Why Ikea doesn’t care if you can’t remember Kullen, Valevåg, Pax/Hasvik and Pax/Forsand.

I was having a drink with a very smart client last week. We were talking about B2B portfolio branding, and she was challenging my general observation that B2B businesses should only try to build sub-brands with funky (sorry, distinctive) names as the exception, not the rule.  “But, Fred, does it have to be so boring?  You end up with a bunch of unmemorable names.  I mean, if Ikea can call its sofas Ektorp or Klippan, why can’t we use cooler, more memorable names for our products in B2B”?

I’d like to say I had the answer at my fingertips.  I didn’t.  But after a bit of back-and forth we got there….and in getting there we identified some truths that were in our view useful.

Firstly, we realised that asking if Ikea’s product names are memorable is the wrong question, because this focuses on the intrinsic quality of a name (its memorability) and not its ultimate effect (being remembered). The real question is: are they remembered and recalled when the decision on where to shop for furniture is being made?  The answer? Unlikely.  Because we humans don’t like to remember everything we’re presented.  Weird sounding names where the meaning is not immediately clear demand mental effort to remember, we’re cognitive misers that tune out the majority of the stuff we encounter everyday and then forget much of what we do pay attention to.  But that’s where the big, bad, weird-sounding €14.7bn Ikea brand asset comes in (valuation thanks to Brand Finance).  I go to Ikea to buy sofas because Ikea has done a masterful job over many years associating the Ikea brand in my mind - and many others - with sofas.  What their sofa ranges are called is not relevant until I get into the store or online to identify which Ikea sofa I want.  

Aha, I (sort of) said, the mistake here is that we’d be deploying top-of-funnel tactics (the creation of distinctive brand assets) to a bottom-of-funnel moment of the customer journey. Ikea’s product names are not sub-brands, they are just product identifiers. They’re as arbitrary as an alphanumeric, just with more personality.  One or two may gain some cultural currency over time - Billy shelves, ironically one of the least Swedish-sounding of their products, seems to be much talked about - but most often you go to Ikea to buy furniture and then work out which Swedish-sounding range you like the look of.  In fact, these names don’t need to be memorable in the sense that they are stored in our memories and recalled at some future point when a relevant need arises.  In fact, they don’t even need to be pronounceable as they are so rarely spoken or heard. They just need to be distinct from each other at the point of purchase so we don’t accidentally order a Hemnes series of bedroom furniture when it’s the Malm series we liked the look of

(I did not say Hemnes or Malm at the bar, I had to look both those names up at home afterwards…but this reinforces my point because these names were not in my memory and able to be recalled by me).

But why do so many B2B businesses insist on creating crazy names in their portfolio, my client persisted, perhaps spotting it was my round and it was worth extending the conversation.  

She thought it was a question of discipline and creating the right context.  SAP, MIcrosoft, IBM, Salesforce - they all do a pretty good job at resisting the temptation to ‘brand’ every new innovation they take to market.  What they’ve realised is that the 95% of the market that are not ‘in market’ will not pay attention to this level of detail; and that to have a chance of being remembered in all their categories means they need to focus on brand name, top line category relevance, maybe one or two key technologies or platforms, and no more.  They’re actually very good at ‘branding’ LESS things (fewer things, I thought, fewer! but I suppressed my inner pedant).

I added that it was also a question of budget.  Most B2B product launches have a meagre promotional budget. And a well-meaning product manager, with a product that is the next big thing (it always is), thinks a cool name is in order, something so cool that you only need to hear it once to remember it forever. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the portfolio ends up littered with disconnected, unclear names from the last couple of years of product marketing coming up with memorable names, which force an actively shopping customer to say ‘wait, what the hell is that?” right at the point where you want him or her to say “there it is, that’s exactly what I need”.

She graciously agreed, but we both knew she’d made the better points.  The night was drawing to an end and I felt it was my job to sum up: there will always be room for a few well-thought-through sub brands, with the right resources (promotional budget, organisational focus, sales alignment, etc) and with a clear purpose in the portfolio, either to shine a light on a capability that is new or important and which the parent brand does not get credit for.  And that if the organisation behind it can turn the volume down on all the other things it wants to talk about, and put this sub-brand in the spotlight, there’s a chance it might actually work.  

And with that, we bade each other good night.