Naming products is a somewhat rare opportunity that holds unique challenges and opportunities. In the last year, I’ve had the pleasure of working on two such projects (QuickRak and AdVine) and am writing to share some of what I’ve learned. I hope this will come in handy when you’re ready to name a product of your own.

First some background on the two projects I’ve recently completed and how they had different goals.

  • Establishing A New Product – QuickRak is a new product that brings a new solution to thebicycle rack industry (for attaching your bike to a car). We wanted a memorable name that reflected the function of the product, tapped into existing bike-lingo, and wouldn’t be confused with anything else on the market. Finally, we wanted a name that would help convey the fact that the rack is lightweight, portable, and easy to use.
  • Repositioning An Existing Product – AdVine gives a new name to a software product that had been on the market for over three years. The product is a visual authoring software for creating interactive content online. In the past it had been used to create everything from widgets to Facebook applications. Moving forward, however, the software was specifically targetting rich-media display ad creation. Renaming the product was a means of repositioning the software towards a target market, reducing confusion about its purpose, and introducing changes that reflected the new focus on display advertising. Finally, we wanted a name that would build on the parent company’s identity and offer the opportunity for line extension.

Repositioning is in some ways more complex than starting from scratch because there are usually more constraints to consider. That said, constraints tend to be a requirement for creativity. Part of what I love about the name AdVine is that it speaks to having “heard it through the grapevine” and alludes to the fact that next generation advertising is social and connected. AdVine ads enable sharing from inside advertising and thus pair earned media with paid media, a concept that makes advertising feel more organic referring back to Sprout’s brand.

Getting Ready

If you want your name to take hold there are some things you can do in advance to set yourself up for success:

  • The Client – Clearly define who the client is and how the final decision will be make.
  • The Stakeholders – Besides the final client, who else has an interest in the success of the naming project? Define clearly how they will be involved, what expectations you’ll have for them and what they can expect from you.
  • The Process – If you want your organization to adopt a new name it can help to provide transparency into the process that will be used to select the name.
  • The Project – Don’t be mistaken, product naming is a full-fledged project. It takes time and effort and must be treated as a real project. Internal projects are hard enough to get support for, don’t cripple yourself by trying to do a project like this in your spare time.
  • The Brief – Create a naming brief with your client to make sure that the goals of the project are clear and delineated. These goals will ultimately serve as a means of validating what you come up with.
  • The Plan – Naming doesn’t stop with the selection of a name. That’s just the beginning, you also need a plan for rolling it out and introducing it to your community. In some cases, the community might even be involved in coming up with or vetting names.

Ready Set …. Names!

While I was working at Sprout, my colleague Alan Peters shared a pretty cool methodology for naming that we ended up using to come up with AdVine. The concept is based on the fact that it’s  easier to come up with names if you’re working off categories or types. Thus, we created high level buckets for different kinds of names which allowed us to riff off of several things rather than just one. This is in turn based on the assumption that finding a great names is the result of coming up with lots of names.

Five sample name buckets:

  • Descriptive Names – These are quite straight forward and describe something about  the product or service. For example, “Rice Crispies” is a product name that pretty much describes the sound the cereal makes when combined with milk. Descriptive names are prone to being too long.
  • Invented/Neologisms – These are invented words that may or may not sound as if they mean something. These can be formed by shortening words (for example, Rack to Rak), by combining words (for example, Quick + Rack = QuickRak), or just by making something up (for example, Zynga).
  • Experiential Names – These names covey a sense of the feeling of using a product or service. “Yahoo!” is one of the best examples.
  • Suggestive/Evocative – Suggestive names allude to a product’s key features or benefits. For example, “Bounty” paper towels or “Mr. Clean” floor cleaner. Most of these names use common words and sometimes incorporate metaphors, allusions, or simile.
  • Arbitrary – These names seem to be out of the box and unconnected to the product or service. One of the most well known examples of this is “Apple”.
When working with buckets like the above it can be helpful to have many people involved in the ideation process. So, this is a great place to get stakeholders, internal clients, internal users, and customers involved. As you go through this process there are a few other techniques that can help you generate names.
  • Use your thesaurus and dictionary to get ideas
  • Create word pairs
  • Look at the competition and understand how their names were created
  • Think about how it will be translated
And, here are a few more techniques to consider:
Method Brand
Alliteration Coca-Cola
Oxymoron Krispy Cream
Combination Walkman
Tautology Crown Royal
Eponym Trump Tower
Description Rice Crispies
Synecdoche Staples
Poetics/Rhyme USA Today
Omission RAZR
Acronym Adaptation BMW
Backronym KFC
Founder’s Name Ferrari
Classical Roots Pentium
Arbirtary Apple
Reduplication Spic & Span

A Note About Legal

You may not be the first to come up with the name you like best. It’s essential to do a legal review of the availability of the name before committing to it. In most cases, you’ll also want to make sure there is a relevant domain name available.
With that, good luck and happy naming!

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2 Comments to Product Naming 101

  1. After have spent three hours in a brainstorming session coming up with names for a new product just to find out that 99% of them were patented was disheartening. Thanks for the legal note at the end haha.

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