Of course, Coca-Cola had an incredible brand even in the 1960's when they introduced Sprite to the market. It wasn't for a relatively long time until Sprite took over as the market leader in the late 70's.
Now imagine if Coca-Cola had used the power of their brand to name Sprite something else, perhaps utilizing Coca-Cola in the name, in spite of their core product differences [2]. You have to admit that would be kind of tempting, and while I'm not a brilliant marketer, perhaps they would have gone with Coca-Cola Clear Lemon-Lime, Coca-Cola Lemon-Lime, Coca-Cola Clear Lemon, or something else.
That would have been an awful mistake. And I see Google making the same mistake with Google+. Google is a search company; Facebook is a personal social network [3]. When I see Google+, I just think about how Google is using their new social product to augment their search/ads business. Perhaps if I had seen Google+ launch their product as plus.com (Google could just outright buy the company that owns plus.com) then I would have thought that Google was entirely committed to creating a social network. Or if I had seen a creative, stand-alone domain instead of plus.google.com or google.com/plus, I would have thought the same thing.
Getting the name of a new product right has to come before any innovations on UI, product, technology, and so forth.
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[1] Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(soft_drink)
[2] Even though Sprite is transparent, has no caffeine, and has a pretty different flavor from Coca-Cola Classic.
[3] And Coca-Cola is a marketing company. Perhaps that's why they got the Sprite name right in the first place.
Thanks to Guillermo for brainstorming this post and reading drafts.
