Why a snack needs a playful name

A playful name gets a snack picked up in the few seconds it has on the shelf, remembered, and mentioned to a friend. But fun does not replace the three jobs every name has to do: say what the product is, read well in several languages, and be registrable. This piece explains how we think about names, through two of our own: PLAY and Let's PLAY.

What a name does in three seconds on the shelf

Snacks are rarely planned purchases. Most are chosen in a few seconds while the eye moves along a shelf or a checkout counter. In those seconds the name has three jobs:

• Be recognised: short, large type, remembered after one reading.
• Suggest a feeling or an occasion: a break, a run, a family around a table.
• Be easy to repeat: the person eating it should be able to say the name to a friend without hesitating.

A technical descriptive name, mixed cashew pressed bar for example, does the first job but not the other two. A playful name does the second and third, and, if chosen with care, all three.

Playful, but still clear

Playful names slide easily into confusing ones. We hold to a few rules when naming a brand or a new flavour:

• Short, one or two words, smooth when read aloud.
• Readable in several languages, because we are working towards export. A name with Vietnamese diacritics can work, but it needs an unaccented spelling that still reads well.
• No promise beyond the food inside. A name must not hint at a health benefit the product cannot support.
• Nothing misleading about the nature of the product. Food labelling rules in many places forbid this, and shoppers do not forgive it either.
• Room for flavours and variants. A good brand name is a frame; flavour names fill it.
• Checked for unfortunate meanings in the languages of the markets we aim for, and checked for trademark availability before the whole team falls in love with it.

The last rule matters more than people expect. A name discovered to clash with an existing trademark after it has been printed is a print run thrown away.

PLAY and Let's PLAY: one word, two uses

We chose the word PLAY because it is short, readable in almost every language, and carries two meanings at once: playing sport and playing for fun. Those two meanings split into two brands.

PLAY Nutrition belongs to active days. Here PLAY leans towards sport: energy bars for a run, a training session, a long walk. PLAY Protein Bar uses the same word, and the Protein Bar part does the clarifying: this is a 45 g protein bar, not an energy bar.

Let's PLAY is an invitation. Adding Let's moves the meaning from exercise to playing together. The brand covers rice crackers in bags of eight, made for sharing, and two snack jars, Cheese Ball and Maize Ball, printed with an Ô ăn quan board. The jar's product name includes the game itself: Cheese Ball Ô ăn quan. Read the name and you know you are getting two things, a jar of snacks and a game to play. It is our clearest example of a name that is playful and still clear.

Our fourth brand, Natural & Healthy, goes the other way: a plainly descriptive name that lets the ingredient, Vietnamese cashew, be the story. Not every brand needs a playful name. Playful names suit playful occasions, and descriptive names suit products where the ingredient is the reason to buy.

Flavour names are names too

Many teams name the brand with great care and the flavours carelessly. For us, flavour names follow the same rules. Lime leaf chicken, cheese tteokbokki, red bean, seaweed: each says exactly what is in the bag, in the words people use in everyday life. For the two Maize Ball jars we named the editions by jar colour, green and teal, so that a shopper only has to say the colour to get the right one.

Flavour names are also where our Taste First value is easiest to break. If the name says orange and cacao and the bite delivers only cacao, the name has over promised. In a sample review we read the flavour name aloud, then taste, and ask one question: does the name match what we just ate?

How we check a name before it is printed

Before a name goes on a pack it passes six small checks: read it aloud in the room; put it on the packaging draft to see whether the type is large enough at real size; show it to a few people outside the team and listen to the first thing they say; check its meaning in the languages of the intended markets; check trademark availability; and compare it with labelling rules to be sure it cannot mislead anyone about what the product is. The six checks take a week. A wrong print run costs more than that.

If naming, packaging copy and keeping four brand voices distinct sounds like your kind of work, the Marketing Leader role in Hanoi is open on the Careers page. If you are a distributor or importer wondering which of our names fits your shelf, send us a message through the Contact page.