6 THE CHOCOLATE LOVER TAKEN
FOR A FOOL

Some stories are best told by those who are leading characters in their own tales. James Averdieck tells the story of how he was tricked into choosing the name for his new chocolate lovers’ brand…

“I’m entrepreneurial and always have been. And I’ve always been a chocolate-lover. In terms of the business, my best decision was going with the Gü brand name. I worked with a marketing agency right from the start, and asked them to come up with a brand name for us, because they’re impossible to come up with.

“I’d been down that route before, and it can be a futile exercise. They phoned me a week later, and told me that they’d been round lots of chocolate shops in Europe and had come across a brand called Gü. The name was exactly what I wanted, but I’d never seen that brand before.

“They showed me the packet and I was really disappointed that someone had beaten me to it. It was then that they told me it was a fake – they’d mocked it up for me – and that was the brand name I should go with. I like Gü because it reminds you of gooey chocolate, and the umlaut adds a Continental sophistication.”

(James Averdieck interviewed in Management Today, 8 January 2005.)

And the moral is that brand naming is never easy. Do you know what you want from any new brand names?