What's in a name? Everything.
Coming up with new names for brands, products and places is hard - but not impossible. Do your research, take your time, and brilliant, resonant names await.
What’s in a name? Well, everything. There are countless studies that show how names determine the course of our lives, from the careers we choose to the people we marry. Out in the corporate world, names matter just as much. A key part of brand strategy, they can make or break a brand, being the difference between a brand that’s memorable and one that’s instantly forgettable. So, in a world where names count, where new products launch all the time — and surely all the ‘best’ names have already been taken — how do you come up with one that works? Read on for the process I use when coming up with names such as Arbeta, SODA and Poplin.
Step 1: Banish the blank screen
If you’re new to naming, Woolf Olins is a good place to start. The brand consultancy published a naming handbook years back that suggested dividing potential names into three categories: descriptive, evocative or abstract. As categories they work well enough, but more important is the principle they establish. Rather than facing a blank screen, categories give you some direction from the off. They give you a way to get started, and to avoid the incapacitating effects of that dreaded blank screen.
Step 2: Scope the competition
Next step? Look at the competition. Your name, brand, product or service won’t exist in a vacuum. So, consider what everyone else is doing. Are there naming conventions within your industry? Should you adopt them, or should you set out to break with them? (Both approaches are valid, by the way.) As an example: Arbeta, the name I came up with for a tech workspace, deviated from the ‘old industry’ names typical of the competition, which all used words like warehouse, mill and factory. We decided to break with that convention as part of a wider strategy to signal Arbeta’s difference from the rest of the pack.
Step 3: Fall down rabbit holes
It pays to fall down linguistic rabbit holes. As a next step, consider the languages your audiences speak, not just mother tongues, but dialect, slang, and even business speak. Look at how they create and use social content, tags, abbreviations and symbols. Pull up a dictionary; look up synonyms. Try etymology dictionaries, and consider keywords. Find linguistic inspiration wherever you can, as it often resides in the most unexpected of places. For the education brand, SODA, for example, I dug into 1,400 Google search terms related to its courses. Yes, it was a mind-numbingly dull task — but it threw out words and phrases I hadn’t previously considered. And it gave fresh insight into the minds of the end user.
Step 4: Make mindsets
Talking of end users … naming is never about you. Even if it’s your brand baby, the only person who matters is the one you want to take that baby home. So, learn everything you can about your intended audiences. Get into their mindset. Inhabit their worlds. Don’t make assumptions about them. Instead, base your understanding on data, market intelligence, and consumer insight. As an example: my research for SODA told us that its Gen Z audience wanted a name that was reassuringly academic, yet at the same time sounded fun, dynamic. The end result? An academic descriptive name paired with a more playful acronym: SODA, the School of Digital Arts.
Step 5: Say it out loud
We live in a visual world, yet how something sounds matters just as much. A word with good phonetic value (easy to say) comes with in-built memetic value (easy to pass on), so it’s essential your potential name sounds credible. Consider the fashion brand Arket, whose name was formed by fusing ‘market’ with the Swedish word for a sheet of paper (‘ark’). Arket was unfamiliar to native English speakers, yet was quickly accepted into the British fashion lexicon. Why? Because it sounded credible. Or take Deliveroo, a portmanteau formed by putting ‘delivery’ and ‘kangaroo’ together. Because it sounded like a word we’d heard before, it was instantly memorable. (It was also nearly called BoozeFood, which shows that not all portmanteaus are born equal.)
The art of giving lovely names to things
Oscar Wilde once said that we “have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things*.” But I don’t think we have. As the world around us changes shape with ever-increasing speed, so too does the language we use. We readily accept new words in a way that we didn’t even a decade ago, and there’s a playfulness in how we speak, message and communicate that perhaps wasn’t there before. And that’s an opportunity, surely, because it means more space to come up with the names that’ll shape the brand landscape that’s still to come.
So, the lessons for coming up with brand names? Give yourself a framework. Lean into your research. Challenge your own assumptions. Inhabit the world of your end user. And fall in love with language - play with it, speak of it, and find the poetry in it.
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*Lord Henry, in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, ‘said’ this line. He went on to say that “the man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.” Agree or disagree?!