Audience names
Audience names primarily convey who a company or offering is for.
As markets expanded and stratified, in the mid-20th century, and the field of market research emerged, it became possible for companies to understand who they served (and what they wanted) well enough to name their companies after those audiences. Given the modern emphasis on ‘customer centricity’ and complex portfolios serving a range of audiences, this primary message has become a popular approach to generate goodwill and ease navigation while standing out from a more inward-oriented pack.
Famous examples
There are two main ways to help your audience see themselves in your brand.
The first is by naming to how they see themselves, and how they’re seen by others that might be making purchase decisions on their behalf. Hostess cakes was one of the first companies to take this approach, helping otherwise-baffled audiences understand insane names like Twinkies and Ding Dongs in the context of serving food to guests. A modern icon of this approach is Salesforce, whose singular focus on a then-underserved audience has made them rulers of an entire industry. And at the product level, almost every employee has audience-named software on their work computers: If you aren’t the type to have Office and Teams, then you almost certainly have Illustrator.
The other main approach is naming to how audiences want to see themselves: Venus evokes a godly vision of beauty and lovability that could be yours if only, presumably, your legs were smoother. Nike, for those in the know, evokes victory, and Peloton, to Tour de France watchers, conveys the idea of competitive communal cycling. And plenty of videogames are named for the persona they’ll allow their players to inhabit, like the splattering platoon of Splatoon, the fantasy adventurers of Monster Hunter, or the multiplayer vocab contest of Words with Friends.
This approach is particularly popular in naming something otherwise very illusory: portfolio segments. As Adobe grew beyond serving visual artists, they split their offerings into a Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud to help their two very different audiences navigate to the offerings that mattered to them. When Hewlett-Packard spun off their B2B cloud and server offerings, they named the new company HP Enterprise. Countless hygiene brands have introduced sub-brands targeting men with straightforward names like Dove Men, and essentially every clothing brand divides their portfolio into audience-based segments, with Men’s, Women’s, and Kids’ persisting into product names.
Why you might use it
You’re naming a company or offering with a unique audience, whose needs you serve pretty broadly. If you’re basing your endeavor on a the fact that sales teams need software specifically tailored to managing customer relationships, you might name your offering for them.
You’re naming a portfolio segment, sub-brand, or offering variant targeting one of your company’s many audiences, especially a new one. If your B2B tech company serves individuals, SMBs, and enterprises, and they see themselves that way in the context of your offering, it might make a lot of sense to name its three portfolio segments after those three audiences. If you’re trying to sell traditionally feminine goods to men, or traditionally masculine goods to women, it might be a good idea to specify, or at least evoke, those audiences in your name.
You have a unique idea of an aspirational identity that unifies an otherwise fragmented audience, like Nike’s unique view of all body-havers as potential victorious athletes.
Why you might avoid it
You’re naming a company or offering with many diverse audiences. If you’re naming pens that cost fifty cents, those might be used by people who see themselves, in the context where they encounter them, as students, parents, professionals, or customers.
You’re serving an audience whose shared identity is not a selling point, and who don’t share a specific aspirational end state. If you’re naming a glucose monitor for people with diabetes, naming to the illness won’t get you much goodwill, but there’s also not a unique “well” identity that’s specific to your audience.
You serve an audience whose needs are broad enough that naming to them could be confusing. If you’re selling diapers, naming for Moms or Babies is going to be confusingly broad, because there are so many offerings that serve each of those groups in the same context. If this is the case, be sure to complement your audience name with a definition.
Up next:
Want to better understand the other messages a name might convey? Move on to read about benefit names.
Think you’ve found the right message for your name? Time to think about the right method, starting with intuitive.
Or, for a general overview of naming topics, head over to our naming crash course.
Have ideas? Have questions?