Dodge the Naming Game Traps: Top 5 Company Naming Mistakes to Avoid

          With three decades of naming expertise, we’ve seen it all and learned even more. Now, we’re spilling the secrets on how to sidestep the most common naming blunders. Dive in as we go beyond the basics and uncover the deeper, most common mistakes that could derail your naming success.

Key Takeaways: 

• Patience and Creativity: Successful naming requires patience, creativity, and strategic insight. Rushing the process can lead to mistakes that hinder your brand’s identity. 

• Audience-Centric Approach: Avoiding mistakes like ignoring your audience ensures your name resonates with those who matter most—your customers and stakeholders. 

• Manage Expectations: Effective naming involves managing expectations realistically. Names aren’t instantly beloved; they evolve through crafting, testing, and refinement. 

• Memorability Matters: Neglecting memorability can diminish the impact of your brand. A memorable name is essential for long-term recognition and success. 

Introduction: Embracing the Challenge of Naming 

Naming a product, company, or brand is no easy feat. It requires creativity, strategic thinking, and an understanding of your audience. Yet, many ventures fall into common pitfalls that can hinder success from the outset. In this guide, we’ll explore five critical mistakes that businesses often make in the naming process and how you can navigate around them to achieve a name that resonates and endures. 

1. Expecting Too Much From A Name

“A name that tries to say everything says nothing clearly.”

The more you pack into your name, the less it communicates effectively. Think of your company name as a first date, you want to capture interest but you can’t guarantee lasting love. A name’s job is to intrigue and invite further exploration, not to convey everything about your company. Avoid overly descriptive names; they often end up dull and forgettable.

• Here are a few good examples:

  • “Unadulterated Food Products” became Snapple.

  • “Research in Motion” turned into BlackBerry.

  • “AuctionWeb” was rebranded as eBay.

These changes highlight the power of a name that’s more impactful and memorable.

2. Ignoring The Actual Target Audience…..It’s Not Just About You

It’s not just about you or your preferences; it’s about your audience. Whether it’s potential employees, investors, or customers, make sure the name resonates with them. Understanding your target audience is crucial, and if you don’t have insights into their preferences, you’re shooting in the dark. 

This also means you need to consider the long game. 

• Do you want to compete for the best talent? Think about your employees.

• Do you want to sell eventually? Consider the investor.

3. Not Managing Expectations

In today’s legal landscape, securing a straightforward, common word as a brand name is increasingly challenging. In today’s crowded marketplace, dreaming of a simple, classic name like “Dove” probably won’t fly. Names like that have been around decades, but don’t let the lack of real word names available in today’s digital globalization scare you.

Legal hurdles and the sheer volume of existing trademarks necessitate creativity. 

Modern successful names often need to be more abstract or inventive—think Google or Amazon. These names weren’t obvious choices at first but were adaptable and distinctive enough to become iconic. Expect to adopt more abstract or invented names. 

“A great name doesn’t need to be obvious or familiar—it needs to be buildable and ownable.”

4. Expecting Love at First Sight, ‘I Will Know It When I See It’

Expecting to fall in love with a name at first sight is unrealistic and often leads to missed opportunities. The right name rarely hits you immediately but grows into its potential through the brand story you build around it.

“Think of names like fragile, new babies- personalities are yet to develop, there’s a need for nurturing, and there’s significant potential for growth.”

What matters most is how well a name fits your brand strategy, not the initial wow factor. It should differentiate your brand in the marketplace and align with your overall brand strategy. 

5. Ignoring the Golden Rule: Memorability

Above all, a name must be memorable. It’s the foundation of brand building. No matter how clever or meaningful, if potential customers can’t remember your name, effectiveness is lost. 

“A good name sticks to the roof of your brain like peanut butter”

A good name creates both awareness and preference, setting an example and the stage for all future growth and other marketing efforts to build upon. Don’t shy away from a name with a bit of edge– names like BigAssFans.Controversial names can be memorable and generate buzz. However, ensure it resonates with your target audience and doesn’t cross the line into offensiveness.

