Ogilvy and the Craft of Branding

The name is more important than you think.

David Ogilvy wrote somewhere that many advertisers did not take their product names seriously. That was an error. Not because branding is marketing. Because naming is part of design. And design is part of how something works.

Ogilvy was right. Look at what good names do. "Volkswagen" is not just a name, it is a promise. It says: this is the car for ordinary people, not the wealthy. "Neutral" tells you what the product does before you open the box. "Evian" spelled backwards is eau, water. It is mnemonic and it says something true.

This is not gimmickry. This is craft. A good product name carries meaning within it. It is like the title of a book. It is not decoration. It is information fused with intent.

Many contemporary brands choose names that are arbitrary. "Slack" does not tell you what the product does. "Zoom" does not really tell you what the product does. These are abstract names that must gain meaning through repetition and marketing. They rely on advertisements to explain what they mean.

Ogilvy's approach was different. He chose names that already told you something. Not everything, but something. "Dove" for soap suggests softness. "Axe" for deodorant suggests masculinity and attractiveness. The name does half the work for the advertisement.

This can seem superficial, but it is not. The reason a good name works is that it operates on two levels at once. On the level of marketing, but also on the level of truth. "Dove" is not just a marketing name. Doves are actually soft. It is not pulled from thin air.

The distinction is between names that lie and names that carry truths. A good name feels inevitable. It feels like it could only be called that. "Amazon" for a bookstore that grew rapidly suggests something immense, river-like, difficult to stop. It is not accidental.

This says something about the relationship between language and design. Many designers think of language as separate from form. You design the object, then you name it. But language is part of form. The name changes how you perceive the object. They are one.

It is useful to recognize that Ogilvy understood this at a time when other advertisers did not. For him, naming was not an afterthought. It was part of strategy. It was part of how the product would work in the world.

Sources: David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1983); branding case studies