Is it iPod nano or iPod Nano?

Well, if you’re Apple’s marketing team, it’s “nano” — but if you’re a journalist following Apple, it could be either. If you read the media coverage, you’ll see both versions.

Nicole Stockdale’s copy-editing blog has a good post on this. Nicole tells fellow journalists not to let Apple’s marketing language undermine grammar and style rules. As she puts it:

Proper nouns are capped. And that means that iPod’s Shuffle and Nano are capped, too, no matter what they want to do on their Web site or with their logo.

Is the resulting inconsistency a problem? Not for Apple. Its brand is so well-established that it doesn’t really matter.

But for most companies, I’d argue that you’re better off with a straightforward approach to capitalization in branding — one that jibes with AP style, and that is consistent for both your logo treatment and the use of your company name in plain type.

The value in this approach is that it makes it much easier to enforce your brand standards — not only with the media, but with employees, business partners, and customers, too.

For example:

If I’m Apple, I’ve spent millions of dollars on advertising and marketing collateral to support nano. I’ve supplied it to my retailers, I’m communicating it directly to customers, and I’ve promoted the branding internally to employees. And, I’ve got a marketing team that makes darn sure that every piece of material distributed by the company is consistent.

So if The Associated Press chooses to call my product “Nano” in its coverage, so what? No biggie.

However, if I’m not Apple, and my product is called, say, “milli”:

I don’t necessarily have big bucks to put behind a product launch. I might be required to rely on public relations and word of mouth — which requires me to have a brand message clear enough that it won’t be lost in a third-party translation.

I might not have the marketing infrastructure to fully support my sales team’s efforts, either; so, perhaps, the salespeople create some of their own letters and other materials, based on their interpretation of the brand and its message.

Do I really want this kind of marketing campaign to have any more inconsistencies than it has to? If you get a sales letter beseeching you to buy a “Milli” and then go to the Web site and see it called “milli,” it starts to erode the image I’m trying to build.

With enough inconsistencies, you ultimately will come to question the company’s professionalism: “If these guys aren’t on the same page, how are they going to deliver a superior product or service?”

I’ve found that even among large companies, enforcing brand standards can be difficult; often, however, the difficulties are self-created.

My advice, for consistency’s sake, is to only create brand names that are first-letter uppercase. The one exception I’d consider is the so-called “camelcase,” where the brand name starts with a lowercase letter but embeds an uppercase letter. (For example: iPod.) For the most part, third parties catch on quickly to camelcase names, and the media is fairly consistent in accepting them.

Frankly, I think the “camelcase” is way overused — but if you have to mess with your capitalization, it’s a better affectation than either all caps or all lowercase.

The question I’d ask myself, though, is: How strong is my brand concept if I need to throw in all those bells and whistles?