Congratulations! Your company has a great new product or service and you get to create a name for it. (In a perfect world, a positioning strategy would have been developed prior to product development. If not, stop right now and put one together. It will ensure your brand strategy---and the name--- is on target.)

Keep in mind that coming up with a new brand name can be challenging---you’d be surprised how many people have come up with the exact same name that you thought was completely original.

Be sure to screen the trademark status of name concepts as you and your team come up with them---before you, your boss or your client fall in love with a name that you find out is already owned by the competition. Ouch.

You can do a preliminary check online of name concepts by using TESS, the Trademark Electronic Search System of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, aka USPTO (Our government does love acronyms, don’t they?) Be sure to check dead as well as live trademarks, and check variations in spelling, plural versus single, etc. Keep in mind that even if you see a favorite name trademarked, you may still be able to trademark it if it is not in a competing category. Or, your search may show that it’s clear, when it isn’t. TESS is useful as an early screener only.

BTW, not sure what the difference is between a trademark and a service mark? Click on the links to get your lingo straight, or check out brandeopedia for these and a bunch of other marketing terms.

See also: How to Register a Trademark, Wall Street Journal

Americhip provides clients with “multisensorized®” technology, meaning “advertising that influences consumers by communicating through all five senses. ‘Multisensorizing’ is based on the tenet that when people have sensory experiences they are influenced.”

Source: Brandflash
Image: Dimensional magazine insert - Americhip

Reverse product placement refers to creating and ‘launching’ a fictional brand in media such as movies, television shows, books, virtual worlds and games.

Once the brand gains critical mass and awareness, it could be translated to a commercial product and launched into the ‘real’ world.

While reverse product placement has occurred in movies, television shows and books, former MIT academic and current Xbox Live Arcade product planner David Edery suggests that reverse product placement in virtual worlds and games can save marketers “tens or hundreds of millions of dollars fighting mature competitors for mindshare and shelf space in the physical world” by launching “a new offering in an uncluttered fictional one" Source: Gamasutra.com

He notes that it happens with other media, such as "Every Flavor Beans," from Harry Potter books and movies, later converted into a real-world product by Cap Candy, a division of Hasbro.

“The Simpsons Movie” was promoted by selling real products under imaginary brand names like Buzz Cola, Frosted Krusty-O’s and so on, and certain 7-Eleven locations were temporarily re-branded as outposts of the show’s Kwik-E-Mart chain.

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