A conversation we often get into is how literal does your company’s branding need to be?

By this, if your company sells wood chips, should you call it ‘the wood chip company’, or call it something even more abstract.

If the marketplace comprises of just you (i.e., you have no competitors), you could totally own that brand personality. Take SpaceX for example, it doesn’t have many competitors (because it’s such a difficult and expensive market to enter) so it can be very literal.

But what if you enter a market where that brand space has already been taken up by a company? You don’t want to be too similar, both for legal reasons but also, you’ll sit in your competitor’s shadow and not be very memorable to your customers. It’ll be hard to achieve that ‘top of mind’ awareness that businesses seek through marketing efforts.

Apple, Nike, Red Bull, O2.

None of these companies sell what they’re named after. Apple doesn’t sell apples and Red Bull doesn’t sell…well, you get the gist of the logic. They chose a unique brand personality to differentiate themselves from a market that already had competitors at the start of their business journey.

A downside of sounding too literal, is that you may come across a little uncreative to your customers and partners. If you can’t think of an interesting brand space to occupy, how likely would it be that you could solve the problem they have?

On a linear spectrum of how abstract a brand personality needs to be, we suggest it’s different depending on the industry you work in and how complex the problem is that you’re solving for you customer is. Our logic here is the more complex the problem, the less competitors you will have in your field (refer to the SpaceX point we made earlier) – meaning you’ll have an easier time picking the brand space to occupy.

However, if you do something that many other organisations can do, then you’ll presumably have lots of competitors – and therefore will need to put more marketing effort into being memorable.

Let us know what you think, we’re always keen to hear different thoughts on these subjects.