Intuitive names
Intuitive names don’t require any conscious thought from your audiences to understand what they mean.
The vast majority of the time, when you encounter a word, your brain doesn’t think twice about what it means: the sounds or letters just melt seamlessly into a stream of ideas in your brain. Ideally, that’s been true of every single word you’ve read so far on this page, with the possible ironic exception of “intuitive,” which we’re using in a somewhat original way.
A lot of names do this, too—and while that can be ideal, sometimes it’s impossible, or undesirable.
Famous examples
If you’ve read any of our name message deep-dives, then you’ve already encountered a lot of intuitive names. They’re the best ones for us to use as examples, exactly because they’re so intuitive: when we say Disney was is named for its founder, Pizza Hut is named for its offerings, or Salesforce is named for its audience, there might be a brief aha moment, but no head-scratching.
The vast majority of these names use one of three common naming tactics.
When intuitively conveying origins, they almost all use proper names, like Kroger or McKinsey (though not all proper names convey origins, like Tesla or Oscar or Sephora). If you want to name a company after yourself, there’s very little reason not to just use your own name to do it.
All other messages are most intuitively conveyed by what we call literals, that is, dictionary words used for their dictionary definition. Home Depot, Progressive, Hostess and Salesforce all just say what they mean using common words that everyone in their audiences will know and understand.
There’s some degree of messing around you can do to a word without sacrificing its intuitive nature. Composites (phrases with the space removed) like KitchenAid, SickKids, Evernote, and Mastercard are all still perfectly intuitive ways of conveying their respective messages. Same with light spelling modifications like Citi, iPhone, Gmail, or Hims. Even some made-up words will make intuitive sense, like Medtronic or Cheerios.
Where this starts to get murky is with everyone’s least favorite naming tactic, initialisms. If you already know what IBM stands for, then it makes perfect intuitive sense—but if you’re naming something new, it’s best to consider these names to be cryptic, requiring lots of additional explanation to make sense of.
A final note: the most important consideration when creating an intuitive name is your audience. All the examples we’ve given here are likely intuitive to an educated, English-speaking audience, but that might not be who you’re talking to. Volkswagen, or ‘people’s car,’ is entirely intuitive to German audiences, as Doritos, or ‘little golden things,’ is intuitive to Spanish-speakers. Most people won’t have any idea what Application Synthetics are, but to the dozen or so CIOs who do need to know, it’s clear as day.
Why you might [not] use it
Intuitive names are good when clarity is your most important consideration, and flexibility is not important. Flexibility can be considered today, or over time.
Today, if the only thing you want people to know about your company is that it was founded by Michael Dell, then it totally makes sense to go with an intuitive name. But if you want people to associate your company with all kinds of electronic devices, high-quality simple design, a source of inspiration, and being founded by Steve Jobs and two other guys probably—well, you’re not going to find a word that intuitively means all that, driving you towards an evocative or even cryptic name. And if you’ve already got a name that says all that, like Apple, you might not need to say much else: this is the Watch that Apple makes.
Over time, if you are only ever going to sell containers and cannot imagine ever wanting to sell anything else, you might name your company The Container Store. But if your computer company is going to sell software and music and credit cards and a TV channel with original programming, Computer Company might be a bit too narrow, while Multi-Industry Conglomerate won’t meaningfully convey anything. If you’re going to sell cars that are united by their small form factor, Mini could be a great name, but it won’t work if you plan to start making SUVs or tractor-trailers.
Beyond flexibility, the other main concern with intuitive names is ownability. If you have a strongly differentiated idea, like Pampers, you’ll probably be in the clear. If you were to try to found a second store that sells nothing but containers, you’d have to find something less intuitive (or a message other than definition) to stand out from the competition. This also means that high-level names, like those of companies and product lines, are better suited to evocative or cryptic names like Apple and Mac, because ownability matters more at that level: then, your products and variants names can be more intuitive, like OS and Pro.
Testing your names
It’s easy to test if a name is truly intuitive or not. In any qual research setting, you can just ask your audiences what the word means, without any other context. “If you saw an ad for something called Nutritious Chips, what would you think the ad was for, and how is it different from other things?”
If their responses are confident and line up with the brief — in this case, if they say, “well they’re chips but they’re also somehow nutritious” — then you’re definitely looking at an intuitive name. If they aren’t confident, though, or their responses are very different from what you intended they take away from the name, then you aren’t hitting the mark.
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?