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Naming

Strategize — About Brand

The first step in the Strategize part is to define who you are as a brand clearly.

How would you describe your brand and its personality?

In this first exercise, we need to summarize your category, services/products, and target market in clear and concise language.

And a great way to do so, is by describing your brand in three statements (Credit: Jeremy Miller—"Brand New Name")

Here, we're going to simply complete 3 sentences.

The first statement is about your category.

“The brand is X” (e.g. Design agency).

The second statement is about the service/product you sell.

“The brand does X” (e.g. “Designs logos and identity systems”)

The third statement is about your market.

“The brand serves X” (e.g. “Startups and small businesses”)

Completing this exercise can be quite easy or a bit difficult, depending on your business.

If you’re naming a brand in popular category then it might be easy, but if you’re creating new technologies, then it might be a bit challenging.

Take about 5 minutes to sum up what you're naming—describe your brand in three simple statements. So if you’re pioneering something new, then it might be helpful to add one more clarifying statement: "Our brand is like X".

For example, the founder of Uber could have said:

“Our brand is a peer-to-peer cab company” which later could morph into “ride-sharing”. Now, the second part of this exercise is to define your brand personality.

In this exercise, list adjectives that would fit your desirable brand personality.

And this exercise is much easier to do if you think of your brand as a person.

So if you brand was a person, who would it be? How would he or she act, talk and dress?

Take about 5 minutes to select 4 to 8 adjectives that would describe the tone and personality of your brand. Need some inspiration?—Check out my article where I describe personalities of famous brands.

Once we've got your brand defined, now It’s time to think about your users.

Strategize — Brand Users

Now, in the second step of the Strategize part we’re going to step into the shoes of you customers and think from their perspective.

So we’re going to define your target audience by understanding:

Who your brand will serve and what they expect from your brand? First, we need to think about who are these people.

So ask yourself:

Who’s going to interact with your brand? Who is going to know and use the name? To kick-start this exercise, let’s create a list of potential users or customers of your brand.

If you have customers already, try to use names of real people.

Some people you know or people whom you can picture using your brand.

First, we have a "Label" on the left—this is just to shortly describe your customer.

For example “stay-at-home mom”, or “busy young professional”.

Take about 5 minutes to describe your most common customers by giving them a short label. Here you can use some demographic information like: age, gender, profession, income, education, location and so on.

Now, in the next column “Needs” let’s think about what the user need from our brand.

Here, we need to really think from heir perspective to reveal people’s behaviors as opposed to preferences.

For example: If I was naming a healthy snack brand for kids, I could come to conclusion that anything "healthy" might not be seen as "cool" by most kids.

What can we do with that?—It can help us later on with choosing the right name.

We're going to pay close attention to that insight and don’t settle on something that sounds healthy.

So in this exercise is really important to think beyond what customer may like or dislike about your products or services.

Here, we need to consider other circumstances that lead them to using your brand.

Take about 5 minutes to describe your customers' needs and wants as it relates to your brand. Now, once we’ve defined the brand and their users, now let’s focus on the objectives for your future name.

Because without a clear goal in mind, you can’t really make a meaningful decision.

Naming is definitely not “I will know it when I see it” kind of thing.

So the next step in the Strategize phase is to define your name objectives.

3. Strategize—Name Objectives

The goals of this exercise is to define what a good outcome looks like for your naming project.

It simply answers the question:

What do you want your name to achieve and why? Here, we have two questions that we need to answer in one or two sentences each.

The first question is about your goal:

“What do you want?” (e.g. "An easy-to-remember name for vegan snacks.") Here you can also add something along the lines: "It should convey that the product is natural, delicious and healthy”.

By answering this question you basically state your naming objectives.

Do you want the name to be easy to say and remember like Uber? Or perhaps it should sound foreign and premium like Haagen and Dazs? And then we also add a sentence about what do you want to convey.

Do you want your name to convey the personality of your brand or benefits of using your products?

For example: Uber means superior and outstanding (superior to taxi services).

Take about 5 minutes to state your your goals (what do you want the name to do?) And the second question is about your positioning:

“Why do you want it?” (e.g. "To stand out in the grocery, so that consumers can make healthier choices") By answering this question you basically state WHY do you want the name you want.

Do you want some stand out from competition? Do you want to position your brand to a certain demographic? Do you want it to be provocative, so it creates viral content? For example: Slack is a short and memorable name, but it's flawed.