In Conclusion

Avoiding these pitfalls isn’t just about creating a good name, but crafting a beacon for your brand that guides and grows with your business. Think of naming your new business, not just as a label, but as the first and most enduring part of your story. Ready to find a name that fits just right? Contact us and let’s make it memorable together.

Original Post – January 21, 2020

The 5 Biggest Company Naming Mistakes – NameStormers

As naming experts, we have plenty of tips to offer about the process. Anyone who’s been in the name development business for 30 years has seen their fair share of company naming efforts gone wrong. Fortunately, that means we have a wealth of wisdom to impart when it comes to avoiding the common pitfalls of naming.

We cover these mistakes in How to Choose a Catchy Business Name, but here we dive a little deeper into how and why these missteps can hamper the process.

1. Trying to Force Your Name to Do Too Much

A company or brand name is like a profile on a dating app. It may capture interest, but it can’t guarantee the first date will go well, or that you’ll survive meeting the parents. It’s merely a first impression, a glimpse into the identity and purpose of your company. That means it can’t do all of the work for you. It needs to be supported by attractive design, engaging copy, and a killer ad campaign to realize its potential. Don’t expect it to stand alone, or you’ll end up with a disappointing result.

We know this can feel counterintuitive. Shouldn’t a descriptive name that conveys a company’s mission and values be a solid choice? Surprisingly, no. Descriptive names tend to be too literal, which is code for “boring.” A good name should intrigue your target, offering only enough information to entice them to interact with your brand.

Consider these three examples of brands that got too descriptive about their purpose and offerings — and ended up changing their names:

1. Unadulterated Food Products
2. Research in Motion
3. AuctionWeb

You would probably never guess that the first two were the original names for Snapple and BlackBerry. You might have guessed that third one was eBay, but you can see why it didn’t last. It’s just not exciting.

Let’s just say there’s a reason these companies went through the headache of changing their names and rebranding. The too-descriptive names were forgettable and ineffective. Their new names prioritize impact and memorability over descriptiveness.

2. Overcomplicating the Process

Creating a company name can be an emotionally fraught ordeal. The name needs to be meaningful, memorable, and available, among other things, which makes for a lot of pressure. Don’t add stress by convoluting the process.

Here are the two most common ways that companies let the process get away from them:

• Letting too many cooks into the kitchen. Asking everyone in your company to come up with a name or tell you which ones they prefer may seem like a good idea, but it will only lead to confusion. Asking the right people is better than asking everyone.
• Getting mired in the details too early. Yes, you should absolutely make sure a name is legally available and run a domain availability search as well. But those steps should come after you have a list of names that inspire you. Getting bogged down in the details will sabotage the creative process. It’s better to have ten exciting name candidates and find out that nine of them are unusable than to work backward from your competitors’ ideas.

3. Using an Acronym

On the opposite end of being too descriptive is being too obscure, and there’s nothing more obscure than acronyms. Your name needs to communicate something, and unless your acronym happens to spell out a real word — which, let’s be honest, is probably already trademarked — your target will have no idea what it means.

Don’t spend your marketing budget on simply making sure people know what your letters stand for in the first place. Instead, choose something with inherent meaning, and use your marketing budget to start building brand awareness and preference. Neither of those can occur without memorability, and acronyms are rarely memorable.

4. Trying to Please Everybody

This goes back to our “too many cooks in the kitchen” rule. You can’t woo everybody, so identify your target and pursue them. Yes, you may have board members or employees to please, and that’s important too. But you will never be able to create a name that all of these constituencies will fall head over heels for. If you try to please everyone, you end up diluting the name’s personality and uniqueness. It’s okay for some people not to love it, or even to actively dislike it.

The ideal number of people to involve in naming your company or brand is five or six. That’s it. Choose people you trust, but don’t only involve yes-men. A handful of collaborators is enough to allow for diverse input.

