A quality name for a brand does not emerge from the creative process; it comes from a legal and regulatory framework that restricts creativity and categorizes a brand.
Many company leaders view naming as something that can be completed based on their opinion and the opinions of people they work with, rather than looking at objective data regarding the likelihood of them being remembered or their ability to be trademarked.
In short, brand naming strategies should not be looked upon in a romantic way but should be based on an operating system for testing names and their suitability for use in the marketplace.
The Main Problem with Most Brand Naming Strategies
The standard procedure for generating a brand name generally collapses within the first hour of beginning the project. The team gathers together, sits in one room, and begins yelling out names of things they consider cool. This does not account for the fundamentals of how a brand works in the real world.
The First Step is Not Brainstorming
Generating names without a positioning brief ensures failure. Each name must have a purpose for being created. Before generating a name, a company must determine who it will be targeting, its geographical reach, and the category it falls within.
Instead of guessing, companies such as Lexicon Branding begin by mapping out the universe of words semantically. The larger a number of options you generate, the better.
It takes many options—generally more than 1,000 raw ideas—to arrive at the best names (50-100). A team that stops after generating 20 has not explored beyond the obvious and overused options identified by their competitors.
Removing Personal Preference
The naming process should not be solely based on the preference of an executive or team because preference is not a measurable metric for selecting the best name.
Addressing Language and Cultural Risks
All brands—local, regional, and global—face the downside of the immediate threat of translation failure into another language. A name that sounds strong in one language may have an embarrassing, negative, or confusing translation in another language or even multiple languages.
It is essential to put language and cultural considerations into account early in the naming process. This includes screening the name candidates against the primary languages in your target marketplace to ensure that the various phonetic sounds, and any slang terms associated with them, are appropriate.
If you do not perform this screening before you launch, you could be forced to remove your product from retail shelves soon after launching and lose months of capital and effort.
Scoring Metrics for Brand Names
Finally, all product and service names should be assessed based on a scoring metric rather than an individual executive or manager's opinion.
To eliminate the possibility of the process being influenced by prejudices or personal feelings, teams must create a weighted scoring matrix that evaluates names based on five specific, measurable criteria: strategic fit, distinctiveness of the name, ease of pronouncing, unaided recall, and legal protection.
The underlying principle of processing fluency expresses that individuals will subconsciously reject an item if they struggle to pronounce, read or comprehend its name. In fact, a naming expert might use the simple rule of a naming expert's test: If three out of five people have a hard time spelling your name after hearing it, you should rethink your name.
The objective of this type of test is not to find the perfect name, rather, it is to identify a name that satisfies all legal requirements and all elements of structure in your brand naming strategies.
Domain Name Issues and Trademarks
Even if a name is catchy, it can't be used as a business name unless another company has the legal rights to it. The number of registered trademarks is approximately 5,500,000 in 45 different classes and is growing rapidly.
A New View on Digital Ownership
The tendency of many businesses to abandon great brand names simply because the exact match of a .com domain has already been registered is out of date thinking. While it is beneficial for a company to have the main domain registered in their name, it is not a requirement for technology and B2B companies.
Thousands of businesses now launch their brands by adding a modifier (for example, "get", "use", or "try") to their names and register using alternative top-level domains. The most important thing is to protect your trademark and maintain your semantic identity.
Once your company begins generating revenue, the domain can be upgraded, but a compromised trademark will end with a lawsuit and a mandatory complete rebranding.
Knockout Searches vs. Trademark Clearance
It is a common misconception that a quick search through TMView or the USPTO database provides legal clearance. It only provides a preliminary knockout search.
A knockout search allows individuals to determine whether or not there is an exact match. Your search does not provide you with competitive information on confusingly similar names, so you may be blocked from filing because a competitor has the trademark for that name.
Once you create your shortlist, you will need to employ a qualified trademark attorney to provide you with a full clearance opinion for your trademark application.
The filing fees for trademark applications vary from $250-$350 based on the class of the application. The registration process for your trademark application generally takes 12-18 months. To apply for a trademark without obtaining a professional clearance creates significant risk to your business.
Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Shortcut
The current influx of artificial intelligence has created a number of new businesses focused around AI-generated names, including sites like Namelix, as well as the relatively simple names generated with ChatGPT or Claude. Although artificial intelligence is a useful tool, many people are unaware of how this technology works.
Repeated Naming Patterns and Suffixes
Predictive technologies, including AI, use data to determine what the next logical word will be. Consequently, the nature of how these tools operate means they generate "average" or "mediocre" outputs. When asked to create a startup name, AI uses saturated types of naming conventions, including dropping vowels from words, or simply adding an "ify" suffix or ".ai" on the end of the word.