The word “slack” has a negative meaning—"laziness" is probably something you would rather want to avoid when naming an office messaging app.

However, it works! And this is because it’s different—It’s gutsy and it’s memorable.

Take about 5 minutes to state your positioning (Why do you want to achieve this goal?) So once we have those two questions answered, let's talk about the Naming Trends.

4. Strategize—Naming Trends

In this part of our naming strategy we’re going to analyze the competitive landscape.

Here, we simply want to:

What are the common naming trends in your category? Here, we want to identify naming trends, so that you can develop strategies to make your brand name stand out.

Analyzing your market will help you see how competitors position their brands, so that you can spot cliches to avoid.

You can also spot some opportunities to differentiate yourself from the pack.

In this exercise, we're going to plot your competitors' names across two axes: Name Type and Name Construction*

*Credit: Jeremy Miller—"Brand New Name"

Name Type—Is the name descriptive, suggestive or abstract? Name Construction—Is it a real word, constructed or invented name, a misspelled word or an acronym? Here you might notice that in your industry there’s a trend toward Abstract-Invented Names, or you might see that all your competitors use similar words.

Take about 5 minutes to create a list of 20 to 30 competitors and then plot them in the chart in corresponding boxes. PS. Check out my other article to see different types of brand names.

If you find it challenging, you can also look for brands in related regions or markets.

Once you’ve created the competitive chart, now we can come back to our first worksheet and define the naming criteria.

5. Strategize—Naming Criteria

The last exercise in the Strategize part is about developing the criteria for your new name.

What are the criteria for your naming project? Let’s make a use of our competitive analysis and draw insights as to what are the words/styles we should explore/avoid?*

*Credit: Alexandra Watkins—"Hello, My name is Awesome"

How names are used in your industry?—Here are five questions to help you see some patterns:

Are there any common words or phrases? What types of names are common? How do the competitors position themselves? What tone or stories do these names convey? Are there any standout or remarkable names? As you think about how to answer these questions, first—let’s write down some words and styles to avoid.

For example: If you’re creating a new frozen yoghurt brand, you might want to avoid using any “berry” kind of word in your name.

This is because Pinkberry is a pretty successful chain of frozen yogurt, so any name like Peachberry, Kiwiberry or Lemonberry will sound like a copycat.

Not only that, this could potentially get you in legal troubles—you can face a trademark infringement case.

So based on our example, we would want to avoid the word “berry” or any type of fruit in our brand name for that matter.

Another example of an often copycatted name is Twitter, we have Yammer, Jabber and Chatter.

While these names might not be a cause for trademark infringement, they are certainly not winning any award for originality.

Take about 5 minutes to list some words and styles you would want to avoid in your future name. Once we've jotted down some words and styles to avoid, now let's focus on the opposite—words and styles to explore.

Perhaps by looking at your competition we can see some opportunities.

Now, let's think about what words we would like to use in our name, or what styles are less crowded so we can use them effectively.

Take about 5 minutes to list some words and styles you would want to avoid in your future name. Here, we can also add any other criteria that you might have.

For example:

Does the name needs has some length limit, or it needs to work in certain languages or regions? Once we've nailed down the criteria, then you our naming strategy is done.

Now, we can move onto the next and the most fun part—brainstorming name ideas.

6. Brainstorm—Generate Ideas

Now I will give you my 12 most lucrative exercises to brainstorm your name ideas.

Feel free to jump into any exercise in no particular order. Remember to work in silence (alone) and just add ideas to your list by using all the following exercises.

Keep doing it until you’ve generated lots of ideas and really go for quantity over quality here.

Take about 5 minutes for each brainstorming exercise and remember that speed is important than accuracy (go for quantity). Why only 5 minutes?—Because that way you will be able to quickly generate tons of ideas and won’t waste time overthinking it.

Once you've gone through all the exercises, we will regroup and move on together to the next step.

Now, I will give you a quick overview of each exercise so you know how to use them.

1. Word Bank Before you jump on your computer to look for ideas, write down at least 8 words related to the brand.

You should be able to get a lot of keywords from our naming strategy.

Remember—this is not meant to be a list of names, just sparks to fuel your brainstorming process.

You can take some words from you brand personality, objectives, word to explore etc.

Just look at your naming strategy to distill a few keywords to get you started.

