When they hired us, Reebok had just established a beautifully clear brand positioning: “Be More Human” which stands to inspire people everywhere to be their absolute best – physically, mentally, and socially. Beautiful ad campaigns and digital assets already communicated this superbly, but product names did not.Furthermore, naming at Reebok had historically been a challenging internal task divided across different business units and lacking a clear process.
As an industry innovator with 15 new names for models and franchises each half year season, it became essential that product names strongly reflected brand positioning and the unique personality of each of their five business units to benefit both consumer understanding, internal efficiency and to help build long-lasting franchises.
We partnered with Reebok on comprehensive namescape strategy development across five business units. After evaluating naming at Reebok, we created improved guidelines and helped to determine flow, roles and ownership of the naming process. The comprehensive naming handbook we developed guided old and new employees on every aspect of the naming journey from creative to strategic to legal. We created decision-trees and criteria to help determine when new names should be created or old ones maintained as well as how to navigate the naming landmines of technology add-on’s and extensions. Establishing brand-reinforcing naming themes for each business unit, we created a large volume of future product names for upcoming seasons.
