Naming is hard. What follows are my thoughts for generating names and getting a group of people to be happy with one of them.
The First Job is to Get Everyone to Agree on the Criteria for a Good Name.
Anything can be a name? How do you know what a good one is? That’s the first job of naming. In my experience, it is almost impossible for an executive team to do this without an outside consultant. If you come up with something that most people like and is available in your namespace (more on this later) then do it. But if you get bogged down and people get locked into opposing camps — if you’re expending the relationship capital of the organization and not getting anywhere — then it’s time to call in somebody like me.
Here’s why.
Sharp and severe argument is the best way to produce ideas. But it’s not always what makes a team of people most productive. People play nice. And 90% of the time they should. But when you have to get to the heart of a conceptual matter, it’s not time to be nice.
So you can fight amongst yourself, or you can have someone like me talk to each decision-maker individually, understand where they are coming from and let the ideas fight it out inside my brain. Which allows you to avoid the unpleasantry and skip right to the resolution.
When a naming and rebranding process is done well, it helps the executive team understand and trust each other more. And helps the business sell and market better. Because all of the issues are brought to the surface as painlessly as possible.
The primary point of leverage to drive people to a consensus on a name are customer/client profiles. One of the most important goals is to have a name that won’t upset or confuse your customers.
What customers will *like* in a name is impossible to know, and maybe not a useful question. An organization’s name becomes the quality of the product or service that the organization provides. There would be nothing cool about Harley Davidson if they didn’t make motorcycles people thought were cool.
The Sanest Thing I Can Tell You About the Naming Process
Things need names so we can differentiate and remember them. On that basis, almost any name will do. Many great organization names are just people’s names. E.g. John Deere, Harley Davidson or Johnson & Johnson. Would Johnson & Johnson been less successful if it had been called Smith and Smith?
Of course not. The good name of Johnson and Johnson becomes what the company has done. When a company is VERY successful then their name becomes the thing they provide. E.G. Xerox or Google.
But when you have a new company or new product, the name becomes important. Or when you need to rebrand. An example of this would be GE Capital rebranding as Ally Bank.
And we can see that much of Johnson and Johnson’s success has been driven by the names of their products: Ivory soap, Listerine, Band-Aid, Visine, and hundreds more.
A name can help you steal a march when you introduce something new. That’s why when the Whistle Bottling Company introduce a new cleaning product in 1930 they named Spic and Span. It definitely sounds clean, and that attribute helped make it easier for people to try it. But if it hadn’t been a good cleaner, there’s nothing the name could have done to save the product.
How Names/Words get their Meaning
Any word has two sources of meaning: a denotation and a connotation.
Denotations are what you can look up in a dictionary. And it’s the rare word that only has one meaning. Rare means scarce. It’s also a steak that is cooked so that it has a cool red center.
Connotations are the informal meanings that come along with any word. These change over time. Paradigm has always had the same formal definition, but so many people used the word as jargon that now it has an unpleasant connotation for me. If someone uses the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ it gives me the suspicion that they might not know what they are talking about.
You Can’t Fight Connotations
Connotations change over time. Before 1930 Hitler was just another surname. But after…
Just like in the 80’s there was a kind of weight loss candy called ‘AYDS’.
You can’t fight shifting connotations. When the connotations change you have to rename.
Kinds of Names
There are three broad categories of names.
Functional/Benefit Names - Corry’s Slug and Snail Death, No More Tears Baby Shampoo, General Electric, ChatGPT
Conceptual Names - Tacoma, Windstream, Titlest, Nike, Twitter, Instagram, Google
Founder’s Names - Toyota, Guinness, Ford, Johnson & Johnson
There are other categories you can add, and if they’re useful, I have no objection. Many people like to include ‘totally made up names’ like Google. And while it’s true that Google wasn’t a word (or more accurately a misspelling of a mathematical term) it certainly came with connotations based on the way it sounds and looks. Geeky, mathematical — it’s conceptual.
Strategies to Generate Names
This is a deep topic that I will write about in future posts, but I’ll just give you the top line and some geeky linguistic details in future posts
There are two strategies to make ‘new’ names.
1. Borrow or modify an existing word or name that means something already. (e.g. Lyft, Uber, Twitter)
2. Cram two words or syllables together to create a new word. (e.g. InstaGram, Email, SubStack)
Linguistically, both of these are very old strategies. English incorporates both of them, because English is at least two languages in one. On one side you have the Old English (Germanic) and on the other side you have French (Latin and Greek).
Before Shakespeare got ahold of the word ‘elbow’ it was just a name for a body part. But he used it for the name of an action — poking someone with your elbow. That’s also how we wind up with a sneaker company named after a Greek Goddess of Victory (Nike).
Old English (the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic roots of English) creates new meaning by pushing two terms together to create a new one. In fact, that’s where Shakespeare got the word elbow from in the first place. It’s a contraction of elino-bugon, literally, ForearmBend. This ancient strategy is the exact same way we get Facebook.
Sources of Names
You can get a name from anywhere. I once suggested Q36 as an ad agency name — the Q36 modulator that Marvin the Martian used to make his weapon insanely powerful in Bugs Bunny cartoons. It’s the tiny part that makes a bigger thing (in this instance a client company) more powerful.
Back in those storied days q36.com was available free and clear. Now it’s $8625. I still like the idea of it though.
Telling you to look everywhere doesn’t help. So here are the big buckets you can trawl.
Romance Languages (Latin and it’s derivatives)
Greek
Old English
Mythologies/Religions
A. Greek/Roman
B. Celtic
C. Norse
D. The Bible
Of course, there are many other language families, cultures, mythologies and religions than this, but I have noticed that the linguistic differences mean that words that have the meaning I want often sound quite unpleasant to native English speakers.
For example a slavic word for grace is благодать (bla-ga-dat). And it sounds anything but graceful when you say it out loud. Play around here to see what I mean.
I’m going to catalog and explain the origin of some well-known names in future posts, but for now, a quick example: Xerox. It’s become synonymous with photocopies, but the source of the name is a greek word xerographia. It literally means ‘dry writing’.
The reality of a crowded marketplace
Many namespaces are very crowded. So naming is not just a matter of generating names. The trick is coming up with good names that are available. Having endurance and being prolific are the most important things.
If you’re trying to name something right now, leave a comment or drop me a line. I’d love to hear about it. And there are many more tips and tools coming in Part II.