Know-How Exchange : Taglines/Names

What Randall said! Your name isn't something you pick randomly or have a bunch of people suggest based on "clever or cutesy" ideas! Your brand (and therefore your name) is part of who you are. It has to fit your personality, culture, values, and ideals AND link you to your prospective customers. It should be the start of the story of what makes you unique among the thousands of other ethnic eateries they could frequent. Versus having a contest to pick out a name, you might better randomly pick ingredients for your sauces and hope they turn out to be tasty. Some may actually taste good, but probably most wouldn't. You "contest" name might hit some of your prospective customers, but chances are, most will leave them with a bad taste.

Identify what your target customers need, figure out what makes you unique versus your competitors, define your products based on this, then choose a name based on these factors that your target market can relate to that reflects what you are all about. If this is outside your comfort level, hire a firm with capabilities and experience to do this for you (like Monmark Group). It's work the investment to get this right and will pay back several times over!

I hope this helps.

Wayde

You only need one name, right? So a contest to generate as many names as possible doesn't make much sense. The way to do this is:

1. Prepare a Creative Brief that describes your target audience, what makes your brand unique/distinctive, what you want to communicate to your target audience, what you want the name to do for you, etc.

2. Have a marketing professional with branding experience come up with a few naming options and a recommendation. The quality of what you get will depend importantly on the Creative Brief and the professionalism of the marketing person you hire.

3. Select the name that you believe most closely matches the specs you laid out in the Creative Brief.


A long list of naming candidates doesn't do much for you unless and until you know what the criteria will be for picking a winner. And if you know those you don't need a long list. You need ONE that meets the criteria.

Rasta-mon

Names become brands once the solution that's the inherent benefit behind the product (which is in turn) behind the name becomes an accepted, anticipated, looked for, and requested service, product, good, or commodity in the marketplace.

A name is not a brand. A logo is not a brand. A brand is a complex emotional soup of state of mind, feelings, desires, and states of being brought about as a RESULT of using the product, service, goods, etc.,.

Thus, a brand (if it's well managed and well directed and backed up by Grade-A service and above the line expectations and deliverables) in turn creates far more powerful, meaningful, and impact full states of mind which, in turn, help to reinforce the emotional impact of the brand and the promise of life as it will be as a result of one's USE of product.

With these things, everything the brand delivers in terms of its promise reinforce the value of the brand, which in turn, propel the cachet of the name.

At the moment you have none of this and a competition, no matter what its prize, won't generate this kind of state. Not yet.

At the moment you have a product line (your Caribbean sauces, spices, cookbook, and potentially a food franchise). You do not have a dilemma (a dilemma is a choice between two or more outcomes, all of which are equally disagreeable). You have a need for a name but BEFORE you get too dewey eyed about a name you need to make sure there's an actual MARKET for your eatery, and for its range of possible tie ins (sauces, recipe books, etc.)

However, until you've refined your reason for being in business, the idea of a food franchise puts the cart of the sauces, spices, and cookbook before the horse of the restaurant chain.

Wherever you are, geographically, is there a market for your kind of eatery? Is there a demand? What is the competition for people's restaurant dollars and how often might those people eat this kind of food?