Effective Brand & Product Naming: A Guide
Everything to consider when choosing a name for your business, brand or product. (Also works for babies and pets, probably.)
You:
Have built or are building a thing, whether that’s a company, brand or product. Nice!
I:
Have successfully named many things, from category-creating products, to companies, to my own human progeny.
If you have tried and struggled to capture the essence of your thing in 1-2 words, that’s very normal, because naming is hard. Consensus-building hard. Overruled-research hard. Shoot-it’s-already-trademarked hard. It can be a real love-hate experience, because it’s fundamentally a process that can involve emotions and politics.
This guide is intended to help you take the emotion out of naming, while giving you considerations that will help you focus your brainstorming and get to a solid set of options. Come along!
My Naming Experience
I’m Marin Lersch, a career marketer with an affinity for naming (sometimes in an “I wish I could quit you” kind of way). I have a BA in Creative Writing, so I’ve always liked how words and sounds click together, and an MBA in Marketing, so I also get that the art only gets you so far before it has to make business sense.
My professional naming experiences include:
Running several small-business naming projects while at a boutique marketing agency when dropping vowels and using CamelCase was very trendy
Leading the rebrand of publicly-traded TASER International to Axon, including evaluating a number of alternatives with our exec team
Setting up the naming guidelines, processes and brand hierarchy for Axon, and naming dozens of hardware and software products and features accordingly
Guiding clients through naming exercises as part of my fractional marketing practice
Let’s get to it.
Establishing a Process
There’s a time to test your improv skills (college or mid-life, usually), and a time for a structured process. Naming calls for the latter so you don’t end up with a meandering mishmash of labels. I advise creating a naming playbook like you would any other SOP, which helps clarify for stakeholders what their role is, or, more importantly, what their role is not.
You know that Ops person who loves nothing more than a Gantt chart or checklist? Ask them to help you define the process. You could even let them name the process!
Some questions to settle:
Who “owns” naming? Marketing? Product? Legal/IP?
Who leads the process? This could be different than the above, if, for example, the process leader does the research and work, while the decision owner ratifies
How do you know if something even needs a name? For example, granular product features may just need straightforward labels and not clever names, unless they’re major differentiators that will be heavily promoted
How much time does your org need to make a decision like this, generally?
What kind of templates do you need to do this repeatedly and effectively? Where are they kept and how (often) have you communicated them to the org?
Below is an example
for starters:
What if you’re a startup and only have a handful of people deciding on all this? You probably get to move faster that way, good for you!
I still recommend a process so you have a record of naming decisions that you can use as you scale to your inevitable unicorn stage. It can be a lightweight version of the above or a retrospective, but nonetheless important.
Actually Naming
the Thing
This is the fun part of the process, when you get all the ideas out of your head and onto a long, long list to see how things feel in writing. I break this into three stages: Ideation, Consideration, Narrowation (fine, narrowation is not a word, but it works so nicely in that list).
IDEATION
No such thing as a bad idea*. In fact, it can be fun to put the certified worst ideas down early to get them out of your system and give you a boundary. During this phase, you can find inspiration in tons of places, once you’re on the lookout:
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Fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, pamphlets at the dentist, placards at the botanical garden - any one of these might have a word or two jump out at you that you can riff on.
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Is there a word or concept you really like, but it’s a bit bland in English? (Side note: isn’t the word “bland” so self-evident?) See what that word is like in Latin or Japanese or Italian or whatever language you might be drawn to, and put your own spin on it. (Be mindful of appropriation, though.)
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While potentially old school in the era of AI, thesauri can help you with concept precision. Are you thinking about “movement” but really you need “shifting”? A thesaurus can help you zero in on fit.
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A no-brainer. But don’t let it be a replacement-brainer. AI is great for brainstorming, but it can lead you down a sloppy path while ignoring your specific context if you don’t carefully scrutinize its output.
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You ever listen to a bunch of tweens or teens have a conversation? They are constantly inventing new words or phrases that are sometimes goofy, sometimes profound. Listen carefully and you might find some patterns that will help you think in new directions.
* Except for that time I thought I could pull off a summer fedora. It became clear from the confused “Is that Jason Mraz?” looks from strangers that I could not.
CONSIDERATION
This is when you’re mulling things over. It may be tempting to move fast and pick the thing that gets everyone excited on Monday, but by Friday you might be questioning how on earth you ever liked that idea in the first place. Pace yourself, and use objective criteria to evaluate names. Things like:
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Does this name point at what you do? Or if it’s random, does that feel intentional?
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Do you have a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-type name on your hands, which could make various brand executions more difficult?
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Are there other brands that sound similar, or is it a common word that could make SEO/AIO challenging? If you ask AI about your name, will it describe you, or is there a risk it’ll pull in another company’s information?
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Similar to uniqueness, is there a je ne sais quoi quality to your name that can make it sticky? Is it fun to say?
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Can people say the name easily on the first try? Will they intuitively know how to write down or search up your name? Could one wrong letter send them to a questionable website?
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Can the name expand beyond its initial application, or does it lock you in to a specific mission or product line? Can it last for the next 50 years, or does it feel tied to a specific era?
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How will this name look in good or bad media headlines? Is it credible? Is the translation of the name going to be suitable for other markets you plan to enter? Is it easily localized?
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If a product name, does it mesh well with both the parent brand and peer products? If a brand or re-brand, what will the downstream implications be for product names?
