Cryptic names
Cryptic names require extensive explanation by their marketers for audiences to understand what they mean. Most folks won’t have any idea what they mean without explicit help, and while some others might have a guess, they’ll often be wrong, or there will be a number of plausible explanations. If they have some right guesses, they’ll be just that: guesses.
Famous examples
There are a few common approaches to cryptic names.
Though it might come as a surprise, cryptic names are just as easy to find in the dictionary as intuitive and evocative ones. This is because pretty much any arbitrary term can be at least directionally right: Orange telecom or Coach bags or Circle K stores are all chosen essentially at random, or have stories so obscure that, once lost to history, they’ve never been rediscovered. Other words might straddle the line with evocative: there’s a story with Apple about the fruit that inspired Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking genius, but that’s not a story audiences have pretty much ever figured out on their own — same with BlackBerry’s little black buttons, or 5 Gum’s stimulation of every human sense.
The other way that real words show up in cryptic names is by drawing words from languages not spoken in the target market, and with no connection to the founders. Kijiji is Swahili for ‘village’, Hulu is supposedly Mandarin for ‘interactive recording’, and Xerox is (pretty close to) the Greek for ‘dry writing,’ although as far as we can tell none of these companies had any connection to those languages or cultures. A common language here is Latin, which people think is a lot more comprehensible than it is: Nivea means ‘snow white’, Raytheon means ‘light from the gods,’ and Nvidia is ‘envy’. Though some might be able to reverse-engineer these coinages, most in their markets won’t know any of these stories without being told.
But of course, the iconic cryptic name is the pure invention. Think of a pharma brand: GlaxoSmithKline, Pepto Bismol, Cigna, Novartis, AstraZeneca. These are all inventions with at best a tenuous connection to any real language. Same with Ikea, Rolex, Noom, or Exxon. These kinds of names are cobbled together out of necessity, or chosen solely on subjective aesthetic criteria.
Why you might [not] use it
Cryptic names are most useful when flexibility and ownability trump clarity and cost.
You might want to maximize flexibility if you have big but vague ambitions. If you plan to follow opportunity wherever it takes you, and don’t have a clear idea of who you’ll serve, or how or why, along the way, then it’ll be very useful to have a name that you can fill up with whatever you’d like. This will come at the cost of clarity, but in this scenario, short-term clarity will just lock you in, and become a hindrance further down the road. Ask Jeeves would struggle terribly to be anything but a search engine with its intuitive verb ‘ask’, while Google could become anything they wanted.
You might want to maximize ownability if you’re building a wide-spanning company brand that needs to operate in a lot of arenas, or against extremely strong competitors.
Both flexibility and ownability will come with high costs. If you can make a word mean anything, that means you have to spend a lot of extra money to avoid it just meaning nothing. And if you skip out on building meaning entirely, you’ll be paying an opportunity cost for the entire life of your brand, sacrificing your single most important messaging asset. If you can’t afford a decade of campaigns to make the name meaningful, consider more tightly prioritizing your messages and aiming for an evocative name instead.
How to test your name
Testing cryptic names is, thankfully, just as straightforward as testing evocative or intuitive ones. The litmus test here is different, but still measurable, and still measurable as part of qual.
The question you ask your prospective audience is this: “A new form of technology is being introduced, called Bluetooth. What do you think that means? Would you believe that this offering could be cutting-edge, simple, connective, and a feature of computing devices? If so, how hard would it be to believe? If not, why not?”
Again, the goal with a cryptic name is not that customers understand what they mean upfront, it’s that the name could be filled with the meaning you want eventually. The fit test here isn’t clarity, it’s whether the name can flex enough to fit what you want it to.
However, it’s still very important to ask audiences what they think the name might mean, because it might have strong associations that are opposite of what you’re trying to build. It’s one thing to fill an empty vessel, but it’s another thing entirely to have to unpack a bunch of unwanted associations from the get-go.
Up next:
Want to better understand the other methods names use to convey their messages? Read about evocative names.
Want to know more about the messages themselves? Start with the originals: origin names.
Or, for a general overview of naming topics, head over to our naming crash course.
Have ideas? Have questions?