Naming Things
by Jonathan Deutsch
Naming new products is hard! It isn’t clear to me how much a bad name can break a product, but personally I’d give your product every chance in this world to succeed by bestowing it as good of a name as possible. I’ve seen my share of bad names, so I thought a list that could act as a reference to elevate naming discussions from the subjective to the objective territory.
A great product name:
- Is spelled like it sounds
- Sounds like how it is spelled
- Has no homonymns
- Has no homographs
- Has no homophones
- Has no more than 3 syllables or 2 words
- Has no significant alternate connotations
- Is not a dirty word in a different language
- Is related to the product
- Has deeper meaning towards the product
- Is not infringing on trademarks (even if those trademarks are in different industries and would not hold up as infringing)
- Has a domain name available
- Has a domain name that was not auctioned off by the government as a way to pay for substantial debts such that the original owner comes back later and wants to sue you for it even though you bought it fair and square thus incurring tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and headache for a span of 2 years. But I’m not bitter or anything.
Ideally your product name does not fail any of these checks, but 1-2 at maximum may be okay.
If you score well on all those, then you can consider:
- Is memorable. You probably have something in your past that makes you think it is, but this rarely applies to others.
Okay… one last bonus one for Apple to consider:
- Is intuitively pluralizable (AirPods Pro vs AirPod Pros)
Okay, really now… one last bonus one for Adobe to consider:
- Avoids camel case, or at least is intuitive about it (Photoshop vs PhotoShop)
Finally, I’ll remark on the trademark point from above. With 8 billion people on this planet, chances are someone is already using the same name and likely for the same product. If you find someone or some company using the same name as yours, start by assuming the best and be kind to work through the conflict.
If there’s any other points to consider in making a great name, please let me know!