Key Points:
- A strong brand name sparks curiosity – it shouldn’t try to say everything.
- Involve your target audience early to ensure the name truly connects.
- Don’t fall in love too fast – great names often need time and context.
- If people can’t remember the name a day later, it’s time to rethink it.
How Do You Come Up With a Brand Name That Works?
Let’s be honest – naming is tough. Really tough. As naming expert Mike Carr points out, even professionals struggle with it. So first, cut yourself some slack if you’re finding the process frustrating. You’re not alone.
Mike’s insights on naming pitfalls might save you from the headaches many businesses experience when trying to name their company or product. Here are the five mistakes he sees businesses make time and again:
Mistake #1: Expecting Too Much From a Name
We all want our name to tell our whole story, but that’s just not what great names do. A name isn’t an instruction manual – it’s more like a first impression at a party. It should make people curious enough to want to know more.
Think about it: “Snapple” doesn’t tell you anything about what you’re drinking, but it’s infinitely more memorable than “Unadulterated Food Products” (which was a real alternative). “Blackberry” gives you a nice image, but doesn’t explain that it’s a communication device like “Research in Motion” tried to do. And “eBay” is just catchier than “Auction Web”, even though the second one is more descriptive.
The best names hint at something interesting without spelling everything out. They make you want to learn more, and that’s exactly what you want from a first impression.
Mistake #2: Ignoring Your Target Audience
This one seems obvious, but it happens constantly. Mike tells a story about a naming session for a product targeting Gen Z, where everyone in the room was over 30. Or worse, a global expansion meeting where a dozen executives from North America and Europe drowned out the lone representative from the Asian market they were trying to enter.
It’s like planning a kids’ menu without asking any actual kids what they like to eat. If you’re naming something for 20-somethings in Japan, and the decision is being made by a room full of 50-somethings from Texas… that’s probably not going to land the way you want it to.
Make sure the people who represent your target are actually in the room when decisions get made. And more importantly, make sure they’re being heard, not just present.
Mistake #3: Not Managing Expectations
Here’s a scene that plays out in companies everywhere: The team spends days feeding prompts to ChatGPT or other AI tools, generating thousands of name ideas. After a grueling selection process, they finally get three names they like. Then legal checks them, and every single one gets shot down.
Why? Because AI tools don’t understand that trademark law cares about how words sound when spoken by real people in specific countries with particular accents – not just how they’re spelled. They miss cultural nuances that can turn your clever name into an embarrassing gaffe overseas.
Start with realistic expectations. You’ll probably need more rounds than you think. Don’t fall in love with just three names, and prepare your team for the likelihood that your first-choice names might not clear legal review.
Mistake #4: Expecting Love at First Sight
“I’ll know it when I see it” might be the most dangerous phrase in naming. It’s the corporate equivalent of swiping left on potentially great matches because you’re waiting for that perfect profile pic.
Some of today’s most iconic brand names were initially met with skepticism or outright rejection:
“Amazon? Like the river where piranhas eat you alive?”
“Apple Computer? That’s what you give a teacher, not what you call technology.”
“Google? That sounds like baby talk!”
Great names don’t always make great first impressions. They need time to grow on you. They need context, story, and visuals to bring them to life. Mike compares names to babies – they’re fragile at first and need nurturing to reveal their true potential.
Give promising names a chance to develop before dismissing them because they don’t immediately wow everyone in the room.
Mistake #5: Ignoring the Golden Rule of Naming
Here it is, the rule that trumps all others: Can people remember your name?
Seriously, if your target audience can’t recall your name 24 hours after hearing it, nothing else matters. Not how clever it is, not how much it says about your product, not how much the CEO loves it.
Mike suggests a simple DIY test: Share your name candidates with friends or colleagues who represent your target market. Chat about the names, get their feedback. Then wait a day and ask, “Which of those names we discussed yesterday can you remember?”
If they draw a blank, you’re in trouble. A forgettable name means you’ll waste your marketing budget just trying to lodge it in people’s brains before you can even start building preference for your brand.
Your name needs to stick “…like peanut butter to the roof of the mouth,” as Mike puts it. If it doesn’t, go back to the drawing board.
Final Thoughts on Creating Effective Brand Names
Naming isn’t a quick, one-and-done process. It takes time, patience, and often multiple attempts. You might not nail it on the first try, and that’s completely normal.
By avoiding these five common mistakes, you’ll save yourself frustration and improve your chances of creating a name that truly works for your brand. Don’t expect too much from your name, include your actual target audience in decisions, manage your expectations about the process, don’t demand love at first sight, and above all, make sure people can remember what you’re called.
Give yourself permission to struggle with this. Even the pros find naming challenging. But with these insights from Mike Carr, hopefully your naming journey will be a little less bumpy than most.
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Podcast Transcript
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 forlorn 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 date 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 inside people on the call when we’re 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 counties: 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 ChatGPT, you’ve got Gemini, you’ve got Claude 3, 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 ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT 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 piranha 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, it works 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 of 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 917-6923. 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.
