COMMENTS
Can you suggest a name or two that you feel is successful?
Naming your product/company is both the easiest and hardest thing to do. No one wants a name that everyone hates...but with 2.0 naming habits (the risk is there). Having a brainstorming with you and your copywriter is a great way to filter out a lot of the bad. As is sending the name around to a few folks to gage their reaction.
@ William,
Great question, but a loaded one. It is as difficult to think of a name not attached to anything as 'successful' as it is to think of a house that is, say, 'polite.'
For example, Nike takes its name from the Greek goddess of victory - who also lends her name to the French city of Nice - but inasmuch as Nike's brand is all about competition and striving for achievement, the name is an excellent four-letter encapsulation of everything they stand for. Without the connection to the product and branding behind it, the abstracted name by itself would not be judged as 'successful'.
To give an example of a name that does work well, let's have a look at Amazon. The name connotes vastness, and denotes one of the last places on earth that is still not fully explored - and isn't 'exploration' a great metaphor for reading? It shows at the head of an alphabetical list, and though they started in book sales, the name did not limit their eventual expansion into any or every other market sector.
I also like the name we've chosen for our shop. 'Nomenon' brings to mind the word 'phenomenon' - a special or unusual case worthy of notice; and 'nomen' means 'name' in Latin. That plurality of meaning, or polysemy, works to capture attention like a cat's-eye reflector on a bike.
Great post. Being that the case I think we have a pretty good name for our industry. BUY AND WALK which means to simply buy it and use it. The behind thinking of this was to buy without any hassle and get your shoes in a fast way.
Great tips and such an important subject. The name has so much power to immediately attract the right customer.
I find it to be the hardest thing to do, often wanting to change later.
The sleep drug Ambien. Bien means "good" in Spanish and French. Along with a.m. which can be thought of as morning. So the name Ambien can translate to "good morning" which is exactly what the product is supposed to give you. You will get a good night's sleep, therefore wake up to a "good morning."
hi. great post. i have been struggling with this very same thing for a while now.. one year to be precise. my company is named "koolooma", after the word "kuluma" which in one our native South African languages mean to talk, communicate, convey etc.
in the course of doing business i found that the larger majority of the people i network with and gravitate toward and that end up as clients are not Zulu speaking, so it doesn't really resonate with them. 90% of our clients speak english as a first language.
in my efforts to find a name that sits well with myself and future clientele and that has brand potential, i have been going around in circles... until i watched your video with larry weber. eureka.
i have you to thank for helping me come up with something new, short, memorable and unique.. and and even a new service/brandcategory.. thanx hubspot
Interesting topic and relative to a lot of SMBs and startups. I know my company labored over it for quite a bit, eventually taking attivo (which means active in italian) and inserting an "i" for the 'intelligence' piece which is part of our tagline, 'active intelligence'. I thought it was pretty clever.
I'm still trying to figure out what a HubSpot is though. ;o)
One of the most important yet overlooked aspect of a name is can you own it in the search engines? HubSpot is a great name for that reason. I always search on potential book titles before deciding. Example, before confirming the title of my newest book "World Wide Rave" I made certain I could own the search results for that phrase.
David you make a great point on the keyword phrase values. We talk about this in the Ultimate Business Toolbox, we are living in a keyword phrase society.
One of the major concerns that many of our clients have is pronounceability. Can the name be easily pronounced? Does the spelling make sense to the pronunciation of the name? And can the name be easily remembered by the targeted audience, and its sub audience. Like Ghiradelli Chocolate... I can't tell you how many different ways I heard people say this name.
I think I read this on the back of Reader's Digest.
Only the first bit seems relevant to a linguist. What does he know about planning for the future...language is changing.
Anyway, I like the first idea most.
I think another element even more important than "owning" the keywords in Google is the actual availability of the domain. I think it's almost essential that the company name line up with whatever the .com domain is.
Also, if you do that, you'll likely end up ranking first for those words anyway. We have a broad and popular phrase as a name - New Media Campaigns. However, since we own the domain, we were ranking #1 for that phrase and many permutations of it within a month of launching the company.
Some good tips among the comments here. In particular, David Meerman Scott's tip that you should choose a name that has relatively few hits in Google so that you can eventually "own" it as a keyword on Google.
On the other hand, the obsession with "encapsulating meaning" in brand names is silly. The best brand names are not descriptive of the product. As Seth Godin advises, it's best to
start with a word that's a "blank slate" and create its meaning in the mind of consumers.
It's amusing to see people speculate on the deep meaning of "Amazon" and "Google". One friend told me that "google" is a large number. She was surprised when I pointed out that "googol" is the correct spelling. Another friend told me that "obviously" the name is a play on the word "goggle", because you see the search results.
See what's going on here? People are taking a made-up word with no real meaning and projecting their own meanings on it. It's called
incongruency theory.
Interesting post. Spent ages on working out names for various projects. Will try some of the suggestions here.
I'm a big believer that your company name should articulate what you do... if at all possible. That being said, it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible to line that up with a domain name. I agree with @David, search value of the domain name is critical... but who knoes where Google will take us on that one. When we registered ours years ago, short (5 letters) was the key.