Because of this saturation of naming patterns, many of the names being generated through AI are indistinguishable from those developed during the last three years. The true benefit of using AI in your brand naming strategies is to collect a random collection of words and expand them into a plethora of unrelated semantic meanings to discover unique name options for your business.
Artificial Intelligence Cannot Create the Origins of Words
The term "hook" is often used by artificial intelligence tools to describe a clever name. Many times, these tools incorrectly state that the name they generated is derived from an ancient language or dialect and is associated with a particular culture. However, these statements are often incorrect.
The underlying problem with relying on an artificial intelligence generator is that it typically does not verify the word it generates. Therefore, the AI tool does not cross-reference its output with live trademark databases.
Relying on AI alone to generate or select a name for a business is a recipe for conflict with the law, and it places your firm in a generic position in the marketplace.
Brand Naming Strategies for Architecture and Post-Launch Tracking
Naming does not take place in a vacuum; when a company names something, it is also naming the entire system surrounding that product/service, along with sub-brands, extensions and other elements in your brand architecture.
Structuring the Product Portfolio
Before any name can be approved, the top level of management at a company must ascertain whether it is going to build a branded house (i.e. like FedEx, where all services are combined under the master name) or a house of brands (like Procter & Gamble, where every brand has an identity of its own).
If a company fails to structure its brand architecture before selecting a name, it will create confusion with an assortment of different types of sub-brands, which will significantly hinder cross-selling efforts and create confusion for large enterprise customers.
Naming all new products and features should generally follow a consistent naming convention for added clarity and to build equity in the master brand.
Testing Names in Context
The name must be able to stand the test of time and not just a mere visual representation. The name should be subjected to rigorous testing by placing the candidates in various contexts before a final decision is made. Consider these tests:
The Sales Call Test: Insert the name into a mock sales script, does the sales person have difficulty articulating it?
The Introduction Test: Have someone orally introduce the company in a loud venue, does the listener repeat it back accurately?
The Overnight Recall Test: Tell five prospective customers about the name and then call them back the following day.
Weak name retention occurs when individuals cannot recall the name of a brand in a test group without assistance. Less than 70% of respondents in a test group having the ability to recall the brand name means that the brand is not thought of as strong.
The success of a brand after launch can be measured through the volume of branded searches for that brand, the accuracy of referrals to that brand, and the speed at which the market stops using the brand's old identity when a rebranding occurs.
The Process of Naming Your Business
When choosing a name for a company, businesses should not think of this process as creating something creative but rather a form of risk management and strategic planning within effective brand naming strategies.
The strongest brands do not spend endless resources searching for one magical word that is the "perfect name." These companies will take hundreds of candidates through the gauntlet of linguistic analysis, memory checks, and legal clearances to find the most effective name(s) to represent their brands.
Therefore, once their candidate names pass these tests, they are not only fun to say, but also offer legally defensible rights to use an asset that can grow, absorb and dominate in their respective market niches for decades.
Brand Naming Strategies: Questions and Answers
Why do most new products fail to obtain a trademark?
Most new products fail to clear a name because the old names are highly descriptive or generic terms within their specific industry classification. Due to this, USPTO and EUIPO protect businesses from obtaining an exclusive right to use a common language to describe their products.
Because many descriptive names refer to what a product does specifically, the trademark office will typically reject an application for a trademark right to restrict the use of the descriptive name to prevent an exclusive right to use the name on that type of product.
How should businesses test name candidates before final approval?
Businesses must test names for processing fluency and unaided recall from a completely external perspective before a name can be approved for use. They should take a small group of potential buyers who are in their target demographic, and verbally give them a name to use without spelling it out.
Then, they should ask the test group to write down their immediate recall of the name. Next, they should ask the test group to remember the name 24 hours later. If the misspell rate and/or failure to recall rate are both high, then the cost involved in marketing the name will be substantial.
How does brand architecture shape the naming of a secondary product?
The architecture of a brand determines the degree to which a secondary product creates a positive association with the primary company's brand or divides the company's brand view among customers. When companies have no clear architecture for their brand, they tend to create a variety of clever names for each new feature they create.
This tends to cause confusion for customers and decreases the authority of their brand on the search engines. If a company has a clear architecture for their brand, they usually use clear descriptive names that are directly tied to their master brand for their products unless the product was designed to meet the needs of a completely different market.
What is the business risk in using a descriptive naming strategy?
Descriptive names become a business risk as soon as companies have to pivot, expand their businesses into a new region, or bring new product lines to market.
Descriptive names are all specifically tied to one specific service or category, thus if a company changes its business model to pursue a different line of business, this name no longer conveys what the company does, and thus the company has to rebrand itself, losing the years of brand equity and recognition.