5. Avoiding Controversy

This isn’t a free pass from us to throw around profanity or culturally offensive terms. But we love a name with a little edge. Edgy names are memorable. They get people talking. A name with the right dose of controversy practically pays for its own marketing with word-of-mouth buzz.

If you do lean controversial, it’s always a good idea to check in with your target audience to make sure you haven’t gone too far before you commit. An optional phase of our thorough, seven-step process is Name Evaluation Research. Choosing a controversial name is a risky move that can really pay off when executed well.

When you’re ready to name your company, don’t just buy business names from a name generator or a pre-made list. Contact us today so we can put our creativity to work for you.

Transcription:

Mike Carr (00:02): 

I am so glad you joined today because I want to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes when it comes to name development that so many of our clients come to us and talk about how they’ve gone down those for Lauren paths. So let me start by saying naming is really tough. So you need to give yourself a break and not be so hard on yourself or on your team. You may find it a little more challenging that first go and not get where you want to be, and you may have to go through a second time and a third time and not be real happy with the results. But I think if you follow the five things to avoid the five mistakes that we’ve seen a lot of clients talk to us about, you’ll at least be headed on that path, hopefully in a little bit less frictional way, smoother way. 

(00:58): 

So the first one is expecting too much from a name. A name that tries to say everything doesn’t say anything clearly. The more you try to pack into your name, the less effective it often is. So a better way to think about a name is sort of like that first state you want to intrigue. You want to hint at some good things to come, but you don’t want to reveal everything. So a name’s job is to catch the attention, create some excitement and curiosity, invite further exploration, but not to say everything about your company, if that’s what you’re naming or that product, if that’s what you’re naming. And you really want to avoid these overly descriptive names that tend to be dull and boring. So three examples of actual descriptive names, and they’re sort of more engaging counterpart, unadulterated food products, very descriptive, unadulterated food and products. 

(02:06): 

But what about Snapple as the new name, sort of interesting or research in motion. Research about movement moving around, or blackberry or auction web auctions on the web, I get that. Or eBay. These examples highlight the power of names that are more engaging even though they’re not as descriptive as you perhaps might start. Now, number two is a mistake that you’re going to say you’re not going to make, but I can almost promise you we’ve seen a lot, not everyone, not the majority, but a lot of companies make this mistake and that is ignoring your target. So let’s say you’re coming out with a new product and you’re targeting Gen Zers and you’ve 

(02:58): 

Got eight senior managers and brand managers and insight people on the call when we presenting our names. And guess what? Every one of those people is 30 years old or older, but they’re targeting Gen Z or a global client, strong in North America, strong in Europe, strong in Latin and Central America, but now they’re going after the Asia Pacific Country’s, China, Japan, South Korea, 12 people on this call from all over the world. We have to do this call at six in the morning. You got five people from North America, you have four people from eu. You have two people from Latin South America, and you’ve got one, one person from China and everybody from North America, boisterous, loud, exciting, engaged, and the Chinese person’s very quiet. And so we ask, we stop and we say, what do you think? And in a very respectful, lower introverted kind of voice explains their rationale and their thinking. 

(03:57): 

Then they’re quiet and then the conversation starts up all over again, boisterous and exciting and engaging. And by the end of the call, no one’s paid any attention to the one person, only one out of 12 that was from the market that they were targeting. So don’t ignore your target audience and try to include maybe more folks on the call or more folks on your team that are representative of that. Number three, not managing expectations. And this is so common now with ai, right? You’ve got chat, GPT, you’ve got Gemini, you’ve got Quad three, and everybody’s excited about using these tools to try to come up with some names. And so you go through thousands of names, it takes you days. Days, everybody’s burned out, but you’ve got three names. Three names the team thinks are pretty good. You submit ’em to legal and guess what? 

