Name first, product second

If people remember what you sell but not who sold it to them, your marketing may be doing more for your competition than it is for your brand.

Put your name before what you sell. There’s a fairly simple pecking order I think more brands should consider when it comes to marketing themselves. Not literally in every instance, of course. There are plenty of occasions where explaining what you sell needs to take priority, particularly if you have a new product, an unfamiliar category or something that requires a little more explanation.

But like any conversation you might have with someone for the first time, you don’t first introduce yourself by saying what you do before what you name is. So when every piece of marketing leads with the product, service or category before it leads with the brand selling it, there’s a risk that all the attention you're generating is helping people remember what they saw without necessarily remembering who it came from.

I recently saw a fellow brand man by the name of Mark Thouless who put it perfectly in video on LinkedIn:

“If people just think about the product before you, then the next time they want it, they can get it anywhere because lots of people sell it too.”

And that's really the problem. If you sell coffee and all I remember is coffee, you've helped coffee. If you're an accountant and all I remember is that you do tax returns, you've helped accountants. If you're a real estate agent and all I remember from your advertising is that you sell houses, you've probably helped whichever real estate agent happens to be standing in front of your customer when they eventually decide to sell their property.

The product matters. The service matters. The category obviously matters. But if you're spending money trying to build awareness, you probably want some of that awareness and thought of “Which brand comes to mind first?” to belong to you. 

The category isn't yours to own

This is the reminder, the category isn’t yours to own, even though the idea of positioning your brand and market share comes close. Now, there's a reason brands naturally gravitate towards showing people what they sell because it makes it easy to understand right off the bat.

Coffee brands show coffee beans, cups and various shades of brown. Dentists show smiles and teeth. Real estate agents show houses. Accountants show calculators, graphs and people looking surprisingly happy while staring at spreadsheets. These cues and descriptors for the most part quickly communicate the category you’re in and it gives customers familiar visual shortcuts for understanding what they're looking at.

The problem is that your competitors have access to exactly the same shortcuts. If ten coffee brands are all trying to communicate COFFEE as loudly as possible, they inevitably start borrowing from the same visual language. Brown, black, cream, coffee beans, steaming cups and perhaps some lovely photographs or illustrations of Colombian plantations. Everyone nails the brief to successfully communicate coffee. But who, out of any of them, does anyone remember and go hunting for again? Especially if they don’t have a commanding shelf presence or availability at the time.

The same thing happens with messaging. Businesses often give the most prominent ‘real estate’ title in an advertisement, website, sign or piece of packaging to categorise the service so it’s bleedingly obvious, while their own brand name sits somewhere above it waiting patiently to be noticed.

This makes sense if your biggest marketing challenge is convincing people that coffee exists. For most established categories, it probably isn't. Your potential customer already knows coffee exists. They know dentists exist. They know accountants exist. They know supermarkets sell breakfast cereal and hardware stores sell drills. What they don't necessarily know, or remember, is you and that right there is the reason branding and marketing exist.

Look at the shelf

A recent example I wanted to highlight since talking about coffee a few times is the brand, La Colombe and in particular its Draft Latte range of on-the-go canned coffee.

If you look at the image below of this supermarket shelf filled with ready-to-drink coffee, it’s not hard to miss the trend of fairly predictable visual language for this category. Coffee colours. Browns. Blacks. Creams. Product descriptors. Imagery and graphics designed to reassure you, very quickly, that what you're looking at is indeed coffee.

Even Starbucks, which has one of the world's most recognisable brands, has leaned heavily into familiar coffee-category cues across its ready-to-drink products. Then there's La Colombe that you can see at the top left of the image.

Their packaging uses a predominantly white background, its distinctive dove mark and branding, with bands and areas of colour helping differentiate each of their product variants. I could safely say that the company deliberately developed its universal design language to run its own race rather than blending into the level of how many other brands un-distinctively present themselves across five levels of shelving in this example.

Placed amongst a wall of products trying very hard to look like coffee, you don’t have to wonder if it’s a coffee product. All you have to do is spot their branding and it’s far easier to spot their brand in a sea of same. And that's the important bit. It doesn't need to disguise what the product is. Draft Latte and other coffee related terminology is still written on the can. The product information is there. The shopper is also standing in a section of the supermarket dedicated to ready-to-drink coffee, surrounded by other ready-to-drink coffees. There are already plenty of contextual clues doing the category communication for it.

So rather than spending every available inch reinforcing COFFEE, the packaging has more opportunity to reinforce La Colombe the brand. That's name first, product second.

Context can do some of the work

This is where I think brands can become unnecessarily nervous. There can be an assumption that if we don't immediately show, say or illustrate exactly what we sell, people won't understand what they're looking at. Sometimes that's true. But context does a lot more work than we give it credit for.

A can sitting in the ready-to-drink coffee section doesn't have to single-handedly explain the existence of canned coffee. A dentist's sign attached to a dental practice doesn't necessarily require a giant photograph of somebody smiling. A real estate agency's For Sale board already has the considerable advantage of being attached to a house that's for sale.

