Naming crash course
So you’ve got to name something. Maybe it’s a company you’re starting, a product you’re launching, or a new variant on a storied product line. Maybe it’s a kid, or a dog. Here’s everything you need to know to get started.
Learning from human names
You might not have thought hard about them before, but you deal with human names every day, and they teach you something about their subject. Without ever meeting James Mueller, you can intuit a few things from the name alone: James indicates that this person’s likely a man, while Mueller indicates a possible relationship to the famous Robert Mueller, and that they’re likely a descendant of a German immigrant to North America. And one thing you know absolutely for sure is that this is a different person than Amanda Caswell.
Other names — for companies and products, campaigns and strategies, pets and family vehicles — work on similar principles: they identify something specific, while telling you something about it.
What names say
In the world of branding, there are about five messages that we often want to convey about organizations, their portfolios, and the offerings in those portfolios.
When Walt Disney named his company, he named it for himself. Same with J. P. Morgan and Louis Vuitton, or the people of [San Fran] Cisco. These names indicate origins: the identity of the person or people behind them.
When Kip Tindell and Garrett Boone named their company, they took a different approach, calling it The Container Store. Can you guess what kind of products they sold? What about Pizza Hut or General Motors? These are definition names, describing exactly what kinds of goods to expect.
Some companies are unified more by an ethos, like Mini’s drive for small vehicles, or Extra gum’s emphasis on large packages, or Budget car rental’s emphasis on price. These are attribute names, telling you, not what is being sold, but what it’s like.
What about Salesforce, or hims? While they definitely have salespeople and male employees, these names aren’t really about the companies at all, but rather their audiences, because these companies have a unique conception of who exactly they serve.
If you’ve taken a marketing course before, you know just as well as Marvel and Pampers and Excel and Discover, to lead with a benefit. These names are as customer-centric as you can get, explicitly claiming the outcome they can provide.
These ideas are fundamentally connected—the reason that the definition of an offering is relevant is because of the benefits the defined thing can provide to its audiences, and that thing’s attributes are dependent upon the ethos of the people making it. But these connections are complicated, taking whole sentences or paragraphs to convey—in the tight constraints of a name, you have to prioritize which idea leads.
How names say
You may have noticed a major difference between these names and my human name example above. The Container Store didn’t actually need any explanation for you to know exactly what it meant, whereas James Mueller did, and you’ve likely already forgotten the nuances of Mueller’s implications.
All the names in the last section (except maybe Cisco) were intuitive: that is, to their intended audiences, they don’t need any conscious thought to process, no storytelling support. But that doesn’t work for everyone. If every man of German-American descent was named Man of German-American Descent, it would be pretty tough to tell them all apart, difficult to remember the details, and really annoying to say all those words all the time.
Companies, of course, face this problem too, sometimes. Maybe it’s not just enough to convey that you sell motors, generally: maybe you want to be associated with electricity and mad scientists, too. Well, in that case, you’re out of luck, because there’s only one name that means both those things, and it’s taken: Tesla. This is an evocative name, which might take a little thinking or research to suss out. Think of Venus brand razors, and that name’s clear, but not literal, association with feminine beauty. Or Visa’s natural associations with access, reinforced by decades of campaigns and sponsorships.
But it may be that there just isn’t a word that does everything you want it to. What if you want the name of your computer company to evoke the extreme limits of invention and inspiration? You might have to go really far out on a limb, and name it something like Apple, after Isaac Newton’s scientific muse. In this case, you’re developing a cryptic name, one that you’ll have to build meaning into over time, that audiences will never be able to figure out all on their own. Xerox and Nivea and Bluetooth and Nike all took this approach, with names you’d need arcane knowledge to figure out—meaning they could make them mean whatever they wanted.
What it means for you
As you may have realized, there are a lot of words in the dictionary, and even more that haven’t made their way in yet, maybe haven’t even been invented yet. These concepts are important for helping you find the chunks of words that might be right, and know what ‘good’ looks like when you see it.
First, find your message: As you begin your naming project, the first step is narrowing in on these five messages. What is it about your organization that’s unique? What is the single most important element of your brand strategy (you have one of those, right?)? What’s the most enduring aspect of your vision, that’ll still be true in ten or fifteen years?
Then, find your method: As you prioritize your naming messages, how many do you have? Is your differentiator singular and clear, or does it have a lot of facets and nuance? How willing are you to compromise, or to spend a lot of marketing dollars making your name make sense? How badly do you want to stand out, versus fit in easily?
From there, you’re all set to move into creative brainstorming, and the wild and raucous word of legal clearance.
Have questions? Have ideas?
Want to ask why the words suggestive and abstract, or coined and composite, do not appear in this article?