(04:50): 

Not a single one makes it through and chat. GBT AI said these names were, okay, well, here’s the problem. Trademark law is based upon how a name is pronounced, not how it’s spelled, and not just how it’s pronounced, how it’s pronounced by a native speaker in that particular country with that particular dialect and chat. GBT and Gemini aren’t necessarily built from these data sets that speak to the subtleties and the nuances and how one might say that word in that particular dialect in that particular country, yet that’s what trademark law is based on. Or it might miss linguistic and cultural nuances and those types of things. So manage some expectations from the out from the get-go. And don’t lock and load on just the three names. Number four, I will know it when I see it. Oh my gosh, this scares the out of me. 

(05:59): 

Expecting love at first sight is not a good thing. First of all, it rarely happens, which leads to disappointment if that’s going to be the assumption going in. If it does happen, it usually happens for the wrong reasons. And you often miss names that actually have greater potential, but don’t necessarily grab you the right way when you first hear them. Amazon. Amazon, that’s a big river where the pran and eat You alive. That’s where the rainforests are being decimated. Amazon women, is that politically correct? Apple Computer. You got to be kidding me. That’s what you give a teacher. It’s not the name of a computer Google. That’s what my six month old says Google when they’re learning how to talk. Yet those were all great names. They had tremendous potential, but they weren’t necessarily the name that when you first saw it, you were going to fall in love with it. 

(06:56): 

Names are like babies. They’re fragile. They take lots of care. You have to be careful with them. But when you wrap the right story around them, the right context, the right graphics, they tend to blossom and come alive when you nurture them, when you feed those babies, you’ll then start to see the real true potential. So don’t expect to fall in love with a name at first sight. And the last one, number five, ignoring the golden rule of naming. Can your target remember it? Is that memorable? Now, it’s hard to test for this. We have some methodologies that are, we think really good at looking at behavior, not asking the question, but a cheap way. A do it yourself way if you’re on a limited budget, not ideal, but it’ll get you part of the way there. If you’re skeptical about memorability is work on all the names. 

(07:50): 

Go through the thousands of names, however you do it with your team contest using an agency. Let’s say you’ve got six that are pretty good and you go to half a dozen or your friends, a dozen of your friends that you trust, maybe they’re in the industry, hopefully they have some knowledge of the market, they, they’re similar to the people you’re targeting and you ask them what they think of the names, right? You give ’em a little bit of story, a little bit of context, and they give you your thought, their thoughts, and they love this name. Here’s why you thank them very much. You let one day go by one day and you simply ask a question, which of the names that we talked about yesterday, can you remember? That’s it. Unaided recall, 24 hours later. And guess what? If they can’t remember any of the names or if most of the people you talk to can’t remember any of the names back to square one, if you’re naming a new company or you’re naming a new brand, you need a name that sticks into the brain like peanut butter that sticks to the top of the brain. 

(08:50): 

It is sticky. And if you don’t get that, you’re going to spend whatever budget you have just 

(08:54): 

Trying to get that unaided awareness score up to where it needs to be before you can start building preference. So in summary, naming’s tough. So go easy on yourself. We’ve been there. We know how hard it is. We’ve been working with clients for almost 40 years. This is rarely as easy as you think it’s going to be. So don’t expect great things right out of the chute, but try to avoid some of these most common mistakes. And I think things are a little bit smoother. So in recap, there are five of them expecting too much from a name. Don’t do that. Don’t ignore your target audience. Don’t pretend that expectations aren’t important. You need to manage expectations. Don’t assume love at first sight. Try to avoid that. Try to talk folks out of that. And most importantly, number five, the golden rule. Can people remember the thing, right? Can they remember the name? Is it inherently memorable? Is it sticky? If you need any help, we’re of course here to help you. You can call me on my personal cell phone number. My name is Mike Carr. My number is nine one seven six nine two three. You can call anytime you want. If I’m not available, it’ll go to voicemail and I’ll try to give you a call back the very next day and find out a little bit more about what you’re interested in. Best of luck to you in your naming journey.