Noom Mood

Situation

Weight loss app Noom wanted to apply their expertise in behavior change to new topics. Their first foray into this product extension would be a mental health app. They needed a name that would help clearly identify the offering and distinguish it from the existing weight-loss-oriented Noom app.

As the first name in their ecosystem, it also needed to help indicate that Noom was not just an app, but a company with an ecosystem of offerings. We considered each possible name as the kernel of an extensible naming system that might one day cover new behavior-change offerings.

I tackled this challenge in partnership with a team at growth and transformation consultancy Prophet. I led the engagement, with air support from several Partners, and name generation and sounding board support from two Consultants. We worked in partnership with several creative executives at Noom, and ultimately with the company’s President and co-founder.

Creative approach

We developed over 300 names for the mental health offering, and another 800 for other offerings to pressure-test the systems these names implied. These names covered an extremely wide range of systems and approaches.

Names like Mind Management or Noom Mindset described the general domain of the offering, implying a system centered on the areas where behavior could be changed.
Noom Mantras or Mindkit emphasized the mechanism of change, implying a system based on the different tools used to achieve behavior change.
Noom Relax or ZenSelf centered audiences and the actual end state they wanted to achieve by using the offering, implying a system centered on beneficial end states.
StressHabits or Noom Anxiety named the challenge audiences faced and were looking for help to cope with, implying a system centered on challenges to be solved.
Names like Spring, Elysium, or Dolos provided nearly empty vessels that could be flexibly filled with meaning, implying a system of peers to Noom.

This wide range of strategic and creative approaches was fertile ground for discussion, but after three rounds, we came to a set of agreed criteria that pointed us to a final answer.

Outcome

The team chose Noom Mood.

This decision was rooted in three criteria.

Brand architecture: to build the Noom brand as a company with many offerings, rather than as a weight loss app with other peer apps.
Naming message: To develop a system that identified domains, because this was highly extensible: everything Noom imagined modifying a kind of behavior, but didn’t always do so with a different mechanism, or to reach a different end state. And, though most audiences would begin their journey with a problem, Noom wanted to maintain relevance after that problem had been solved, helping maintain changes once they were made.
Naming method: To maintain the quippy concision already present in the Noom name. Mood is short, easy to say, has a striking phonetic similarity to Noom, and almost explicitly states the benefit of a “new mood”. While this would be difficult to replicate for other offerings as the system extended, it was a tremendous bonus for this offer.