One of my clients wanted to use his own surname for his private champagne brand. Wanting your own family name on the bottle seems a perfectly legitimate thing.
But by a bizarre coincidence, when the name was translated into French, it turned out to be one of the words people use when they’re talking about champagne, a common descriptor for a particular aroma and taste. So even though it looked like a perfectly reasonable choice, it couldn’t go through.
He accepted that fairly readily. There was nothing he could do about it. He could have complained all he wanted, but the name still wasn’t going to be approved, so there was little point in pursuing it. He chose a different name, a totally different concept from the one he’d first had in mind. It wasn’t his first choice, but he found it acceptable, he was happy with it, and we went ahead.
There are unexpected pitfalls with names, and you need to know they’re there before you fall for one.
Every name has to be approved
Every private champagne brand name has to be approved by the authorities in Champagne before it can be registered, and the registration is what makes the brand legally yours. There’s a considerable amount of leeway, but there are conventions and regulations, and there are things you may not use.
In my experience the plainest of them is this. If the name already exists for some other product, whether that’s a wine, a champagne or something else entirely, it won’t be approved for a new brand, because somebody else has already laid claim to it. And sometimes that throws up some surprising results.
Then there’s the translation. A name can be perfectly good in English and still fail because of what it means in French, which is exactly what happened to my client.
Please wait
So when somebody has fallen in love with a name and is about to brief a designer, the first thing I say is please wait. Don’t do anything until we’ve had an informal conversation with the authorities in Champagne and heard their initial reaction to the name.
It doesn’t take long. I can call someone in the legal department at their offices, or send them an email, and I’ll usually have a fairly quick answer in a day or two.
If they tell us they see no obvious objection to the name, we’re reasonably safe in going ahead. There’s no 100% guarantee it’ll be formally approved later, but that informal okay is good enough to go on in most cases. If there’s any doubt, we rethink until we’re happy we’ve reduced the risk to the absolute minimum.
The formal approval takes a little more time. The meetings that consider new brand names only take place periodically, every two weeks or perhaps once a month, so there’s sometimes a delay of two weeks or a month. Usually it’s no longer than that. The formal application goes in with the artwork of the labels, so once the informal answer is back, the design work can go ahead in parallel.
What I ask clients not to rush, before that first answer, is the spending that depends entirely on the name. Marketing material, logos, designs built around one particular name: if your project depends on that name being approved, pressing ahead with those before you have a clear idea whether it will be is always a bit risky.
The name is the first of a long series of decisions, and it’s the one that can stop everything else.
When approval isn’t the end of it
One of my earliest clients had a family name strikingly similar to that of a very famous, internationally known family in the world of banking. There was just one letter different. Understandably, he wanted to use his own family name, and it seemed quite reasonable to him.
We had quite a discussion before I managed to persuade him that the other family wouldn’t hesitate to take legal action against him if he insisted. So he relented, and chose another name, one that referred to members of his wider family.
A couple of years later, the famous family contacted him anyway. Even the second choice, in their eyes, was likely to lead to confusion and an incorrect association with them. He was able to resist it.
He’d given up his own name for one that belonged to his wider family, and even that was questioned. It goes to show how careful you have to be with a brand name, both in meeting the requirements of the authorities in Champagne and in thinking about the wider implications.
Before you spend anything
Usually a name that can’t be used isn’t a disaster. You can change it, or find a way around it. The problem comes when you’ve charged ahead with a name in your mind and already spent the time and money on a marketing plan, logos and colour schemes, only to find out afterwards that it isn’t approved.
So please wait. A day or two is all the first answer takes.
If you have a name in mind for a private champagne brand of your own, the next step is a conversation before anything gets designed. I’ll tell you what’s involved, how the name gets checked, and whether what you have in mind is likely to work. Book a call.