The Mysteries of Naming: Chapter 2

To create a good name, you need to create a lot of names.

Okay, I'm cribbing a bit. It was the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling who originally said, "To come up with a good idea, you need a lot of ideas." But his observation bears repeating and paraphrasing. In creative endeavors, quantity often begets quality.

When you first try to develop names, you feel tapped out after writing down fifteen ideas: the three obvious names, the three you labored on, the three you got from the thesaurus, the three that feel forced and stupid, and the three that came to you while you were showering or driving. You feel proud of your creative output. Smug, even.

And now, as the psychoanalyst told Portnoy at the very end of Portnoy's Complaint, now we can begin.

Consider this: Given a decent creative backgrounder and a week on his or her own, a professional namer will come up with 250 or 300 names per assignment. Some of the names will be obscure. Most will be unavailable legally. And a few, just a few, will be good candidates for the job.

How do we amass 250 to 300 names...or more? (I've worked on naming projects in which four team members came up with more than 2,000 names.) Here are three techniques to crank up the volume:

1. Name stairs. I love this term, which I picked up from a post on Baby Name Wizard. Start with a word and add one letter to the beginning or the end to create a new word. An example of a baby name "staircase": Ana - Lana - Alana. The game works with product and company names as well, and you can add whole syllables instead of letters. Start with a linguistic unit relevant to your naming objectives--for example, CARE for a health-insurance company. Now start adding prefixes or suffixes to CARE: ProCare, QCare, WiseCare, CareForce, CareMark, CareGuard. A lot of your names will be silly or contrived or taken by someone else, but at this point you don't, um, care.
2. Triangulate. The creative backgrounder, or naming brief, will contain a list of features, benefits, and intangible qualities that go into the brand you're naming. It's virtually impossible to create a name that embodies ten attributes, but quite feasible to hit two of the points. So take any pair of naming objectives and write down words that suggest both. Example: a technology that cools integrated circuits by means of a soundless flow of water. What suggests "flow" and "cool"? Cascade, Rivulet, Floe, Running Ice... Pair "silent" and "water"? Oasis, Damper, Rushhh, Liquid Silence...
3. Go global. Besides Latin and Greek, from which many English words derive, consider French (especially for beauty brands), Spanish (whence Ariba, Marimba, Adobe), or Italian (Bravo, Presto), all of which may resonate as acceptable to the native-English ear. Depending on how much of a story (and marketing budget) you're willing to invest in your brand, you can look at more "exotic" languages, too: Hawaiian, Chinook, Basque, Esperanto, Farsi. You'll want to double-check for pronounceability, but that comes later.

I often turn for inspiration to Terry Ryan's wonderful The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, which tells the story of Ryan's mother Evelyn, who supported her large family by writing jingles and rhymes for contests. "Mom worked on her entries day and night, honing them until the rhyme or the sentiment, in her mind, perfectly fit the sponsor's expectations," Terry Ryan writes. "She never submitted just one entry when she had enough ideas for ten or eleven."

Be generous in your naming. Aim for abundance. Remember e pluribus unum: out of many, one--one really good one.

Read "The Mysteries of Naming, Chapter 1."

Read "The Mysteries of Naming, Chapter 3."

Read "The Mysteries of Naming, Chapter 4."

Comments

[Michael Wagner]

Great advice and practical help! We usually are working with too few ideas on any challenge we face.

I tell my clients "fish with a net".

The triangulate model is interesting, will give it a try.

Keep creating, Mike

[amyjussel]

Witty. Concise. And spot on. (replace 'shower/ driving' with swimming the dogs off the dock, & it mirrors my day completely) Here are a few more tips for your readers, credited to the (now defunct) "brandfidelity.com" site:

"The power of sound and cadence in naming"

-Hard consonants such as C (cat), D, J, K, Q, T, V, X, Z
give a name a strong, bold sound. Examples: Prozac,
Questlink, Coca Cola, Kodak, Tazo Tea, Delta.

-Softer consonants such as B, F, G, H, L, M, N, P, R, S, W,
Y help round out a name and make it sound welcoming, easier
to get along with. Examples: Amazon, Broadview, MindSpring,
and Nike.

-Vowels: O and A sound big or open, while the short E or I
(as in cheese or rice), sound smaller, more enclosed.
Examples are American Airlines, Agilent vs. Microsoft,
Verisign, Verizon, (a mixture of both types of vowels) vs.
eBay, PeoplePC, Heinz.

-Alliteration creates a memorable name through the use of
repetition of different sounds. Examples include Broadbase,
Form Factor, Nortel Networks and Sim City.

-While rhyming is not common in naming, it can be an
effective tool to improve the sound and cadence of a word.
Examples: ThinkLink.com and LoudCloud (this is both rhyme
and alliteration).

-Rhyming can also be effective in developing new ideas while
brainstorming. If you have a keyword you'd like to convey,
but don't want to use it literally in the name, see if
there's a word which rhymes, and conveys a similar meaning.
Handspring's Visor (a palm based computer) is one example.
The creators of that product name might have thought of
their new device as a good "advisor", and the word "visor"
(a word for hat) is a nice rhyme that (via sound) connotes
"advisor." © Brand Fidelity 2001”

[laurieclemans]

You are generous with your knowledge. It can't be easy coming up with names that say it all perfectly and haven't already been snapped up and registered on the government's patent and trademark office website. But it sure seems like fun to play with words! What are your favorites? The Internet has certainly spawned some interesting names: shopzilla,gizmo, wikipedia, scifidelity...!