Please try using each tool, because they all yield unique ideas.

Ok, so open up your computer and let’s get started.

2. Thesaurus Next, let's select one word that you want to start exploration with, and then begin your online brainstorming on thesaurus.com

NOTE: Later you will repeat all of the following 11 exercises using the remaining words from your word bank.

Simply type in the word you picked from your list, to find synonyms and related words.

Then take a closer look at the results and write down at least 8 promising words that you find interesting.

Remember to time each exercise for 5 minutes and go for quantity, not quality.

3. Glossaries Another exercise is to comb through glossaries to find unique words and phrases.

As every community has its own lingo of words, jargon, terms, slang or however you want to call it.

Glossaries are also helpful if you’re searching for metaphorical names.

Again, write down as many ideas as you can come up with in 5 minutes.

4. Dictionaries Dictionaries are also a deep wells of ideas.

The one I like is thefreedictionary.com, which provides much more than definitions.

It’s also a thesaurus and an excellent source for phrases and idioms.

Pick about 8 phrases or idioms that you think would make for interesting names.

5. Movies Authors have been distilling big ideas into small phrases for centuries, so let's take advantage fo that.

For example: If I explore the word cold, my next Google search term is cold movies.

This leads me to a list of the “Top 10 Freezing Stone Movies”.

Here I look for some interesting pairings of words or ideas that could inspire my naming process.

6. Books Now, unlike business and product names, one cannot trademark a book title.

So that won't be any copyright infringement and that’s why this makes book titles ripe source of ideas.

BTW—Did you know that Starbucks was named after character from Mobby Dick?

An Amazon search of book titles that contain the word cold shows 36,364 results.

Now, of course I’m not going to check all of them, but I go through first few pages.

Then I write down some interesting word pairings like: Bitting Cold.

7. Songs Song titles, as well as album titles and band names, are a fantastic resource for inspiring brand names.

They make super sticky names, because just like the songs themselves, they get stuck in our head.

BTW—A song inspired brand name that I like is the car-sharing company “Getaround”.

8. Images A picture can say a thousand words and many of these words can inspire your names.

Which is why I always refer to image searches to fuel my creativity.

Simply go on Google.com, then click tab “images” and type in your keyword.

Immediately I can see photos of kids building a snowman, snow angels etc.

9. Cliches Cliches and phrases are some of the best sources for names.

I typically find some unexpected ideas at clichesite.com

Here are some results I got when I typed in “cold”— "A cold heart, cold as ice, stone cold sober" and more.

While not all make for good names, the “stone cold sober” could be shortened to “cold sober”, so I add it to the list.

10. People Look for well-known people that could embody the spirit of your brand.

Are there any famous figures that could make as a metaphor for what your brand is like or aspires to be?

Whether it be fictional figures like Nike from greek mythology or Tesla that was named after inventor Nicola Tesla.

11. Places Are there any regions or areas that could function as a metaphor for your brand?

For example: Patagonia clothing brand is named after the mountainous region in South America.

The company’s founder thought the name evoked “romantic vision of glaciers tumbling into fjords” and it is easy to pronounce in every language.

Look for regions that evoke specific feelings or characteristics.

12. Word Twister Names like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat are all constructed names and each is created by combining words or parts of words.

So, look at all your previous exercises to find some word pairings that you could combine to create a new name.

You can also try adding suffixes or prefixes—brands like Expedia or Spotify were created this way.

But here, you have to make sure that the word sounds natural and don’t try to force it or just misspell the name like Flickr.

Sometimes it’s clever, but most likely it’s just lazy and you will not want to apologize every time for your name.

Note: Once you've gone through a round of these 12 brainstorming exercises, then repeat that process for other words form your word bank. *If you work as a group, you can assign one word to a different person so that way you can speed up the process. If you work solo, then you naturally want to repeat this process for all the words from your word bank.

Now, in the next step we're going to have a chance to refine these names by assigning them to specific categories.

7. Brainstorm—Categorize Names Do you remember the Trends exercise form the first part of our naming framework?

Now, we’re going to categorize your name ideas by using the same table.

This is a chance to refine your ideas and add new names to specific categories. Start by looking at all your options from the previous step and think about what category you can assign them to.

I’ve described these name categories in the first module, so you should know by know what they stand for.

*I’ve filled out this table with some famous brand names just to give you some examples and get you started.

