A better way to name new products

Your team has built the perfect product that you believe solves a critical need. You’re excited, and can’t wait to take it to market. The only thing in between the product and the market is one small thing — the name.

The product name is the first step towards a cohesive branding strategy that allows your audience to emotionally latch onto. It’s hard to define your service in a single line, let alone a single word. How do some product names just sound right? How can you define a name that really captures your product’s WOW?

I’ve had to ask myself this question a couple of times during my professional journey, and after some trial and error coupled with a lot of research, there can be a science to it.

What does your product or service do? What outcome does it improve on? And how would you write this in one sentence?

Once you put this in writing, it gives you a reference point to start ideating. It may even be better to start with the positioning statement and work your way to the name from there.

For example, I once built an AR scanning app as a hobby project with a few buddies that scans physical music merchandise to unlock personalized messages. I took a crack at describing this in a sentence, coming up with the following -

A mobile app platform for artists to create immersive digital experiences that fans can engage with, and share across different social platforms so they can effectively promote new releases, merchandise or their brand in general, using a medium that blurs the lines between physical and digital realms at low costs.

Now comes the fun part. Start writing down anything that comes to your mind as a name when reading about what your product does. Ask your core team to do the same. You can do a little bit of research to see how some of the other players in the market name their products.

A good idea would also be to crowdsource this — get name ideas from coworkers and close friends. Share your product’s positioning, and write down any ideas they can offer, which may give you a perspective from a group of people who aren’t at attached or involved with your idea.

By the end of this exercise, you should have put together a good list of name ideas to start tinkering with.

This is essentially a set of criteria your team believes the perfect name should satisfy. This is a mix of subjective as well as factual criteria.

The subjective criteria are typically the emotional elements you want your name to be associated with. Some of these include -

The factual criteria are typically -

From here, associate weightage and the scoring range to your criteria. This is to identify what you and your team believe holds more importance than others when it comes to the identity of your product.

Here’s an example of some of the weightage and ranges we’ve used in the past when naming products.

Create a simple spreadsheet with the list of names in one column, and all the selected criteria as subsequent columns. Then with the help of your time, start assigning relative scores based on the range defined in the previous steps.

Then multiply the score assigned to different criteria with the weightage defined, and add them all up for each name to give its final score.

For example, here’s the final scores for 10 names based on how they scored against the individual criterion.

By doing the above exercise, you can identify the top five, 10 or 15 names that best match up to your business expectations. A good name typically rallies you entire team to work towards the mission of your product, as well as emotionally resonates with your end users and subconsciously motivates them try and buy your offering.

So call for a vote from both your internal stakeholders as well as some of your trusted early customers to see what best resonates with them.

From here, you should have a good indication of what the product’s name should be. While this is a data-driven approach to identifying a great name, never forget the importance of your gut. So if the top name that comes up following the above steps doesn’t feel “right”, then you can always go back to the drawing board and start over.

My hope is by being this thoughtful, the process of identifying great names for all the new products and services you will build in your professional lifetime will become more and more natural. Give naming your products the time and effort it deserves, and you may be one step closer to business success.

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