- With over 10,000 brand names registered every day worldwide, developing a brand name requires a methodology that goes beyond providing a list of names or brainstorming
- The main advantage of working with a professional agency is that you get a choice of possible names that are free of rights, i.e. that you can register on a trademark register*** and that gives you exclusive use of your word mark in the desired product classes and markets.
- A professional agency therefore incorporates a legal process into its methodology (see slide 3)
- A professional agency will also check the linguistic and semantic validity of your brand name in the desired languages and markets - i.e. that your brand name does not have undesirable connotations in the languages covering the desired territories.
- A naming agency integrates the necessary expertise for the 4 criteria of brand validity: marketing, linguistic, semantic and legal
Trademark registers
- Federal Office for Intellectual Property www.Ige.ch
- Trade mark register in Switzerland www.swissreg.ch
- International Trade mark register www.wipo.int
5 pitfalls to avoid
- If the agency does not include identical legal checks and a minimum of linguistic and semantic checks, they are not professionals and you are wasting your time and, more importantly, your money.
- Make sure the agency is professional with creative people from a language/languages background and not graphic designers working on names.
- For an international brand, make sure the agency has a sufficient pool of naming creatives - you need a minimum of 500 possible names to get around the legal hurdle - at the end of the legal process only 10% will be registerable
- Naming requires cross-functional expertise in marketing, linguistics/languages and IP/trade mark law; this justifies the high cost of a brand name development
- The naming process requires criteria defined in a concept board upstream of the creative process so that the selection of names is not limited to a "like/dislike" of each individual but to the alignment of a team around a common ambition.
The brand development process
- Concept board + Création internationale, 600 / 800 variations de noms
- Première sélection au sein d'Admarka, Première présentation à JTI - 60 noms, Première sélection avec le client
- Deuxième création - recentrage de la création, vérification juridique à l'identique, deuxième présentation et sélection avec le client.
- Sélection finale de 3-5 noms, Contrôle juridique complet, Contrôles linguistiques et sémantiques
- Enregistrement du nom, Argumentation du nom, Conception du nom
Get a quote in naming agency
To draw up an accurate quote, the naming agency needs the following information:
- Description of the activity concerned or the product classes concerned
- Communication on the markets targeted by the trademark registration - either national (Switzerland), European, International
- Clarification of the purpose of the brand name development - i.e. brand for a product/service, brand for a company "corporate brand
Indeed, the pool of candidate names is much larger for an international trademark than for a national trademark, it is a question of legal obstacles of already registered names. This process becomes even more complicated if the brand name is to represent a company name which will also be registered in the trade register of the countries/markets concerned.
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