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Company and Product Naming Guidelines

Decide what you are naming:

  • Company
  • Technology
  • Product
  • Feature

List the audiences and markets you need to address.

Determine your naming strategy.

  • Will you be naming several products or product lines over the course of business?
  • Will the products or product lines be targeted at different audiences or markets, or the same audiences and targets?
  • Does it make more sense to use a company name/generic descriptor combination (or product line/generic descriptor), or to have separate company and product names?
  • Are “fabricated” names allowed (“empty bucket”), or does the name need to consist of existing words or word fragments?

Examples:

Sony: WalkMan, DiscMan, etc.

HP: 3000, 9000; DeskJet 660, DeskJet 850; LaserJet 440, LaserJet 540

Great Plains: General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Payroll, etc.

Accenture, Aptimus, Adaptis, OnVia, Expedia; lots of car models

Who is the primary audience for this name?

What are you trying to communicate?

  • What is the most important attribute that your audience will care about? What attributes describe the entity, its intended positioning, and its differentiation. List all attributes, then select the most important. Group the rest into secondary and tertiary attributes.
  • For company naming, list all the possible product and service ideas/areas that the company may need to enter during its life to get a sense of the scope the name should encompass.
  • Take into account your corporate culture in determining what you want to communicate and how you want to communicate it.

Brainstorm:

  • List single or two-word attributes
  • List all applicable synonyms
  • Play with sounds and word combinations, contractions, spelling.
  • Develop as long a list as possible.
  • Add to the list from dictionary & thesaurus research

Check trademarks and URLs to determine availability of all candidates. Determine if the name is in active use or not; you may need to acquire the rights to a name.

Check meanings in other languages!

Review short list of viable candidates.

Test the top three candidates against the original objectives. “Road test” in written and verbal form on co-workers, friends, selected partners and customers.

Choose the winner. Grab URL. File for trademark registration.

Example:

Encoding.com did research with customers, partners, and co-workers that indicated that the company name no longer reflected the scope of services and technologies the company offered. Plus, the “dot com” implied a destination site, which is not part of their business model.

They asked a naming company to bring them candidates that expressed “audio/visual”. Among the top three candidates was “AVology”. Among the rest of the ideas was “loudeye”. Why did they choose loudeye?

  • It sounded better and was easier to say than AVology. (AVology sounds to much like “apology”)
  • It was more interesting and memorable
  • Customers and partners, even their most conservative, liked it; even friends who weren’t acquainted with the company could guess that it involved sound and pictures.
  • It expressed the quirky culture of the company

Naming Do’s and Don’ts

DO make sure the name you choose is pleasing to the ear, is easy to say, easy to spell, and easy to remember.

DO make sure it works globally – unless there are geographic limitations built into the company or product.

DON’T open the naming process up for multitudes to contribute. Keep the naming committee small. However, you can and should test names on people within the company and outside the committee.

If trademarks are important, DON’T let anyone begin using the new name before the trademark search is complete.

DON’T use initials.

Facts:

All the good names are taken.

A large number, if not the majority, of people within your company will hate the name you choose -- for the first six months. Then they’ll think its fine (and possibly believe it was their idea!).