Product naming is harder than it’s ever been. If you’ve struggled with developing a brand name you can trademark, register as a .com and grow into new markets, you’ll love this episode.
Naming a product is more complicated than naming a baby. There’s more family involvement, and uniqueness is essential. Is the product for men, women, seniors; is it for a particular activity or sport that has its own jargon and vocabulary? What country is the product going to be sold in—now and down the road? What are the social mores of that market, and what cultural taboos do we need to avoid; which buttons are we able to push without offending? It’s like learning a new language. At Graphos Product we do it all the time, and everyone in marketing has said, “Someone needs to write a book about this.”
Jeremy Miller, the author of “Sticky Branding” has written a brand new book called “Brand New Name: A Proven Step-by-Step Process to Create an Unforgettable Brand Name”.
The book codifies the brand naming process and guides you on ways to think about a name. There are abstract names, concrete names, acronyms, and more. Jeremy Miller’s approach to naming a brand has a lot in common with how we think about it and develop and execute product naming strategy for our own clients, so it was a pleasure to just drop the list of questions and talk shop about this really critical first step for a new product.
