CASE STUDY: creating a brand name

Social Lama's services cover a broad spectrum — we'll build you a communication strategy, run an ad campaign, help you move house… All right, the range doesn't stretch quite that far, but creating a name for your brand is a challenge we're able to take on — and that's what today is about.

A while back we put a case study on the Lama blog about bringing a car repair shop onto TikTok. It concerned a small local business in Podkarpacie, a region in south-eastern Poland, that opened in 1994. As tends to happen with businesses like that, it was simply “the shop”. That was it. The client decided to make use of what the 21st century has to offer, though, and move his business into the online space. On top of a communication strategy, he needed a name to build everything around.

After a joint brainstorm and a round of proposals put to the client, together we picked the name:

O, ZGAsł?

Why, what for, what's the point? The name's key ideas and qualities:

• Both the wording and the graphic treatment nod to the surname of the owner and his family — Ozga, which the capital letters spell out. That matters for a local business: among the people nearby, service shops like this are often known by who they “belong to”:

— They'll get that done fastest at Ozga's shop!

Putting the surname into the name strengthens the brand in the local market and at the same time opens up room to build a wider image, in business and networking terms as well.

• Brevity. Short and to the point — that's “O, ZGAsł?”. We all love convenience, and our minds love it most of all. A form a few characters long anchors itself in the mind after the first few touchpoints and refuses to be dislodged. It gets into your head without asking, and then surfaces fast the moment you need to call it up.

• Uniqueness — anyone who has ever come up with taglines knows the pain: the perfect play on words feels like a gift from heaven, all that's left is to type it into a search engine pro forma and… there's already a company with exactly that name, plus two other campaigns signed off with almost the same line. “O, ZGAsł?” is unique in its league — with that many layers, we were all but certain Google wouldn't show us anything close. We checked availability anyway, for peace of mind; human creativity knows no limits 🙂

• A nod to the business — a car that cuts out on its own doesn't bode well. It's often met with a rhetorical question from the driver or the passengers, “o, zgasł?” (“oh, it stalled?”) — how can a car just refuse to work? The first fix that comes to mind is a trip to the mechanic. So it all comes together into one whole.

• The humor. Putting the previous functions of the name together is meant to build positive associations with the brand. This short form packs in “little treats”, and finding them gives people the pleasure of their own sharpness and fires the reward center. That makes the brand easier to remember.

Some people may notice the punctuation and the consonant clusters. They can make the name feel a little complicated, extremely short though it is. These days, unusual naming isn't a problem; just look at how many linguistically awkward brands do well in global markets: Carrefour, L’Occitane en Provence, Osram, and so on, and so on. The list runs long, and paradoxically a pronunciation that isn't obvious sometimes plants a company more firmly in the audience's mind. Every case is different, of course — if the client had been weighing up expansion into international markets from the start, the choice of name would certainly have been somewhat different. Here the territory was clearly defined as Poland, and more than that, the emphasis was on local recognition. Besides, as an outside firm we can't forget that in the end we are an advisory voice. The client owns the business and the decisions are his. We propose and we argue our case; the client may, but does not have to, follow our advice — even when it doesn't quite match what we had in mind.

It's true that a professional approach to the customer, the quality of the work and, often enough, the owner's own charisma are the foundation of success. Set that alongside an original name that doesn't call another brand to mind, and you can build a complete image that will carry the business further.

The “O, ZGAsł?” car repair shop is living proof — valued above all for the results of its work. Adding a brand launch online to that reputation earned a warm reception from people who hadn't heard of it, as the many messages and comments turning up on the profiles show. The client's goal has been met and is still being built on, and it's the final results that tell you whether the work was worth doing.