Customers aren't encountering brands in a vacuum. They're searching Google for something. Walking down a particular supermarket aisle. Browsing a category and even a location in an online search. Driving past a business. Looking at a trade show stand. Comparing three businesses that provide roughly the same service. The environment is already giving them information.

So ask what information you need to add to what is already present. Sometimes the answer will absolutely be the product. But sometimes the more valuable use of that space is making your name, colours, typography, character, message or other distinctive brand assets considerably more prominent. Because once someone understands the category, repeating the category louder isn't necessarily helping them distinguish you within it.

Context is such an underrated part of marketing. As it lets us focus more on building your brand and expanding its presence. Context helps give it a considerable leg up already that isn’t required to amplify further, costing you time, money, space and effort to communicate more than you need to. While also giving customers less to process and remember.

Don't hide what you sell

None of this means you should make your marketing deliberately cryptic. There is a particularly annoying version of branding where a business becomes so determined to appear clever, premium or distinctive that nobody can work out what the hell it actually does. That's not the goal or anything close to what I’m suggesting here. If I visit your website and spend five minutes trying to determine whether you're a management consultancy, software platform or spiritual retreat for burned-out executives, we've probably gone a little too far.

Product and category communication still matter, as many businesses live in the niches and require that extra attention to product/service communication and even education. The difference is understanding the role of that communication and how/when it’s introduced.

So let’s say, your product helps someone understand what they are buying. Your brand helps them understand who they're buying it from. Your positioning can help give them a reason why/when they might think of and choose you. Good marketing needs to connect all three rather than allowing one to consume everything else, and that right there becomes a pitfall for many startups and small businesses that get lost in only focusing on one or two of these at most.

So instead of removing product communication, look at the hierarchy.

What do I notice first?

What do I notice second?

What am I most likely to remember?

And if I encountered this without your logo, could it just as easily belong to three of your competitors?

Those questions can completely change the way you approach a piece of packaging, an advertisement, a website or even a sign on the side of a building. It’s basically the ‘thumb test’ another fellow brand man I know, Phillip Oakley came up with. Which is to say, cover up your logo on any piece of communication. Your coffee cups. Your shopfront sign. Your For Sale board. Your social media ad. Is there anything else that is easily discernable for a customer to know it’s your brand?

Additionally, showing the product in its use case is often a better form of communication than saying or showing what it is. As it could be this use case that is often uniquely defining of what your brand is remembered for, like Netflix and Chill.

So sell the product, yes. But not at the expense of your brand in many ways, not just your logo.

Make the brand sell the product

There's also a much longer-term reason for getting this hierarchy right. Every product you sell is an opportunity to build your brand. Every coffee can that gets picked up, every package sitting in someone's pantry, every vehicle driving around town, every invoice, every sign, every advertisement and every interaction with your service can contribute to somebody becoming more familiar with you. But only if you give the brand enough prominence to do so. Otherwise, you can end up continually marketing individual products while never accumulating much recognition for the thing connecting them all.

This becomes particularly important as a business grows. Products change. Services evolve. New ranges get introduced. Old ones disappear. Customer needs shift. Categories change. A strong brand gives all of those things somewhere to belong. 

I’ve always had this thought that if you’re expanding into a new category, you’d honestly be crazy to ditch what has made you successful in one category and change it to fit the category norms of that new one you enter. So bring across that brand equity you have, as it’s more likely going to be the thing that has you standing out than just being some new player that thinks it has to play by the rules of everyone else around you just because you’re the newcomer.

If La Colombe launches another flavour tomorrow, it doesn't need to build awareness entirely from zero. The new product can borrow from everything people already recognise about La Colombe. In 2024, the company said its updated brand design, including its logo, colour palette and packaging, would extend across product and retail touchpoints, reinforcing that connection beyond a single can or flavour.

That's the compounding value of putting the brand first. You're not just selling today's product. You're building recognition that tomorrow's product can use too.

Make sure they remember your name

There's a very simple test you can apply to almost any piece of marketing. Take a step back from it and ask what you're actually helping someone remember. Are you helping them remember that coffee is delicious? That dentists can improve their smile? That accountants can help at tax time? That real estate agents sell houses?

Or are you helping them remember your brand when one of those needs arises?

Because most businesses aren't fortunate enough to sell something nobody else can provide. There are other coffees. Other accountants. Other dentists. Other designers. Other real estate agents. Other products sitting centimetres away from yours on exactly the same shelf.

If people remember only the thing you sell, they can buy it from any of them that is available without preference, especially when many are solely focused on price if there’s nothing to sway them otherwise. So don't stop communicating the product. Don't make people guess what you do. And don't sacrifice clarity just for the sake of looking different. Simply consider the order.

Use the category cues you actually need. Let context do some of the work where it can. Give your distinctive brand assets enough prominence to become familiar. Make the name easier to notice, recognise and remember. Even how it’s spelt and pronounced can make an impact based on its ease to recall. Then connect that name clearly to the product or service you want to be known for and make it prominent over or larger than the service or category descriptor in your communication. Because when the customer eventually wants that product again, you don't just want them thinking, “I need a coffee.” You want them thinking, “I want a La Colombe coffee”

Name first, product second. Give your brand a shot at it with better branding and marketing for better business success.