Naming
Your brand's name is its most important asset. It's the one component of the brand that is ALWAYS present, because it's the mental anchor audiences use to think about it: try using your usual search engine without thinking about its name. It's the first word of your story, defining your audiences' first impressions with your brand. And it's also, of course, omnipresent in your UI or packaging, and it's how people talk about your brand as they use or recommend its offerings. No other asset has that level of sticking power.
At their best, names pack the most important ideas about a brand into a single word. I love to use Tesla as an example, a word that perfectly conveys the idea of a mad genius changing the world through electricity— exactly what Elon Musk would like you to think is true of him and his company.
Names are not only important, they're also extremely difficult to develop, both creatively and operationally, a fact that often surprises product developers or brand managers facing an imminent launch.
This article is a crash course in understanding naming: if you're about to embark on your first naming project as a client or practitioner, this is the article for you. If you want to learn how to make your 10th or 100th project go more smoothly, you might want to read about my naming system instead.
What qualifies as a "brand name"?
In my view, a brand name is any consistent term used to denote a component of your portfolio. In the universe of Samsung, there are names like Samsung, Galaxy, and Bixby, but also S12 and Internet.
Many of my clients take a much narrower definition, of both brand and name. Commonly, companies will only consider something a name if it is something other than an industry standard term: Apple is a name, but Watch is not. These non-name words are often called descriptors. I see brand teams do this in an attempt to limit the pressure on a naming team, and offload responsibility for functional names onto product teams rather than use limited brand resources.
While I understand those motivations, behind closed doors, when it's just us, I prefer to consider all consistent terms names, right down to highly functional specs like sizes. Ultimately, they all have to be selected, and the basic method is always the same, and a naming system should account for them all.
What criteria should I set for my name?
All names share a pair of goals: to convey information about the thing it names, and to stand apart from other things like it. These goals are often in tension, and balancing them is the central art of naming strategy.
In my work, I tackle this in two steps, first looking at the names in the category, then looking for stand-out messages, and methods of conveying those messages. If you've already developed a brand strategy, you're ahead of the game on this one. At this step you'll decide if you want to be more like General Motors, or Tesla, or Volvo.
Unfortunately, the industry standard way of approaching naming strategy is badly broken, opening up as many pitfalls as it closes, resulting in protracted and confusing engagements that force clients to compromise as their deadlines loom. Fortunately, I have developed a comprehensive, reliable system for identifying these messages and methods that I've used successfully with clients at all scales and levels of naming expertise. If you'd like to know more, or the agency you're working with is talking about descriptive and abstract names, read on here.
Why is naming hard?
Even if you've started your process with a solid framework, naming is hard both for the professionals developing the name, and the clients selecting the name. The biggest challenge is a failure of conventional wisdom: it intuitively seems like it should be easy, so when it turns out to be hard, it feels even harder.
Selecting that one word is extremely hard for three reasons (some of which seem, to the uninitiated, like they should make things easier, not harder).
Prioritization is the core issue, with clients struggling to choose identify the most important associations to build.
Singularity is the second issue we face: naming has to boil ideas down to a single word, not many. It's relatively easy to write something like an elevator pitch, that has the room to explicitly state the main benefits you provide your audiences and the advantageous features that support them. It's harder to do that in a positioning statement that's just a single sentence, even harder to do so in a value proposition that's just one pithy phrase, and harder still to boil it down to one word. One word that means everything you want to mean, and nothing else -- such a word might not even exist!
Limited availability is the third challenge namers contend with: we're usually working with real words, and real words are limited by real usage and understanding. There will often not be a word that conveys the exact nuance you want (hence my creative project, the Unglish Dictionary, which channels my naming frustrations into side-project success). Or maybe a word with the right meanings does exist, but it has other negative meanings or connotations, or maybe it sounds like garbage. Or maybe the perfect word exists, but someone else has already found it. These limits on the field of exploration make finding the best possible name a complicated dance of deep creativity and rigorous due diligence, a combination of tasks few people are well suited for.
How important is a URL to my name?
Many naming clients ask me about URLs and social media handles as we go through the naming process, as an additional availability concern alongside trademark.
The unfortunate reality is that, if you are looking at real words, it's taken. Pretty much every desirable real word is going to be unavailable on Twitter or Instagram, or as a .com.
My approach is to consider both the root of the name— Apple, Tesla, Venus— and possible descriptors to pair with it— Computers, Digital, Tech, etc.
I also think about alternative top-level domains. Some have become extremely popular and crowded, like .io, but there are likely others relevant to your brand strategy or industry, like .life, .home, or .art. These are not considered with the disdain of old generic TLDs like .co or .net, because they convey something of importance, not just that this is a website and the .com was taken.
So, while your URL is important, consider a wide range of alternatives: don't kill an otherwise-excellent name because you couldn't get the .com. People will say and think your name every time they engage with even the idea of your company, but they may only type in the URL once, if ever. If you have to compromise, compromise on the handle, not the name.
How do I decide on a name?
If you're lucky, and the naming process has brought you several viable, available candidates, then your biggest challenge will be picking which one works best for you.
My first tack, as always, is to go back to the brief. What did you set out to say, and which of these names says it best? If you can't agree, ask your colleagues, friends and family: not which name do they like best, but which name does the best job of conveying what you wanted it to?
If that still doesn't result in clarity, trust your gut: the name you like best will be one other people like, too.
If you're really desperate, here's a trick to force you: say each of your candidates aloud. Over and over and over and over and over again. As you get tired of a name—as your subconscious decides it doesn't like that one—stop saying it. The last name standing is the one with the most staying power and aesthetic juice, making it the winner.
Want to talk about the name of your brand, or ideas for a new one? Want to debate the fine line between a word and a name?