Blog post 27 Innovate

INSIGHT 20 | GRAMMAR MATTERS

You can explain an idea perfectly, but does the product speak for itself?

Are you pitching with passion or explaining with purpose?

How fluently does your product speak once you’re not in the room?

Does your brand land, or need translating?

in²⁰ | Grammar Matters

Brands that spell trouble... Flawed phonetics

By now you know I like to be succinct and boil everything down whenever I can, ever searching for clarity with brevity. Beware! Apparently, you can go too far, and I certainly learnt that lesson with my first own brand product.

Looking for a short snappy and balanced product name, which would be clean and compact on both product and website, I quickly settled on a brand I thought described exactly what the product did. A Bike Lock is what it was right, short, balanced yet not very original and in need of some inspiration. So, after some (clearly not enough) thought, I removed the last letter of each… BIK-LOC then to make it phonetically plural BIKLOX. To emphasise correct pronunciation, it was further honed to BiKLOX with the lower case i reinforcing the split to read Bi - KLOX. Genius eh! Seemingly not.

Never a problem when exhibiting in context at the National Exhibition Centre cycle show in Birmingham, a tailored event with the perfect audience for our product launch. BiKLOX was well received, and we made a healthy profit over the two-day event in both our first and second years, even accounting for the higher sunk cost into a larger stand to boost our presence.

Yet outside of that industry setting, people slowly but surely started to ask about Bic (like the disposable pen) Lock. Can you imagine how irritating that became? Moreover, there was the unwanted and damaging connotation of aligning our brand of robust indestructible bike lock with a low-cost disposable product like a pen or razor.

Brevity is good but please do check the pronunciation of your brand, so it works in all settings, dialects, and even more challenging, languages! Assuming you hit the big time and go global of course.