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What tone does the name strike? What feelings does it evoke, or what qualities would people ascribe to it?
These dimensions are what make naming so hard, but are also why landing on something that fits your criteria feels so satisfying.
NARROWATION
(I made up the word and I’m sticking with it.) In this stage, you’re picking your favorites and putting them through a few additional litmus tests. Like:
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Write up a few sample usages of a handful of your favorites, like a paragraph for your website or a one-liner for the About Us section of your company LinkedIn page. Oftentimes cracks show up when put in realistic executions.
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Ask your legal team to run a check with the US Patent & Trademark Office (or non-US equivalent) to ensure your finalist names won’t infringe on someone else’s claim and thus set you up for expensive cease-and-desist-type proceedings.
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Even if your brand or product is not live yet, you could run a small survey or focus group with people who fit your ideal customer profile. They’ll help identify blind spots and other things that trip them up, like spelling or pronunciation, or even how they might abbreviate something.
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Is your desired domain name available? What about social media handles? What results come up when you search the name? While conflicts here shouldn’t necessarily fully deter you from a name, they can become important as your brand or product gets out there.
Of course, there are plenty of successful companies that violate one or more of these guidelines, so at the end of the day you have to go with what feels right for your situation. This guide simply attempts to give you enough information to “know the rules to break the rules”.
Derailment Avoidance
For people who don’t get to flex their creative muscle much, a naming effort can be exciting. And while it’s good to include multiple perspectives, you have to balance the right level of input vs. what are distractions. So, where might ideas come from that could upend the process if you’re not careful? Elephants in rooms include:
AI everywhere, all the time
Leaning too heavily on AI can lead you down a sloppy path, because it might mine trends instead of considering your uniqueness, or give you options that are lazy mash-ups of things that already exist and won’t pass IP tests. Great for brainstorming, yes! For final taste and polish, maybe not.
Your leaders
Your CEO built the company to what it is and rightly has a voice. It should not be the only voice or the loudest voice. This is where research is critical for bringing alignment and making the business case for a name, vs. letting the people in charge lead with a gut instinct. May well have worked beautifully in the past, but as companies evolve, so too should decision-making around brand.
Your engineers or scientists
They’re building the thing, using code names and talking to customers. They start to like placeholder names as a reflection of their contribution, and out of pure familiarity. They start to fight for the names. Appeal to higher-ups. Share how much beta users love the names. This is all respectable and understandable, but it does not reflect a careful process run by people who are paid to think about the bigger picture of how the name will show up in marketing, PR, IP, legal, localization and more.
Other marketers
If you don’t have a process or a leader for naming, then everyone who sits under the “Marketing” label on the org chart might think they have license to make naming decisions. Suddenly your events coordinator tells the venue what the signage should say without checking with anyone, or your product marketers think the buck stops with them and you wind up with a mismatched portfolio. Even if responsibility is distributed, make sure it’s clear there’s an approval process.
These potential dive-bombs are also why it’s important to have and communicate a process, which prevents people from thinking that anything will fly with enough advocacy.
Putting it All Together:
A Fictional Case Study
Scenario:
A startup that makes “countryfresh” dog food is about to launch a new treat product to the US market. They have a new CEO who is very hands-on with the marketing team and who loves mobile gaming. The company has 70 employees, and the marketing team has 5 team members, including a head of marketing and one product marketer. The company is called Dottie’s Dog Food (after the founder), and their flagship kibble is called Charlie’s Chow (after the founder’s beloved pomeranian).
NAME THAT TREAT!
First, the process.
The head of marketing creates a series of steps and gets sign-off from her counterparts on other teams. Rollout, reinforcement, repetition, boom.
Next, the naming experience.
She sends a survey out to several key employees and has small-group sessions with the main stakeholders. The resulting brainstorm list is long, with these options as the finalists:
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Discarded for being too long; “Baby” also felt too human, and “Bones” by itself didn’t quite fit the product’s form
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Discarded for trademark concerns with Chico’s clothing; the team did love the alliteration
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Discarded for possible spelling/punctuation concerns of the apostrophe in “Li’l”, and concerning social media account with similar name
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Met all criteria defined by the team; final recommendation
Derailment is real!
When she presents the final picks to the CEO, he is not aligned, and feels there is not enough energy or spunk in the name. He does his own brainstorming with AI’s help, and comes back with a favorite: Treatsify.
Resolution
The head of marketing diplomatically reviews the naming criteria with the CEO, but agrees to explore his suggestion further. The team feels that the more social- or app-sounding term is not cohesive with the brand, and that it sounds more like a process or experience than a physical, consumable product. With additional customer survey input, that hunch bears out, and customers don’t get it. The CEO stands down and they are able to move forward with Toby’s Treats. They launch the product and dogs around the world can’t stop howling about it.
Parting Words
As a leader, you have many decisions in front of you on a given day. It may not seem like it, but naming can be as consequential, as, say, hiring a bad manager who costs you months of progress. Your brand and how you show up in public can influence everything from pipeline (if customers can’t say or spell you, they might move on) to media relations (if your name sounds stodgy or uninteresting, journalists may skip over you) to your ad budget (if you pick a generic name, it’s harder for search and AI tools to tell whether people are looking for you specifically vs. the general term, so it’s more expensive to stand out). Don’t skimp on careful consideration!
We covered a lot in this guide. Here’s a cheat sheet version for easy reference. Enjoy!