

Here’s another example: if you’re not a runner yourself, it’s a safe bet you know one. Assuming you or s/he isn’t a barefoot runner, take a look at your/her/his preferred shoes and count the number of branded features they tout.

The Salomon XA Pro 3D Ultra GTX® trail runner features: Sensifit™ Quicklace™ 3D advanced chassis™ GORE-TEX® OrthoLite® and ContraGrip™	The Asics Gel Nimbus® 13 running shoe has: I.G.S.® Guidance Line™ Space Trusstic System® ComfortDry™ Biomorphic Fit® and AHAR®

Even this brand-savvy author’s morning jog was completed in a pair of Kalenji Kapteren XT’s, complete with CS®, Arkstab® and BiPron® technology. And, frankly, those features helped make the sale, despite the fact that we have no idea what they mean or what benefit they provide. They created a diffuse but visceral sense that the shoe was engineered to deliver real performance.

Use With Caution

Don’t get us wrong – this post is not an endorsement of patenting, branding and furiously marketing every feature or function you can jam into your product. In commodity categories (gasoline, clothing, cleaning products) or in categories where customers want and are willing to do real comparisons (banking, education, virtually all B2B sales) complexity sows confusion and confusion drives customers away. But in many others (personal computers, mattresses, mountain bikes) there are compelling reasons to keep marketing and brand architecture complex. In categories where high performance matters, to strive for simplicity may simply be too simplistic.

You may not have heard of this purveyor of preppy-cum-vintage apparel for 15-25 year-olds, but its financials should get your attention:

• 93.6% increase in retail sales this past Christmas season over last year
• 243.3% increase in internet sales for the same period
• 74.4% increase in total sales for the first three quarters of its fiscal year, to £172,000,000.

All of this with no advertising, no clearance sales and in the midst of a faltering UK economic recovery (don’t let the logo fool you – they’re British). So what can your brand learn from Superdry and its parent, SuperGroup?

1. Commit to Your Brand. The only thing Japanese about Superdry is its founders’ interest in the country and its style, but that didn’t stop them from making Kanji and Katakana versions of the name part of the brand’s logo.
2. Stay focused. Superdry’s success would make it easy for them to start selling a children’s line, but, in the words of founder Julian Dunkerton, “Fifteen-year-olds will not get sweaty about Superdry if their kid brother is wearing it.”
3. Invest in new brands. IF AND ONLY IF they help differentiate your product lines from each other and you are willing to support them, that is. Superdry is one of the clothing brands of SuperGroup, which also sells clothing under the 77Breed (snowboard-inspired) and SurfCo California (surf-inspired) brands, and whose online and brick and mortar retail operations include stores under the Superdry and Cult names. Superdry clothing also features countless graphic treatments of the name Superdry. Hence the 250 logos that Mr. Dunkerton believes will give his brand the unlimited room for growth that using a single, uniform logo has denied English retailers FCUK and Bench.
4. Persist. Mr. Dunkerton’s been at this for 26 years.
5. Don’t advertise and don’t hold sales, but do recruit a Beckham. Superdry claims to have grown by word of mouth, its only discounts are when it sells irregular inventory on ebay and they haven’t hired any celebrities to endorse their products. They did, on the other hand, mail one of their jackets to David Beckham, who was wearing it in several widely-published photographs just before Superdry began selling like hotcakes. You won’t find it in Aaker or Ries & Trout, but it’s a well-known fact that the Beckham Strategy works every time.

Unnim is one of three fairly new Spanish banking brands that has caught our eye. Unnim was created in July 2010 by the merger of Caixa Manlleu, Caixa Sabadell and Caixa Terrassa. (Caixa is Catalan for Caja, which is more or less Spanish for credit union). Here are those three logos, so you can see how far Unnim has come.

Unnim isn’t exactly a Catalan word, but it’s immediately recognizable as meaning “Let’s Unite.” An innocuous enough name, but the multi-layered, multicolored, semi-transparent, off-axis, u-shaped amoeba that adorns the wordmark isn’t your usual bank logo bug, and we like it.

