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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/what-is-up-with-the-brand-name-for-pfizer-s-covid-vaccine/ar-AANEuUo
What Is Up With the Brand Name for Pfizer’s COVID Vaccine?
You know it, and know it well, as the Pfizer vaccine or, perhaps more properly, as the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID vaccine. But now that it’s officially approved, the vaccine has finally been allowed to use its fancy brand name: Comirnaty.
“Let me first start by saying that any naming process is extremely difficult, so I would never want to put a naming team down,” Molly Davis, the chief storyteller and strategist of Wonsupona, which does strategic brand naming and storytelling. “From what I’ve gathered, this name had a tall assignment: to include COVID-19, mRNA, community, and immunity.”
That ambition may be where it went wrong.
“Often when there are many naming objectives, the real story behind the name gets lost and the effort is just to appease executives,” she explained. “At first glance, Comniraty feels as confusing as these few years have felt,” she wrote with kindness, accidentally misspelling Comirnaty.
“The creators of this name packed all these spot-on allusions into four syllables,” wrote Margaret Wolfson, founder and creative director of River + Wolf, in an email. “That is not an easy thing to do, especially given the hyperstrict regulations and issues around pharmaceutical naming and trademarking. The name might be a little difficult for some speakers to say, as ‘mirnaty’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue and just misses the mark as an elegant sound. That said, people will get used to that, and the melding of relevant concepts makes it a winning mark.”
While naming is a lot about sound, you can’t ignore how it looks. It’s got all those rounded top letters making it messy to read: Cmmmmnnmmrrnnty.
“You have to be able to spell it, and you have to be able to say it,” said Carr. “This name fails on every count.”
The Pfizer vaccine’s new name was created by the Brand Institute, a specialist in the pharmaceutical naming space. And the name isn’t new in Europe, since Pfizer first rolled out Comirnaty when it received EU regulatory approval last Christmas.
Meanwhile, did you know the Moderna vaccine is named Spikevax? As a name, that seems kinda … metal.
According to Fierce Pharma, the other names BioNTech and their friends at Pfizer considered were Covuity, RnaxCovi, and Kovimerna — all of which are not great. BioNTech, like most companies, captures names all the time: Right now, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, they are sitting on some incredible names, including RIBOSPHERE and BLADDERTYPER.
The Big Pharma parents of COVID vaccines aren’t just tasked with the challenge of branding. They have to rebrand what are already extremely well known products around the world.
“We’ve spent like months now learning not only these names but kind of getting a feel for them,” said Bierut. “Pfizer is kind of the Coca-Cola, Moderna feels a little like Pepsi, J&J ended up being like RC Cola, an off-brand, funny thing. They acquired brand profiles on their own, no doubt to the chagrin of the sponsoring companies.”
Now they have a mountain to climb. The public’s perceptions and feelings about the vaccines “will now have to be displaced by these new names we have to learn. That creates a new, tough slope these brands have to climb as they try to intrude upon our consciousness,” Bierut warned.
Seems like it might not work.
“The golden rule for a brand name is it has to be memorable,” Carr said. “We do name testing all the time, and the only way you can test that is you let a day or two go by and you call them up and say, ‘Remember that new Pfizer vaccine?’ And they say, ‘Oh, great, I’m excited about that,’ and you say, ‘Okay, what was it called?’”
“I bet you have close to zero people.”