Naming research

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Naming research

How important is a name?

Cautionary tales and the makings of a good name:

What’s in a brand name? Research shows there’s a reason that you shouldn’t call your company Tronc

Cautionary tales, success stories in an interview with Lexicon founder David Placek:

Famous names: Does it matter what a product is called?

Naming Your Startup by Chris Dixon

“Before we came up with the name SiteAdvisor, I probably had 100 meetings where people said “I don’t understand what you are building – is it an anti-phishing toolbar, a spyware blocker or what?”. This included meetings with VC’s who focus on security and other experts. I knew the name SiteAdvisor was a winner when my father in law wrote the name on a high school blackboard and asked the kids what they thought the company did and one kid said “They advise you about websites”

Should Product and Company name be the same?

https://davidcummings.org/2015/02/18/product-and-company-name-should-be-the-same/

https://arketi.com/blog/product-company-name-one/

“Master brand strategies can be highly beneficial for start-ups. In a master brand strategy, the company’s products and services hold the company name. Google is a great example of a well-executed master brand strategy with Google Calendar, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Chrome, Google Alerts – and the list goes on. This strategy helped build immense brand recognition around the Google name and its vast portfolio of products.

Sub-branding strategies can make marketing a little cloudy. In a sub-branding strategy, the company’s products and services don’t carry the company name. Take, for example, Apple; think about the iPhone, iPod, iTunes, MacBook and MacBook Air. Apple offers a wide variety of products, and each family of products has its own sub-brand. This branding strategy clearly hasn’t harmed Apple, which has a rather large marketing budget at its disposal, but on a smaller scale this type of strategy often leaves customers without a sense of loyalty and understanding of the brand identity and promise.

It’s safe to say that smaller companies, start-ups, and beginning technology companies, especially, should stick to the master brand strategy.”

Descriptive Names: Descriptive names are purely descriptive of what a company or product does or its function. They might also take the form of an acronym or the names of the company founders.

Invented Names: This category of names includes the purely invented, the morphemic mash-up, and foreign words that are not widely known to English speakers. At their best, Invented names can be poetic, rhythmic and ripe for investing with the soul of a brand (think Google).

Experiential Names: These are names that map to the experience of using a product or service, or to what a company does, or to an aspect of human experience. This category also includes all the generic adjective-based names, such as Advanced, Superior, Vantage, Smart, Super, Ultra, Mega, etc. Experiential names are usually literal, and are the types of names often created by cross-referencing a vision statement with a thesaurus.

Evocative Names: These are names that map metaphorically, rather than literally, to the brand positioning. Evocative names rise above the goods and services being offered, and paint a bigger picture. The best of them tap into a deep reservoir of shared cultural knowledge, myth, story, imagery, association, legend and art, and usually work on multiple levels. Nearly all the greatest brands that you are familiar with have evocative names.

On descriptive names:

“These names have never been the most powerful, and

unfortunately, since the rise of the Internet and online searching, it has become nearly

impossible to build an effective brand around a Descriptive name. For example: if you

named your new automobile company “Fast Cars,” nobody would be able to find you

online, because your name would disappear among all the search results for “fast cars.”

The notion that a name should be Descriptive in order to “describe what we do,” is

completely wrong. A name rarely has to describe what the brand is all about -- that will

become evident by the context surrounding the brand. The job of the name is to get your

brand noticed, remembered and talked about, and that is rarely achieved by Descriptive

names.”

Evocative names:

“Rather than merely describe your brand positioning with a descriptive or experiential name, like your competitors do, consider creating a highly-memorable evocative name that strongly differentiates your brand from your competition by demonstrating your brand positioning rather than explaining it. The key is to move beyond the literal and into the metaphorical. Think Amazon, Virgin, Twitter, Coach, Caterpillar, Yahoo!, Oracle, Apple.”