Hello, I’m Glyn. I work at Albion, a marketing agency who are working with TIML Golden Square to help develop and launch your new brand.
Yes, we’re the “overpaid marketing tossers” who get “paid to sit around” and “dream up ridiculous ideas”.
(Actually, we try hard not to be tossers, pay ourselves too much, sit around, or create stupid ideas. But this isn’t meant to be a post about us. If you want to know more, have a look at www.albionlondon.com).
Now, creating a new brand covers a huge range of different areas, but the one that always gets emotional is the name. And it’s understandable. This business has been called ‘Virgin Radio’ for 15 years. Imagine having to rename your son after 15 years of him being called Geoff. It’s difficult. He’s just a Geoff. It’s silly to start calling him something else. But that’s what we have to do here.
What’s clear to us though, from talking to people at One Golden Square / reading this blog / reading the VIP blogs, is that there is a very strong sense of identity and potential to this business. An identity that already transcends the Virgin Radio name. In fact it feels like the business is ready to move on from that name, that history, and move fast in a new direction. So ‘all’ we have to do is try and distill that sense and capture it in a name.
So how are we going to do that? Well, in our experience, the best brand names come from inside the organisation. That’s what happened with most of our clients – eBay, Skype, Innocent…
So we’d like to hear your ideas. Please fill in this form. Your ideas will come directly to me and Clive. I’m afraid we can’t be as open with this, as some pesky speculator will just go and register the domain names and trademarks – so please don’t post serious suggestions in the comments here; satire only.
Clive tells me they’ve already had some stonking ideas at TIML, and that some people at One Golden Square have already emailed great ideas too.
A few guidelines:
- Think in names. Words aren’t enough. We know you’re ‘good’, ‘rock’, and ‘music’, but there’s nothing that’s going to make people’s hearts flutter there.
- Try to think into the future and imagine the name in context. ‘iPod’ is a slightly naff name really – it’s all the other bits of the brand that give it context and make it great.
- Try to find something unique and distinctive. This is the hard bit. There are a lot of radio stations in the world, so lots of the good existing words will already be trademarked. So:
- Try thinking laterally. ‘Virgin’ doesn’t describe the music you play, but an attitude to business.
- Invent words. ‘Skype’ was just made up, but feels like it could be real, and is redolent of sky and hype.
- Mash words about. ‘Ocado’ loses the first few letters from avocado.
I’m afraid there’s no financial incentive if your name makes it, but you’ll be able to bask in the glory of having created the new name for the media story of 2008.
The decision won’t be made by committee, or by vote, as that will only lead to sludge! The TIML team will make the final call, based on their ambition for the business, as well as what suits it today.
They’ll be advised by the marketing professionals at One Golden Square, and us. This is one area where we won’t be asking listeners – as Geoff points out, they might not be able to make the kind of creative leaps we’re after.
Ultimately, wherever the best idea for the name comes from, we all need to embrace it, and get on with the more important work of making sure that everything else you do is brilliant – that’s what will make the new brand great. We’ll be trying to do our bit with the visual identity (logos, colours etc), and brand communications (ads).
(BTW, some other people have already had a go at the name).
Glyn
