It’s All In A Name: An Experiment In Branding

Branding has become a key element of his company’s business model as Pineda, business development manger for Bodhi Lawn & Sprinkler, thinks more and more about how worldwide corporations have used branding to represent their products and evoke a lifestyle preference among consumers. Pineda’s goal is to separate his company from competitors by creating specific brands throughout his entire organization, including specific names for different company divisions and services.

Pineda’s company performs lawn care, maintenance and custom landscape design/build work all under the moniker Bodhi Lawn & Sprinkler. He said the company specializes in custom landscape installations, but if someone looked that name up in the phone book, they could only guess that the company did some sort of lawn and irrigation work. "Our name does not sound like a custom craftsmanship type of company," said Pineda. "Next season we’re subdividing our divisions into separate brands." Each company division will have its own name, and within the custom landscape division, for example, crews doing common landscape installations will have a different name than crews doing higher-end installations because their core market sectors are different. "We’re going to brand each individual identity," he explained.

Pineda gave an example of how his branding philosophy has developed. He explained that a high-end homeowner looking to spend $50,000 on a water feature installation would look for a specific and creative company name in the Yellow Pages that alluded to high-end services. "If I told you my name was Custom Water Gardens, Water Garden Artist Doug Pineda, you’d probably be more likely to spend $50,000 with me than if you called Bodhi Lawn & Sprinkler," Pineda explained. He said the first company name seems to have a higher value to it than the second even though the companies might offer identical services. "All it is, is a name," he noted.

"I’ve deeply studied branding for about 12 years now. In that time, I’ve seen the term ‘marketing’ change into a more correct term - ‘business development’ - and have watched the term ‘advertising’ split into separate categories, one of which is ‘branding,’" said Pineda, noting that he’ll be spending the fall and winter to get the ball rolling for his own companies’ branding. "In the meantime, we’ve solidified about 10 names with the state, so we can and pick and choose and then get our image - our brand - down for our advertising."

NAMING LANDSCAPES. Pineda’s first experiment with branding before restructuring the entire company involves creating brands for custom landscape styles. He has developed names for several common landscape styles used in his designs and installations, including Durango, Aspen and Americana. The idea originated from the practice of homebuilders naming the different styles of their architecture.

"My home is called the Durango," said Pineda, explaining that it has a stone veneer on the outside. "It is common to match your landscape style and design to your home. When I designed my landscape, I designed each element to be symbiotic with the style and name of my home. I thought: developers name - or brand - subdivisions, streets, styles of homes and even bring their concept through to the design of the community entrances. Knowing what I know about branding, naming our landscape styles to fit the house and/or community is a natural relationship."

Thus, the Durango landscape was created. It includes features like boulders, narrow deciduous trees, pines, rocky retaining walls and ornamentals that fit a mountain-style theme. This landscape style is common in Pineda’s Colorado market, therefore, he has introduced the Durango landscape to customers as a brand for his design/build division.

Pineda explained that homeowners are proud of their property investment and want a landscape that ties into their overall home and property feel. Because of this personality trait, Pineda believes homeowners will have an emotional attachment to a landscape with a name compared to just a plain-old landscape. "If one company creates a landscape design for a potential client, and I come in and create a design based around our Durango style, the two have a different flavor," he noted. "A potential client is going to identify more with my product than my competitor’s because they’ll feel my landscape proposal has an actual identity, which they can emotionally categorize. And if my competitor and myself are about same price and design, I pretty much guarantee nine out of 10 times they’re going to go with me."

To create landscape style names, Pineda needs to identify the relationship between the property and landscape styles, categorize the landscape with a name and tie it into his business marketing and development plan. "Now I’ve created it as an identity," he explained. "It’s no longer an inanimate, two-dimensional thing or service that someone is purchasing - it’s now an entity, a brand, because I named it."

Pineda noted that the Durango and other landscape styles are flexible designs that must be customized to fit individual properties. Although the landscape style name is a brand, that doesn’t mean there will be 10 boulders, three retaining walls, five pine trees and a bed of mountain laurels. Therefore, Pineda is careful not to package his landscape styles as a finite, tangible entity. "If you say it verbally, it comes off as very creative and very intimate," he explained. "As soon as you put it down on paper, it becomes a package and it may have a different effect."

Pineda’s other two current landscape styles include the following:

• The Aspen: may include aspens, evergreens, large twiggy shrubs, mosaic stone or timber retaining walls, a mix of medium to small boulders, cobble and river rock, colorful flower beds and a small water feature.



• The Americana: may include large areas of turfgrass, big canopy trees (such as maples) mixed with small flowering trees (such as crabapples), block-style retaining walls, bird baths and feeders, cobble and river rock mixed with wood mulch, large flower and shrub beds and a small water feature with a pond.

MOVING INTO WATER GARDENS. Pineda is also developing names for custom water garden styles. The first part of developing brands for this area of his business is to call the features "water gardens" rather than "ponds" because he said the phrase "water gardens" creates a feel of relaxation and tranquility compared to "ponds," which could be visualized as fishing holes.

Pineda explained that a homeowner’s decision to invest in a water garden could be a difficult one because of the perceived costs. Therefore, he said contractors must create value in the product, educate the customer, offer decision-making factors and hold the customer by the hand to convert them from a lead to a sale. "For homeowners, a water garden is usually a luxury item purchase. Therefore, you have to brand it and do everything you can to help someone make a transition to purchasing one," noted Pineda.

For this reason, he is working on specific names (brands) for water garden styles. However, compared to landscape names that change depending on the style and relationship with a property, water garden names change depending on additional features and material costs. "As a contractor, I equate materials to price. As a designer, I equate materials to design," explained Pineda. "With water gardens, any time my materials change in relationship to price is where my next name change should be."

As far as developing a complete branding plan for his company’s divisions and services, Pineda wants to be sure he gets it right from the beginning. His initial experiments in landscape style and water garden branding will help him evolve other brands within his organization. "Branding is absolutely key," he stated, "in creating emotional relationships, value and occupying a primary position in a client’s mind."