It’s challenging to find a great company name.
Choices are difficult and often expensive. Coming to grips with what ‘great’ really means is never definitive. And for early stage companies, we have little more than gut belief and pure inspiration to guide us.
No product. No market. No early community. Nothing but a silhouette of a big idea.
Naming at an early stage is like building the transcontinental railroad with only one directive–head west. This is as close to zen as marketing can get.
The naming process is a wacky anomaly. There is no scale for right or wrong. No data to guide you. You labor to an end result that is completely subjective, arbitrary by nature, yet critical in ineffable ways.
It’s not quite free-form imagination but the rules are squishy, advice overly plentiful and the logic of one choice over another, often questionable.
Some marketers claim that the importance of the naming process is inflated. You ‘fix’ the name as you grow with it. This is the ‘money equalizes all problems’ babble. Some say that your future is determined by your birthright. Nonsense both.
Names are important. They are an outline and language for the future. There is brand sense in the sound of the name even at first blush. Discovering the right name is marketing at a symbolic level. Defining in halftones and creating a shape for an idea and giving that shape a name and the customer something to hold a memory in.
I’ve been creating company and product names throughout my career. I’m back in the name game recently with a number of personal and client projects.
Every naming project is unique. Each one is difficult and inspiring. I’ve never done this well where the vision of team and the company didn’t grow and become more self cognizant during the process.
This time, I decided to poll my networks for new ideas and guidance before I started. Very little came back.
The following thought categories are the ones I created as guidelines, very minor epiphanies that made the process more intelligent and focused, and seemingly less random.
All names are not created equal, but none are great at inception.
Some names are really clever right off. Some just sound right. But all of them are somewhat meaningless and devoid of impact until you give them legs and the market embraces them as an icon for your company’s value.
We forget that the names on our Bookmark Bar–Google, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Skype—are anything but overnight successes. We’ve been working with them for years. We know what they stand for, when to use them and for what.
They aren’t perfect now, any more than I bet they felt perfect back when. Just today, our history with them gives them meaning. They just work.
Compare these name brands with any group of cool start-up names. The best of the new are sassy and compelling, flexible shells awaiting gravitas from our experience with them.
The difference between, say Tumblr and a great name like Jig is just that–years of exposure, gazillions of link shares, billions of personal experiences from a global population. Tumblr has evolved into a brand; Jig is just a name.
Names do really matter even before they mean anything.
How valuable is your company name before it becomes an icon for what your product and your company stand for?
I think, very valuable.
We need symbols and words to wrap our ideas around. That name is the first piece of language that articulates what your company could be. Try pitching without it.
I’m a believer in words as maps for ideas and guidelines for creativity. Names to me are a visualized idea, a synthesized composite that you layer with meaning over time.
You need to be comfortable without reservation, putting your heart and soul behind what the name represents in a word. The initial word on the slide to gather your first early community around it, find funding and establish partnerships.
It’s a giant step towards articulating and in some ways defining the future.
You can’t outsource the process of self-discovery.
This is not a popular idea.
I believe that no one can tell you who you are or what the core of your company is about.
You can hire someone with naming chops to help tease the vision out of you and into a name that works. It’s a hard process and having a pro as your partner can help. But ultimately, their job is to find voice for what you believe. They can’t find the vision for you.
My advice is to listen to everyone, internalize, then decide yourself. This is not a democratic process.
You are the one who will sweat it into meaning through endless conversations, pitches, interviews and decisions. Your opinion is the one that matters.
This is important stuff to find the time to make right. Do it with a partner as needed but make this process your own.
What you call yourself, what you do and where you live are the same.
We are not choosing a name as much as drawing a map of connections to being found by our future customers and the place where community will be built. We are in a sense, also designing the first word of a new language of expression.
The compromise between the sense in the sound of the word that we love and the availability (and cost) of the URL is always uneasy.
The flexibility of having more than .com at your disposal is however, a creative gift from today’s social web.
If you are building a destination site, the .com designation still seems to have meaning to the mass market. A straw poll of my marketing networks came back unanimous on this.
If the activity is centered around ‘me’, and mobile, then each of us is their own center of the connecting social net. Then .com seems wrong and .me may be a strong contender.
If the service is a verb, an action, then .it as in ‘name.it’ makes sense. Domains are a new global language with very few rules. We have immense freedom to craft new language structures as long as we are not cute for cute’s sake and forget about how this will play with the customer.
With mobile devices as the new desktop, you need to rethink how important correct spelling really is. We download an app once, use it forever. Think about whether you will live in a app-based world or one where typing in your URL will be commonplace. Being remembered as a sound may be the most important criteria.
Naming is an exercise in compromise. I find that the more puzzle pieces I have to play with, the better the result.
And of course, core company value will trump everything else. Having a great name to build that value around is a huge asset.
The domain name moat.
The web world is incessantly changing and domain strategies are in a constant state of flux. A number of entrepreneurs I spoke with are targeting a .com, .it, .me, and sometimes, .tv moat strategy.
The idea is to lock in a destination site .com, a mobile .me, an action .it and video, .tv domain family. It is a broad idea, hard to accomplish, but worth considering.
Some names really do suck and win anyway.
del.icio.us is the best example of a terrible name for a great service that was hugely successful.
I use the product incessantly and always misspell it. It has no sound and sense logic to me. No real connection to anything.
But delicious rocked my world when I adopted it for my bookmarking platform. I’m still using it today.
The sound and sense puzzle
I needed some way to parse the infinite naming possibilities and tackle this process conceptually.
The sound and sense puzzle stack was my solution:
- The literal layer. Names that describe what you do as a verb (foodspotting, blogger, drynks) or as a place or noun (think Cartoon Network). Great for known brands. Good for keyword based traffic strategies.
- The metaphorical layer. Names that exemplify what your brand is about. Tumblr, Flickr, Stumbleupon, Re-Vinyl, maybe even Twitter, all jump to mind. These are all the rage and create some killer names.
- The meta layer. The interface as a defining behavior. Think of games, like Doodle Jump. Concepts wrapped up as reflex actions.
- The Sound before sense layer. Names that just sound right. Seemingly random and unconnected in any tangible way. Yelp and Jig are examples.
There are as many of these layers as there are different ways of thinking about your brand. Moving these puzzle pieces around can make the universe of choices more manageable.
I went through this naming process a bunch of years ago when I started my blogs. I came up with some cool names for my social web and wine blogs that are still cool today, but filed away (for now) .
At the end, I chose what it is today: arnoldwaldstein.com.
No symbology. Hard to spell. No sound over sense. Nothing meta. Only myself as the brand and the container to build a community of discussion around.
I am what I sell and this container is the most flexible and fits like it’s mine.
It just feels right and for naming and building a brand, that’s the most important thing.
