Despite experience working on thousands of naming and branding projects, and personally managing hundreds, it took an audiobook to cement something about the branding process for me. I’d long had an inkling that naming and brand positioning are linked to human nature, but David Hawkins’ Success Is For You really hammered this point home for me. In it, he says, “You only have one customer; it’s human nature”.

Hawkins is an experienced psychologist and motivational speaker, with personal experience running a successful practice in New York. When he talks about human nature and business, he’s not necessarily talking about branding. More, customer experience – another quote is, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Everyone uses the bathroom, make them easy to find.” With the take away in my mind that business success can often be very simple, pragmatic, and human. Likewise, think about food courts in malls, or the famous meatballs at Ikea. People are traipsing around for hours and they need sustenance! It’s basic stuff. 

You can even apply the human nature test to the ‘essence’ of a brand. A brand’s name and its messaging, that is. Basically, you need to know what part of human nature you are trying to fulfil. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean there are suddenly more options for brand positioning than usual. We still need to think about the usual types of brand position and name. Our approach at Atom breaks down as follows:

• Classic 
• Pragmatic
• Modern
• Outlier
• Emotional
• Fun and Playful

But what area of human nature does each appeal to? I’ve taken some time to think about this recently.

Decide What you Want to Appeal To

Banding theory often starts with archetypes and personas. I have many customers come to me saying, “I want to build a hero brand”. What I find is that it’s all too easy to get lost in abstract principles and forget the purpose of a brand. Which, in this article, I’m arguing is to  appeal to human nature! 

So you have to start by deciding what area your brand should appeal to. Choosing a name style and a branding tone naturally leads to the color of your store, the layout of your website, your UX design, your advertising, and on and on… 

Brand styles break down like this:

• Classic names appeal to a customer need to feel special, and create a level of trust. These names tend to work for luxury products as well as things like consulting businesses and banks. These brands have gravitas and a timeless quality – Rolls Royce, Vanguard, or Liberty Mutual for example. 
• Pragmatic brands solve problems. They appeal to the human desire to smooth life out and work out snags. They work for insurance companies, medical products, anything that has a clear use and gets rid of a nagging issue or a problem you didn’t even know you had. Think Dollar Shave Club, PayPal, or Science Comics (what parent doesn’t want a comic book that teaches their kids science).
• Modern names appeal to a desire to be both a part of and ahead of a crowd. They are fresh, new and buzzy. They work for companies aimed at a younger audience, or any attempt of breaking into and freshening up an industry. What is modern changes – for a while it was people’s first names, like Casper mattresses amongst others. Remember how Redfin pushed the boundaries of online real estate or Hulu came out as the cool younger brother to Netflix? These are both modern names, playing with an older industry standard.
• Outlier names appeal to curiosity! We all want to explore. We all get our heads turned by something new. Outlier brands stop you in your tracks: A cosmetics company with the word decay in it or a tech company named after a fruit! At the time, these brand decisions were huge risks, and they paid off with major impact.    
• Emotionality does what it says on the tin: appeals to emotions! Mighty Call is a good example, evoking strength. The Honest Company is another. The starkness of the name feels, in itself, honest. The desire to feel positive emotions is core to human nature, and brands that align here can have a huge effect on their customers. 
• Fun and Playful brands appeal both to our need for newness and our desire to laugh, have fun, enjoy ourselves. Remember, the original iPod commercials, with bright colors and dancing figures were all about pure fun! A lot of businesses aimed at Millennials and Gen z go for this kind of brand identity. 

Applying the Lessons

Ask yourself, what area do you want to appeal to in the human nature of your customers? 

If it seems a bit scary, remember, this is just a different way to look at brand positioning. And you can either play to or against expectations in your field. For a bank, traditionally a space for pragmatic or classic names, you probably don’t want to suddenly be ‘fun’, but you could be a little more modern than expected to draw in a younger audience. Or you could go for something more emotional, drawing in families and getting customers to think about their future. It is important to note that there is some contrast in human nature. We want security and adventure! Both can work. Look at Apple vs Microsoft. Both have done incredibly well, despite Apple being ‘Think different’ while Microsoft are eminently trustworthy and solid. 

When you start breaking all this down, it makes sense. Of course it does, we are all guided by human nature! So start thinking about it. What buttons can you push to get customers on board? Work that out, and build everything around a core idea that appeals to human nature.