OneSteel spent $1 million coming up with a meaningless name, and will need to spend much more to make it work.

Arrium was dreamt up by OneSteel’s trusted consultants and has no particular meaning – aside from a cheeky reference by the company’s social media team to kryptonite, the one weakness of The Man Of Steel.

The new name is meant to suggest “a mining and materials business of some substance”, according to chief executive Geoff Plummer.

He said the `Arr’ in the name was meant to be “something that looks and sounds okay to people”.

The `ium’ is meant to suggest a good mining and materials business.

“It sounds somewhat mining and somewhat technical to most people when we’ve tested it,” Mr Plummer said.

University of Sydney marketing expert Charles Areni said OneSteel had avoided one of the major pitfalls of a name change.

“Companies do a lot of research to make sure not so much that they’ve got a good brand that’s going to confirm a lot of positive perception, but they don’t want to make a catastrophic error where they come up with a brand name with some negative connotation,” he told AAP.

Negative associations with brand names have resulted in many changes over time, perhaps most notably Kentucky Fried Chicken’s move to plain and simple KFC.

The Australian steel industry is going through tough times at the moment due to overseas competition, but the name change has been made to better reflect OneSteel’s growing resources business rather than distance itself from steel, Mr Plummer said.

It’s now up to the company to give the new name some meaning.

“The name of a brand can be darn near anything,” Professor Areni said.

“It doesn’t inherently have any equity until the company begins spending money on mass media and other forms of communication to effectively inject the brand with meaning, and that’s what creates the brand value.”