Introduction

Naming a company or product is part of what is traditionally referred to as “branding.” I have sat through many silly exercises and long, inefficient engagements conducted by branding companies designed to elicit a great name for a company or product. As a digital product-strategy consultant, I often find myself in the branding business, and I use an extremely rational, fast, yet very creative process, summarized below.

Stripped to its bare, rational essentials, branding is just the process of designing the verbal and non-verbal “identifiers” that single out a company and its products and services from the crowd, and groups them together into a recognizable family. Verbal identifiers are the names, taglines, and taxonomies for the company and its products and services. Non-verbal identifiers are commonly logo and corporate styles for palette, typography, stationery designs, copywriting, etc.

As part of this effort, we find a way to communicate, to the degree possible, the kind of customers, the kind of their unmet needs, the kind of benefits, and kind of product features relevant to the company while warding-off potential misunderstandings or negative associations. When done well, this is of great help to the company’s marketing and sales function. Only naming is addressed in this post.

1. What is a name for?
2. What distinguishes a good name from a bad one?
3. What difference does a good name make?

Drawbacks of a Poorly-Chosen Name

A poor name is a barrier to marketing and sales:

1. Confuses customers about what the company does or who they are
2. Misleads customers
3. Undermines confidence in the company and its products and services
4. Thwarts attempts to remember or use the name to connect with the company
5. Gives marketing and sales departments a lot of unnecessary and expensive work to do to overcome drawbacks of name

Benefits of a Well-Chosen Name

A good name facilitates marketing and sales by communicating, directly or indirectly:

1. Who potential customers would be (self-select themselves as potential customers)
2. The type of products or services offered
3. Reputation, authority, and scale of company

Criteria for a Company Name

The following outline is the criteria for a good company name. The importance of each criteria depends on the specific company situation. They should be rated before they are used. I have divided them into primary (which apply significantly to almost every situation) and secondary (varies with the type of company.)

Primary Criteria

1. Usable: short and easy to spell, ease to abbreviate
2. Categorizing: indicates what industry or type of company and/or type of products or services and/or who potential customers would be (context before content), at the right level of specificity (i.e. not too vague or too detailed)
3. Image: right image, status, or class for target customers (e.g., cheap, casual, popular, contemporary, cutting edge, risky, young, ordinary, formal, professional, reliable, special, exotic, alluring, exclusive, quality, high-end, traditional, conservative, safe, luxury, glamorous)
4. Memorable: e.g., uses puns, wit, humor, surprising or novel techniques, allusions or associations. e.g., “Just Desserts”
5. Fit: after initially talking about the company, will potential customers immediately understand why the company has that name? (accurate, clear, makes sense)
6. Unique: differentiated in spelling and sound from competitors; unlikely to be confused with someone else; not already trademarked or service marked
7. Strategic: anticipates company growth and future business lines; does not limit the company’s potential domain of business (another reason for meaningless names).

Secondary Criteria

1. Language Universality: has the same or approximate meaning in all the languages or are likely to trade in, or no negative associations (e.g., this is sometimes why Latin or Greek based names, such as LexisNexis, are used, as these are broadly meaningful in all Indo European languages, or why meaningless coinages are invented, such as Skype)
2. Differentiating: emphasizes the important and differentiating elements of the company’s key benefits (unmet needs/solutions relative to competitors), and not emphasize unimportant or undifferentiating elements
3. Authority: tells you who owns or runs or is connected to the company (e.g., famous owners, Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P.; or if ties to parent or merged company are important)
4. Legal Entity: makes clear the legal form of the entity (indicates scale, solidity, reliability)
5. Locality: indicates where the business or service area(s) are located
6. Capacity or Size: indicates magnitude of the company (big or small, e.g., Global Payment Systems vs. Cherry Creek Boutique)

Miscellaneous Notes

The right frame for evaluating a name is from the point of view of a new entrant into the market. E.g., Nike is household name, but as an entrant name it scores relatively poorly. New names should not be judged by the same standards as old, established names. Companies have many more opportunities to modify or abbreviate their name once it has become established (e.g., Federal Express -> FedEx).

