What's in a Name? How to Successfully Name Your New Brand or Product
Most new parents agonize over the name for their baby—making lists, ranking backup options, researching current trends. There's a lot to take into account: What is the meaning of the name? Is the name popular, or trendy? Are there current celebrities who share the name? Does it sound like something else (brands, products, insults, etc)? And what about spelling—phonetic, traditional, novel, etc.? It's no wonder this task can lead to months of hand-wringing.
Many of the same concerns apply to a brand or product as well. Naming is hard, and the stakes are high. Done well, a name will bolster brand equity and marketability. Done poorly, it may bring adverse consequences like legal ramifications, SEO conflict, and negative associations. The following is the process we use at Beutler Ink when it comes to product and brand naming.
Where to Start Naming Strategy
You're probably thinking, "I want a good name." But "good" isn't an especially meaningful evaluation for business purposes. We prefer to think in terms of "success", because that can be tied to several specific metrics. These are all yes / no questions, and can serve as a as a punch list for your naming process:
Does it support brand equity?
Does it pass vetting and usability review?
Does it follow the basic rules of brand naming?
Does it pass legal review?
A good name can sound cool. Maybe it even evokes a strong emotional response from your audience. But a successful name will be a useful, long term-business asset because it checks all of those boxes. Let's take a look at each one.
Make Sure Your Brand Name Supports Brand Equity
The first step to coming up with a name is simply compiling options. While the final name you select should be rooted in strategy and supported by research, the initial process is primarily a creative one, where all you need is an open mind to find inspiration and come up with options that evoke a certain feeling.
But what is this feeling that you're trying to capture? It seems so floaty a metric that it could already feel impossible—at step one, no less—to pin down what could be a successful name. What you're searching for is what you want your customer to feel. This is also called brand equity; i.e., the value derived from the customer's perception of the name and presentation, separate from the product or service it represents.
Ask yourself: will these naming options resonate with your identified audience? You can answer this question easily if you've gone through the process of positioning for your brand.
“Your name should evoke your brand equity—the value derived from the customer’s perception of the name and presentation, separate from the product or service it represents.”
Ruthlessly weed out choices that do not clearly align with your product or company goals. This will help you take your naming options from "every name in existence" to a few options that feel relevant to your goals.
READ MORE: Brand Positioning, messaging, and voice
The list you end up with should be long, but not exhaustive. Once you have it, the next step will be to vet the names to make sure they hold up in your market without any conflict. Too short a list and you risk yielding no actionable results; too long and you could tire the most formidable of researchers with hours of scraping web pages, searching for potential conflicts.
Vetting and Usability Tests for Your Brand Name
The next step in the process is to make sure that your naming selections are conflict-free. This is when you get to searching, browsing, and clicking your way to answers that ensure your name choices don't have hidden consequences. Here are some questions to ask yourself to guide your research:
Is the name hard to say and/or spell?
Are there competitors with the same name?
Are there famous or well-known brands/products with the same name?
Does the name come from history, pop culture, or another language?
Are relevant URLs available?
If one of your naming options is a "yes" for any of these questions, think about whether these factors outweigh any affection you have for a particular name. Some allusions can be beneficial, but others can be confusing.
There are no simple answers, and this is a big reason why you might want an outside agency or consultant to advise you. Short of that, you'll have to rely on your own judgment. That said, there are best practices. The rest of this post will walk you through this process.
The Rules (Guidelines, Really) of Brand Naming
Now that you have a shortlist of names that align with your brand and can stand up in your market, it's time to start looking at the names through the lens of branding "best practices". It's at this point that we begin to think critically about the naming options you're left with, and really assess why these names feel the way they do.
Step one is to give a brief description of the literal definition or origin of each name. This will help you think more clearly about the name's connotations. Ask yourself what positives and negatives arise from the name as a result of its literal definition and associations—even if you don't personally agree with them. This will give you a way to access what the name may feel like to someone outside your viewpoint.
Once you have something down about these four basic criteria (definition, connotations, positives, and negatives) for each name, ask yourself the following questions to go deeper and explore how each of your remaining options tie into your brand and your goals:
What are the characteristics of the name?
What are its attributes (literal, graphical, abstract, historic, universal, nostalgic, phonetic, or thematic)?
To see this in practice, let's say you're opening a breakfast restaurant and you're considering the name "Morning Glory". Following rules of naming could make your naming study look like this:
Naming Option: Morning Glory
Morning:
Definition:
The period of time between midnight and noon, especially from sunrise to noon.Connotations:
Evokes a sense of refresh, restart, renewal, rejuvenation, and brightness.Positives:
This option is temporal in nature and could contribute to the brand's sense of place and time. Tying it into the association of the morning being a fresh start to each day comes across as aspirational, welcoming, and curious.Negatives:
Some people are averse to mornings/aren't "morning people"; could be looked at as limiting since it is temporal in nature; can sound like "mourning" out of context.
