The Dutch have extended this friendly first name association to companies or brands where the name has no relation to the founder or owner. Consider the following examples over a variety of industries:

Will it work? Early to tell but Albert’s biggest national competitor Max Foodmarket (yep, another first name brand) went bankrupt at the end of 2002.

Companies taking personal names or revising their own name to convey a more familiar or friendly brand name is not new. However, previously companies predominantly chose the last name (surname), “Or, sometimes as well, first and surname,” says Bas Kist, director/partner of Shield Mark Brand Protection in Amsterdam, for example: Douwe Egberts and Albert Heijn, or Heineken and Philips.

“But nowadays, society has become more informal,” Kist continues. “First names are more often used to address others, and therefore, also as a brand name. Just a first name sounds more accessible than a family name.”

It helps the brand gain an association as an acquaintance, one that is already very close to the consumer. The brand can act as a friend.

This is the case for Rabobank’s Alex. It is a small miracle that the online broker started as Alex in 1999 and not as “Labouchère online,” says René Frijters, general and marketing director of Alex. Alex was at that time a daughter company of the chic Bank Labouchère. “But by the Board of Executives of Labouchère, Alex was seen more as a new channel of communication. While we kept emphasizing that Alex was a whole new service concept, a new product really, that would attract new clients too. And we wanted to express that innovative aspect in the first name Alex. The financial world is loaded with last names, but we’d liked to avoid the impression to be a dull banker.”

Frijters also points out that computers are cold, and for that reason he wanted to add the warmth of a person’s name. Alex works as a boy or girl’s name as well, and has direct associations with “AEX,” the abbreviation of the Amsterdam Exchange.

Armed with all this, the point still proved very hard to convince Bank Labouchère’s CEO. Frijters remembers the reaction as: “ ‘Alex? My colleague bankers will laugh at me.’ ” Quick thinking saved the name from the scrapheap. Says Frijters, “[F]inally we instantly made up that Alex also was short for Access Liquidity to Exchanges.”

Nowadays the rapidly growing Internet broker can boast more than 70,000 clients, and Alex is a market leader in transactions. Last April, Frijters was proclaimed “Marketeer of the Year 2004” by Nima Marketing Association, Platform Innovatie in Marketing and Tijdschrift voor Marketing.

Another example of a first name brand is Ben. Ben was a mobile telephone company that in its first year (1999) was the fastest-growing mobile telephone brand in the Netherlands; it rocketed to a number three position in the Dutch market by 2002. “The name Ben was purely intended to make a telco more personal than the existing companies with their chilly and non-friendly names like KPN, Libertel, Telfort and Dutchtone,” says Nameworks’ Heyning. It worked—at the expense of several tens of millions of marketing euros. Ben was something like the Great Pretender, but actually [it] made a lot of friends, that is: ‘Ben-users.’ ” Last year, Ben won a posthumous Golden Effie. The name Ben ceased to exist when German mobile telephone giant T-Mobile, which had bought Ben from its Danish and Belgian owners, decided to offer it, last year, to globalization (sometimes also called globrandization). In January 2003 Ben was renamed T-Mobile. Ben died at the age of 4.

Heyning doesn’t advise his client’s use a first name for a brand. “A first name is always marked. I mean, people who already know a Ben and hate the guy, won’t buy a product named Ben.”

Other marketing experts also warn of negative associations that stick to first name. This is the reason why marketing portal Communicatiecoach considers the use of first names as a brand name a pitfall.

Then again. There are still people who call their newborn son “Adolf”—in the last twenty years not less than 61 times in the Netherlands.    

[15-Nov-2004]