A short recipe for naming

Naming can be hard. Excrutiating. Or a no-brainer.

Here is a simple method that I follow to cook up some great names for new products and businesses.

Use physical or virtual pen and paper and ideally a bunch of people who have an understanding of your customers, who you are as a business are (i.e. your values, purpose, people) and a mix of perspectives. Then ask the following three questions to spark a basket-load of ideas:

1. What names would clearly tell people what benefit there is to them of using this product, or simply, what it does. Let's use a desktop cloud computing company as an example.

• What it does for people: freedom, functionality everywhere, always-on, device freedom, easy desktops, forget about it. i.e. Get started (note - web design)
• What it is: a no PC PC, a computer without the box, a PC in your pocket, a vitual PC, tech-agnostic, flexible personal computing. I.e. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

2. Who are we? And why are we special?

• Exceptional architects, experience management, Ex consultants, Dynamic consultants, Old fixers, Men with spanners, formidable, Bob's PCs, business technologists, deep computing thinkers.

3. What is a name that is completely unrelated to the product or service, but has the potential to have meaning loaded within it (i.e. become a real brand). It is different enough in the industry to have cut-through and strong enough to create visual cues.

• For example, Yellow, Orange, , alice euphemia, Zara, Lululemon

Method:

Brainstorm.

Check in with customers.

Decide.

Go.

You? What do you think of this method? What names do you love and why?

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