Velfina

Naming

Client

Actimed Emergency Systems - currently known as Velfina - is a Romanian medical company that has been active both on the national and international markets since 2001. Its main solutions and products are used in the treatment of wounds.

The challenge

Actimed is the only Romanian supplier of medical products whose quality is recognised at the European level and its approach to the European market has been twofold: both directly, by using a proprietary brand, and indirectly, by subcontracting. Due to the potential problems that would have derived from using Actimed as a brand name at the European level without making it more relevant to the company activity or without researching the intended target market, too, the company contracted Grapefruit to assess the existing brand and highlight both the opportunities and risks that would be implied by a launch on the European market.

The solution

Following the brand audit and the design of the new communication strategy, Grapefruit supported the view that changing the brand name in order to make it meet more accurately the requirements of the new target market would benefit the customer to a large extent.

This process implied proposing over 150 names, followed by three stages of shortlisting the most appropriate ones according to semantic, phonetic and strategic criteria that featured in the brand strategy. Considering that the target market was a multilingual one, where brand names belonged both to the category of proper nouns and to that of artificial names, the final choice was an artificial, figurative name. The best choice needed to sound feminine in order to communicate the main distinctive features of the brand: gentleness, superior care, and excellence.

Grapefruit's final recommendation was made from among the best five candidate names following linguistic, cultural, marketing, strategic and legal research. The current name of customer company, Velfina, was believed to come closest to sending out all the right messages. Velfina is a trisyllabic construction, versatile and easy to remember, which has an underlying Latin structure that renders it easy to pronounce in all the European languages. It combines ‘velum’, ‘veil’, ‘văl’, ‘voile’ - meaning veil, or bandage -, suggesting the idea of protection and care. Moreover, ‘finis’, ‘fin’, ‘fine’, ‘fein’ stands for the ultimate ideal of quality and excellence.

  • Bd. Poitiers nr.16, Iaşi 700671, România
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  • Tel/Fax +40 (332) 403432, 403433
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  • Bd. Dacia, nr. 15, Sector 1, 010402, Bucureşti, România
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  • Tel/Fax +40 (332) 403435, 403433