Meaningless names or coinages such as “Skype” are last resorts because they require so much explanation (i.e., expensive marketing) to get established. They are appropriate if none of the relevant criteria below can be satisfied. This would be the case, for example, if you were a global company selling products with nothing in common among them, to everyone in the world. Coinages are by definition “innovative” and are generally associated with a young and informal company image.

Entrants in new product categories may want to coin new names in an attempt to dominate the associations of the whole product category or the activities associated with it. E.g., “to Xerox”, “to Google” for photocopy and search.

Product Category Naming

In most cases, needing to define a new product category is serious drawback for a company. This is because it is beneficial in most cases for potential customers, business analysts, and reviewers to understand the context of your company’s products and services without having to study them in detail. It allows them to pick you out as relevant with little effort; consider you in the right contexts where you have positioned yourself; make correct sense of your marketing messages (context before content); compare you against the right competition; and select you from alternatives in their decision-making processes. It also saves you from having to establish the product category, which is a time consuming and costly affair, and opens you up to a lot of skeptical scrutiny because most markets are suspicious of the impression of innovation carried by the introduction of a new product category. It is often inflated.

New product category naming should only be done if existing product categories are very inadequate, such as when the combination of the most significant categories of potential customers, unmet desires, product benefits, and product features are so different from the nearest existing product category that the business cannot get its message out without a new category. If it needs to be done, the business should restrict itself to subcategories, supercategories, or adjacent categories (i.e., consistent with a coherent product taxonomy). Cells phone vs. Smart phone is one example of an effective creation of new product category. Without the Smart Phone category, a Blackberry is reduced to comparing itself to a Razor, only bulkier with more features.

If you decide to define a new product category, it often advantageous to make the new product category part of the name of your product to help communicate it. E.g., Blackberry Smart Phone

Strategic Prerequisites for Naming

1. Who are your customers?
   1. Business Demographics
   2. Categories
2. What are their unmet needs/desires/self-interests relative to your company?
3. What alternatives do they “hire” to meet those needs, and what industries/product categories are they in?
4. What are the pros and cons of those alternatives?
5. What is special about your alternative (features) and how do its benefits compare?
6. What are your future areas of expansion? Customers, their unmet desires, new products, etc.
7. What kind of image do your customers respond well to relative to your company? (the following scheme is very simple, but surprisingly effective)

Linguistic Naming Techniques

For each of the ideas above, it is useful to brainstorm variant phrases using the guidelines below. These form the creative “soup” out of which effective brainstorming can form names.

• Synonyms
• Metaphor (speaking of one thing in terms of another, e.g., calling a piece of software a “workplace”)
• Humor (esp. word play or puns, e.g., “Just Desserts”)
• Metonymy (using part for whole, or using the name of one thing for that of another associated with it. E.g., referring to the President as “The White House”)
• Association (more important the shorter the name: ideas, feelings, literary, situational, etc.)
• Portmanteau (blending two or more words, e.g., Wikipedia is a blend of “wiki” and “encyclopedia”)
• Foreign or classical terms or etymological roots (e.g., Xerox from the Greek root “xer” meaning dry, or “LexisNexis” meaning a central connecting hub for text; often rely on our (unconscious) etymological familiarity with the terms)
• Acronyms (an abbreviation formed by the initial letters or syllables of a compound name that can be pronounced as a single word)
• Coinages (invented words, usually conforming to English phonology, morphology, and etymological roots)

Group Method for Naming a Company or Product

1. Introduce the problems of a bad name and the benefits of a good name
2. Introduce the criteria for a company name, a product, and a product category
3. Agree on weights of criteria for this situation
4. Try some worked examples with the group
5. Define/agree on the strategic prerequisites of naming
6. Brainstorm synonyms, metaphors, puns, metonyms, associations, foreign or classical terms
7. Brainstorm names
8. Critique against criteria, give a qualitative score, shortlist until you have a list of about four names all with high scores
9. Vote/pick the best name