Next up, Catalunya Caixa, also launched in July of last year:

Catalunya Caixa is made up of Caixa Catalunya, Caixa Tarragona and Caixa Manresa. Again, the constituent parts’ logos below.

First of all, our apologies for the fuzzy resolution of the CX mark, but we can’t find a sharp version online – even on the bank’s home page! Here, while we still find the color palette adventurous for a bank, we don’t think the mark quite hits the (ahem) mark. The stark juxtaposition of the C and the X leave us thinking more along the lines of forex and derivatives trading than not-for-profit retail banking. And the homage to the FedEx arrow is inelegant (though not tired in Spain, where FedEx is not the Kleenex of time-sensitive delivery).

Finally, we bring you Bankia, unveiled earlier this month:

Bankia rises from the coming together of no fewer than seven cajas, but two of them make up the bulk of the new entity. Their marks:

Okay, so maybe in this case Bankia have actually reined it in a notch from the Bancaja… well, we’re not sure what to call it. Bankia’s brown and lime green color palette is, again, a departure from the traditional dark blue and power red that dominate the world of finance. The Bankia name is safe enough (despite the tempest in a teapot because a Norwegian bank once used the name before being acquired and renamed). The wordmark takes some chances. First, with the heart-shaped B. Memories may be short, but a populace dealing with unemployment of over 20% may be feeling the crisis a little too viscerally for banks to inspire either éros, agápe or storge. Second with the readability – we stumble every time we read this name because of the vertical shared by the n and the k. If it gets people to stop and pay more attention to the name then it’s a good thing. If it’s irritating, it probably sticks in people’s minds and is probably still a good thing in all fora except typography blogs.

Let us be clear: neither the designs nor the color palettes nor the names of these three institutions are that far out there. But they are contemporary (Bancaja’s po-mo illustration notwithstanding), and they do recognize that attempting to communicate only stability may not only ring untrue given the events of the last 4 years – as competition heats up to attract retail customers, it may just come up short.

Why would we recommend that Aol do away with a brand that, according to the NYTimes, receives 15.6 million page views per weekday and has been doubling traffic every year? First let us clarify that we only recommend they get rid of The Huffington Post as a brand name, not as a news operation. Now, let us give you three reasons they should do so:

1. Aol acquired The Huffington Post not just to acquire its visitors and ad revenue, but to build a new entity that is bigger than its combined parts – at least according to this press release, which sports a sub-head to break all records for length. The Huffington Post has become a strong enough brand that it will be extremely difficult for Aol to subsume it and benefit from its brand equity. Furthermore, these brands stand for very different things right now. Love it or hate it, The Huffington Post brand resonates with people who believe they are technologically adept and politically progressive. The Aol brand? Well, to selectively quote a quote from a Huffington Post article, people with Aol email addresses tend to be overweight, politically middle of the road, have never left their own country and enjoy lounging around in sweats.
2. It will never be easier to change the name than it is now. The Huffington Post exists exclusively online. How hard is it to permanently redirect a url and create a splash page announcing a new name? Not very. How easy is it to get people who spend lots of news on the web to learn a new url or create a new bookmark? It’s not effortless, but it’s doable.
3. We’re not sure The Huffington Post as a name has the gravitas to become a truly global brand without overcoming some significant hurdles along the way. This is where we’re getting into the art part of the art and science of brand building. The name aligns very closely with a specific individual, which always carries risk. And we’re not sure it sounds serious and news-y enough to attract people other than those who agree with the site’s politics or enjoy being riled by them.

Are we saying that Aol should have named its new news group Aol news? No – that would likely have turned off The Huffington Post’s current visitors. Rather, we believe they should come up with a new name that Aol can more easily associate with itself and, over time, derive brand equity from. And we’re not just saying that because we’d like the naming assignment.

But it’s likely a moot point. In a recent article, Ms. Huffington, the new group’s President and editor-in-chief, referred to the transaction as a ‘merger’ rather than an acquisition. When you think that a $2.05B company’s acquisition of your website for $315m is a merger, then it’s unlikely your ego will allow you to remove your name from the masthead or the letterhead anytime soon.