Glory:
Definition:
1. High renown or honor won by notable achievements.
2. Magnificence or great beauty.Connotations:
Elicits greatness, grandeur, and a sense of aspiration.Positives:
Aligns the brand with feelings associated with positivity and renown. Comes across as trustworthy and worthy of praise.Negatives:
Has strong religious associations that can be alienating to some audiences.
Morning Glory:
Definition:
A climbing plant often cultivated for its showy trumpet-shaped flowers, which typically open in the early morning and wither by midday.Connotations:
Has strong associations with beauty and celebrates pomp and grandeur, even though it's ephemeral.Positives:
Creates a strong sense of place and time that could contribute to a memorable feeling, while also bringing the brand in alignment with a piece of nature praised for its beauty.Negatives:
Morning Glory is a pernicious vine that can suffocate other plants.
Keywords:
Refreshing, rejuvenating, relaxing, natural, beautiful, temporal, irreverent, pious, celebrated, aspirational
Attributes:
Trademarkable, Distinct, Meaningful, Memorable, Scalable, Short, Positive affect, Good for SEO, Easy to pronounce
And maybe if you pick this option for, say, a nice breakfast spot in San Diego, you can use ALL of its associations to lean into the irreverent yet aspirational feeling of the name, and end up with a hit on your hands.
Last but Not Least: Legal Review of Your Brand Name
At this point, you should have some strong naming options—ideally about three—to pass through your legal team to make sure there are no trademark infringements or other esoteric conflicts your Google search couldn't provide you.
Once you get the legal OK, your next step will be to choose your final name from the greenlit list. If you’ve been diligent, you can be confident that you've landed on a final selection that won't be just good, but also successful.
Now you’re ready to register it with the Patent and Trademark Office.
This brings us to the "Continuum of Distinctiveness", a classification system for naming that plots the characteristics of a name against its relative strength as a trademark.
Credit: Shel Perkins, "Talent Is Not Enough: Business Secrets for Designers". New Riders, 2015
Fanciful
Fanciful names are words that you've essentially made up that never had an existing definition. For example, "Rivian," a maker of electric vehicles.
Arbitrary
For a name to be considered an arbitrary trademark, it needs to be a name or phrase in common use that's being used in an unexpected way. For example, "Dove", the cosmetics maker.
Suggestive
These names have a less literal tie-in to the brand, product or services, but suggest some aspect of them. For example, "Tesla", another maker of electric vehicles.
Descriptive
A descriptive mark describes in plain language the features, qualities, ingredients, or uses of a product or service (such as ComputerLand or Shake 'N Bake). This category includes the use of family surnames (Mrs. Fields) and geographic terms (Bank of America).
Generic
Generic names are simply common terms. Few companies these days are so named, but it once was common. Think General Motors or International Business Machines (IBM).
When you file your application with the Patent and Trademark Office, the name will be placed on either the “Principal Register” or the “Supplemental Register.”
Fanciful, arbitrary, and suggestive marks qualify for the Principal Register because they are considered to be inherently distinctive. This gives them a broader scope of protection. Marks that are merely descriptive are placed on the Supplemental Register. They are weaker because they do not have inherent distinction — they must achieve it through sales and advertising, usually over a period of at least five years. This acquired distinctiveness is referred to as “secondary meaning.” The mark must achieve significant public recognition through exposure in the marketplace. Separate from whatever its primary meaning may be, consumers must come to associate the mark with specific goods or services (in court cases, this is usually shown through consumer polls that indicate widespread awareness). If a descriptive mark eventually achieves secondary meaning, it can be moved up to the Principal Register.
Conclusion
So, you've got a name picked out and registered for protection, at long last. Congratulations! What comes next? Well, the short answer is that it's time to build your brand.
This means taking your new name—and all it represents—and weaving those components into your brand identity systems. These are interconnected methods and tools for telling your brand story to the world. From verbal identity (think messaging, positioning, brand voice) to visual identity (logo, brand colors, design standards) to the actual assets that carry your brand (website, merchandise, sales collateral, ad copy), these systems exist to communicate the "who, what, why" of your brand.
Feeling overwhelmed by all this?
Don't worry, we're pros at this. If you're game, we'd love to have a chat about what a naming study could look like for you—no strings attached. Drop us a line and let’s talk about it!
