Naming strategies for quick-commerce brands

Getir has become a source of pride. With the category it created and its unique operational infrastructure, it has entered millions of homes.

The quick-commerce category Getir leads worries many retail brands and pushes them to do something against it. Names chosen in a panic all try to resemble Getir — and the more they resemble it, the wider Getir's reach becomes. It wouldn't be wrong to say the hidden heroes of Getir's success are the confirming name choices of its rivals.

Why do names other than Getir find little or no place in our minds?

Some players in quick commerce operate with independent names; others move under an umbrella brand. But all of them choose experiential names. First, understand this: the "quick delivery" business model Getir introduced has now become a category. It opened a drawer in our minds, and the competitive arena is the inside of that drawer.

The first brand in that drawer was Getir. Then Banabi became the second, and its head-to-head rivalry catalyzed the category's rapid formation. But somewhere along the way Banabi moved under the Yemeksepeti umbrella and stopped its independent brand advertising — even though it had positioned itself as one of two alternatives in the new category and had pushed its awareness quite high. The marketing-strategy side of this is a big topic for another piece.

Back to our real subject — brand names

When we design a brand name, we start by feeding on the competition in the market, because at the end of the day a name is itself a competitive arena. If you're going to enter a new competition, we aim to find a name that occupies more space in collective memory and therefore carries stronger associations — that is the only way to be learned and accepted easily.

Getir, as any category creator should, chose the right naming strategy and took the position of category founder. An experiential name represented what the category does and its promise in a simplicity that broad audiences could learn easily.

So what happened next?

Every new brand entering the category tried to design an experiential name — and today we have brands that resemble Getir, confirm Getir, and are perceived as weaker than Getir. That is probably the underlying reason Banabi wanted to move under Yemeksepeti's umbrella: it couldn't represent the category as well as Getir or carve out its own space, so it tried to pull the competition onto ground where it was stronger. In vain — the consumer mind works by its own perspective, not by desk-bound strategies.

Banabi, Migros Hemen, İstegelsin, HepsiExpress, Trendyol Go — all fell into the same trap, and by creating experiential names they catalyzed Getir's fame even further. Worse, their own ads remind people of Getir. Run a quick survey among people around you to test it: when they hear an experiential name, the experiential and popular brand surfaces in their mind.

What could they have done?

I don't know, but I can guess. With courage, they could have found invented, definitive or associative names that capture, represent and make people feel the category's promises beyond speed.