When you put your names in different boxes, try to go beyond that and also refine them or combine some ideas.

Names don’t always fit clearly into these categories e.g. some names are more descriptive or abstract than others.

However, the goal of this exercise is to just have an opportunity to look at your names from different angles and take our brainstorming session further.

Remember that one idea can lead to another idea that can take you down a different direction.

So that two random ideas can collide, because you were able to look at them from different perspective.

Try to generate close to 100 names, because in the next module we’re going to have a chance to focus on the strongest candidates.

When you’re ready and have a bunch of potential name candidates, now let's screen and evaluate your names.

8. Evaluate—Screen Names Here, a quick and dirty internet search can give you a good idea whether a name is viable candidate or not.

Any name that is used by a competitor, or its trademarked, is a non-starter. If it’s a non-starter then you just need to cross it out.

It’s important to don’t fall in love with any name because you might end up heart-broken.

Trademark screening is the most painful part of the process, yet it must be done.

So before you spend money with a trademark attorney to have your names screened professionally, do some initial search on your own.

First, use Google to search for the same or a similar names in your category (and related areas too).

Run a preliminary trademark screening—just type in your name + industry and see what’s coming up in Google. For instance, if you were naming a web design firm—also search in other related industries like: advertising, marketing, branding, social media etc.

Second, use Trademarkia.com where you can quickly look for registered trademarks and for best results use the advanced search.

I like this website because the interface is so simple, but you can also search the free government trademark database TESS at USPTO.gov

Search for registered trademarks on websites like Trademarkia.com and USPTO.gov (if the name is taken scratch if off the list). Now, keep in mind that while you do your free searches, there’s no guarantee that your name is available.

However, you will save you a lot of time and money by eliminating names that are obviously already in use.

Don’t mourn them—Just cross them out, mark them as taken, and move on.

Now, let's do so until you end up with no more than 10 best and available names.

If you have more than 10, then check them against you naming strategy and eliminate the weakest candidates.

Once you’re left with 10 strong name candidates, then the last step is to pick 3 strongest options.

9. Evaluate—Select Top Names In this last step, let's take our 10 names and put them into the column on the left.

Score your names by answering a series of questions. Try to not cheat here—don't favor some names over others just because you like them (stay objective).

Use 1 for Yes and 0 for No.

Try to be as objective as possible here, because ultimately we want to make a meaningful decision.

So start with the first name and the first question—which is Positioning.

1. Positioning Review your brand description and objectives from the Strategize part.

Does the name position your brand to win? Remember that you’ve got only 5 minutes to answer 10 questions so don’t overthink it.

2. Experience Look at the Users exercise from the Strategize Part to determine if the name will work.

Does the name resonate with your audience? It’s important to think from the perspective of your users (not your own) as they are the ones who should understand it, love to talk about it and share it with others.

3. Criteria Look at your naming criteria that you've defined based on your competitive research.

Does the name fulfill your strategic criteria? Remember that the best names are different, they stand out among your competitors so they can be easily remembered.

4. Impression This is something a bit more personal—as people we can have different first impression.

Does the name make an impact when you hear? So in general, think about whether your name makes a strong first impression.

5. Feeling This one is a bit personal too, but in general:

How does the name make people feel? Think about whether the name makes you smile or makes you nervous.

6. Look Some names will look better than others.

Would the name lend itself well to logo design? Think about whether the name Is visually pleasing.

7. Read Read is short for readability (legibility), so simply say the name out loud and notice:

Is the name easy to read, pronounce and spell? Think about whether it would be clear for someone to write your name when they hear it on the phone for the first time.

8. Uniqueness Think whether the name can make your brand stand out in your category.

Is the name unique and distinctive? You don’t have to be super original, but you should have a unique name (or differentiated in your category at least).

9. Memorability If your name is too literal, it won’t sound special and won’t be remembered.

Is it easy to remember the name? Also note that shorter names tend to be easier to remember.

10. Availability Think about whether you can defend that name and make it your own.

Is it possible to exclusively own this name? I’m not talking here about domains, because you can always use a modifier.

For example, Dropbox started with getdropbox.com and Facebook started with thefacebook.com

Consider the results of your preliminary screening and trademark search—some names are easier to own than others.

Once you understand all the 10 questions, then go through your list and score the names. Finally, sum up the scores in the right column and circle the three higher scores—these are your top 3 names.

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