Benefit names
Benefit names primarily convey the outcomes an offering or company can produce.
As we approached the end of the 20th century, marketers became more and more sophisticated, and a simple axiom was discovered by strategists and copywriters: Lead with the benefit. This was something some had intuitively known long before, but as it became a common rule of thumb, companies began to intentionally lead their stories with benefits from the very first word: their names.
Famous examples
What does your company or offering make people feel? If your comics put them in awe of stupendous and heroic feats, you might name your company Marvel. If your food tastes good, you might call your company Yum Brands, and if it’s so good it makes people cackle with joy, you might call it Snickers. If your search engine helps people plug into the incredible excitement of cyberspace, you might name it Yahoo!, punctuation mark and all.
What do you help your audiences do? Perhaps your credit card lets them uncover new possibilities, like Discover, or maybe it gives them access to anything they want, like Visa. Maybe your spreadsheet software lets its users just do a better job, like Excel. Maybe your computer helps them find inspiration, just as Isaac Newton was inspired by a falling Apple. Or maybe your videogame lets people try out otherwise forbidden behaviors, such as committing Grand Theft Auto.
How do you change the world—or at least your audience’s circumstances? Do you help their family’s clothes become soft and light, like Downy? Or do you help their little ones feel indulgently cared for, like Pampers? Will your financial platform redistribute wealth from the rich to the needy, like Robinhood? Or will your cosmetics help its buyers become as beautiful as Moses’s wife, like Sephora?
Why you might use it
You have a unique (conception of a) benefit you can provide, or one with a singular need. If you’ve found an incredible insight, a secret unmet need that nobody else in your space is meeting, you can center your brand on that idea, like Visa or Robinhood. Just make sure the offering you’re creating actually delivers that benefit: if it turns out that the rich are actually paying you for access to your poor customers so they can squeeze money out of them, that’ll be a pretty embarrassing inversion of your chosen metaphor.
You want to spice up a definition name. If you’re naming a deep-fried onion snack, you might stand out best from your fellow deep-fried onion competitors with a name like Funyuns.
Why you might avoid it
You deliver the same benefit as your competitors, just better. If everyone in your space aspires to deliver the same benefit, it’s going to be very hard to stand out by claiming to do the same thing but better. It worked out OK for Best Buy, but the world is littered with Acme this and Apex that, which tends to read as desperate (or delusional) rather than authentically better. Your competitors aren’t going to claim second place, so your audience will have to just take your word for it. You might instead focus on the attribute that makes you better at delivering that benefit, or delve deeper: what is the resulting benefit of doing the same thing better?
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?