Almost from the day that Robert, Edward and James Johnson began making first aid kits for work gangs laying railroad track in the late 1800s, Johnson & Johnson has been virtually synonymous with personal care products. Over the ensuing decades, J&J has also grown into the country’s largest pharmaceutical company and is today among the best-known brands in the world.
So, how will customers feel about a name like Kenvue?
That’s the question floating around ever since the J&J announced late last year that it would split its pharmaceutical business from its consumer products division into two, publicly traded corporations. And since only the pharmaceutical division can keep the Johnson & Johnson badge, the consumer products will exist under an umbrella company that, until corporate revealed its name last week, nobody had heard of.
“It really is a once-in-a-lifetime assignment and a way for us to define the future of this planned, new consumer-health company,” J&J global president of skin and consumer health Ellesha Kirby told Adweek.
Unsurprisingly, J&J and agency Lippincott invested a great deal of time and trouble into coming up with the Kenvue name (and imagery). It was a project that began in February and took some four months to complete. (The New York office of Wolff Olins handled the visual identity. See graphic below.)
J&J is entrusting legendary brands like Tylenol, Benadryl, Listerine and Band-Aid to the Kenvue name. So how did they go about doing it?
Check the fine print
Relying in part on the input from its 140,000 employees worldwide, J&J drafted a list of 12,000 potential names for the new company. (In case that sounds like a lot, consider the famous 1958 case of Ford Motor, which waded through 18,000 possible names before deciding to name its new model the Edsel.)
The process of vetting and trimming that list was “quite complex,” Kirby said, “because we had to consider a lot of different variables.”
Initially, the potential list of names had little to do with creativity and more to do with lawyers.
The new company would immediately have a presence in more than 100 countries, which meant that its name couldn’t run afoul of the existing trademarks (in 10 different product classes) in any of them.
What’s a Kenvue?
Assuming a new brand doesn’t bear the founder’s name (Cadbury Chocolates carries the name of founder John Cadbury, for example), it’s usually a good bet to come up with a previously nonexistent name. Not only does that help avoid trademark conflicts, but it also puts more control in the hands of the creatives and marketers from the outset.
Many of today’s best-known brands have followed this path. Intel, for example, is a mashup of “integrated” and “electronics.” British telecom giant Vodafone pieced its name together from “voice,” “data” and “phone.”
But since personal health is such an intimate and emotional area, pharmaceutical companies historically try to be a bit more imaginative, combining words and parts of words to evoke feelings of trust and efficacy in customers.
Viagra, for example, is a mashup of “virility” and “Niagara” (make of that image what you will.) The name for cough remedy NyQuil arose from the union of “nighttime” and “tranquility.”
In assembling Kenvue, J&J took a similar approach. The brand name is a portmanteau of “ken” (an archaic noun that means field of experience) and “vue,” the sensationalized spelling of “view.” Management hopes the end result will present the image of a seasoned company with an eye on the future.
“Bringing together knowledge and insight felt very fitting for us,” Kirby added.
Sounds nice, at least
Do customers really pick up on these symbolic machinations? Will anyone purchase a Kenvue product because they’ve pondered that name, deciphered its meaning, and then decided to try it?
Very likely not, said Rachel Bernard, a veteran brand-naming professional and founder of the consultancy Parts of Speech. A name like Kenvue, she said, “needs to sound good” and “feel like a medical company”—and that’s about it. It doesn’t matter much that consumers won’t be able to deconstruct the semantics behind it all, Bernard said; a name like this one “communicates more through its tone.”
Troubles in translation
The creation of a term that’s never existed before entails own risks, however, and that led to the next major task facing J&J and its Lippincott partners: making sure that Kenvue didn’t carry an absurd or offensive meaning when spoken in other parts of the world.
We’ve all heard the stories of how the Chevy Nova failed to sell in Mexico because Nova translated to “won’t go.” And how Pepsi’s “Come Alive” campaign flopped when Asian consumers interpreted it to mean that soft drinks help the dead to rise from the grave.
Those stories are apocryphal—but the risks they portend are real.
J&J applied what it called “linguistic and cultural screenings” to Kenvue in 89 languages and dialects to make sure it wasn’t too difficult to pronounce and, more importantly, didn’t conjure ribald or foul suggestions.
When working with her own clients, Bernard refers to this step as the “disaster check.” It’s where “things can get really, really tricky,” she said.
Bernard recalled working for a Japanese company called Calpis, a popular bottled drink with milky appearance and a tangy flavor. Facing the owners, she found herself explaining why a drink that could easily be misheard as cow piss “is not going to be a great name for a dairy product in the U.S.,” she said. (Today, Calpis sells in America as Calpico instead.)
Good—just not too good
In the end, J&J also had to manage a counterintuitive bit of wisdom when it comes to naming—at least when naming a company that will encompass many brands.
Since Kenvue’s portfolio will contain products that are already among the best known in the world, each with its own positive associations, the name for the corporate umbrella merely had to compliment these brands as a reasonable sounding parent company.
“Our consumer brands like Neutrogena or Tylenol will all always be the at the front of consumers’ minds— they’re the brands that consumers have in their bathrooms every day,” Kirby said. “So the role of a corporate brand is really to support those brands. We’d never seek to overshadow them.”
Time alone will tell how well the new name works, of course. Kenvue will become a standalone company in 2023.
