Naming (or renaming) a brand is harder than naming a child. Trust me. I’m trying to do both right now. A child’s name can be largely arbitrary, based on what you feel, what you are comfortable with, what sounds good with your last name. We consider things like cadence, meaning, lineage, history and then the emotional baggage of other people who have the same name. Now naming a brand carries all of the latter but should never have the former. So what should you consider when creating a name?

A shortlist of considerations should contain:

1. Competition – Know who the competition is. There is a legal issue with brand names that says, basically, you can’t create “confusion in the marketplace” with a name. Which is why International House of Pancakes rightly sued International House of Prayer for using IHOP as their name. While their categories aren’t the same there is enough confusion between the two that the latter needs to change their name. Basically, it’s equity theft.
2. Meaning – This is the fun one. Research words, concepts, root, etymology, derivatives. Find something that means nothing but has a rich meaning tucked behind it. This will play into our last two points. But why not go literal? Literal has the baggage of established meanings and all the baggage of consumers’ prior experiences. Create a word that means nothing and you have the freedom to create the meaning.
3. A Story – A good name should have a story behind it. Stories are the cultures truest currency. We buy and sell to tell stories, either about who we are, who we wish we were or where we’ve come from. I wear Fossil because I want accessories that are nice without being pretentious. A chose brown leather over black because I don’t want to be that polished. Choose a name that allows you to share your brand’s story and also invite others to discover it.
4. Discovery – The newest generations of consumers don’t want to be told what something is, they want to own the brand in a way they can brag about it; either illustrating their hipness, their shrewdness or their logic. When a brand name is too literal, there can be no discovery. Even a “real” name like Fossil allows me to insert my own meaning as I discover what the brand means to me. And that last preposition is the most important of all: to me. After all, all the research doesn’t matter when a brand goes live… it’s then the consumer’s decision to either embrace, believe, or reject the brand. I had a poetry professor that always said that “if you right a poem about rabbits but everyone thinks it’s about elephants, you wrote a poem about elephants.”

The final point is that there are three classes of brand names:

1. Commodity Names – This class consists of names that contain the product or throw some patriotic reference in the name like “Aquafina.”
2. Differentiated Names – This class would be along the lines of “Coca-Cola.”
3. Preference Names – Finally, a preferential name would sound like “Red Bull.”

Of course, preference is easily pushed by million dollar budgets, but it doesn’t have to be. Red Bull was broken with two-minute episodes on the street.

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