Magical Business Documents

Name of the product is a key aspect of the brand. The name that will be reflected in the final analysis, choose who you are, your company’s personality and vision. But more importantly, it must unforgettably embody the promise of its main product benefit to your potential customers. It may generally coincide with the competition, but ideally should be distinguished from the crowd. Where to start? Here are some basic guidelines.

If the field is too crowded, be unique
MSN Search, Netscape Search, AOL Search, all remained in the same category, so you can play it safe and go with the amazing Super Duper Search or Find. This works for some time, but once the field becomes too crowded, you’ll be lost in the mush of sameness with ever diminishing name recognition. If you’re in it for the long haul, best to leave the crowd with a name like Google, Yahoo, or even Dogpile (but I’m not a fan going in category scat only to be unique). Even the founder of Kinkos-nickname (nasty, who had red hair at school)-is quite different from memorable.

Do tongue twisters
There is a small part in everyone that hates to be embarrassed. When we ask for a product or talk with friends, we want to sound literate and not fumble over pronunciations. So is your kind of potential customers and to avoid tongue twisters, or any other name is unusually long or sound foreign. If you can not find a single word name, no more than two or three syllables.

Alliteration can help with more names
Okay, the company president, as all the more names on the list. ? can be made more memorable and / or easier to pronounce with alliteration. Consider Circuit City (initially, the incredibly bland, monosyllabic, Wards). Or Downtown Disney, or the world famous brand, Coca-Cola. All four syllables, still roll off the tongue with surprising ease.

Avoid abbreviations
Abbreviations lack of personality and communicate very little in terms of performance or brand character. Sure, IBM, MCI and ABC have great recognition and identity, but also for years and millions in almost all media to promote their image using images of people and situations that were warm and fuzzy. Even Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has chosen by MS (which has some undesirable connotations).

Convey an implicit advantage
If you do not have a lot of media dollars to spend on name recognition, to search for a name that expresses an advantage or describes the content. Snapple started with a name that combined two of his original flavors: Spice N Apple. Silk soy milk brand, combines soy and milk. Benefit-oriented names include EasyOff oven cleaner, Miracle-growth of food plants, and Hearthwarmer (add a fireplace).

Lost in Translation … or worse!
Most of us have heard the story of their introduction of Chevrolet ‘Nova’ in Spanish speaking countries. The car tanked because ‘new’ means ‘wrong’. Fiat had found them to rename the ‘one’ in Finland, as ‘One’ in Finnish means rubbish. Canadian products require labeling in French and English, which is why some boxes of cookies, the English phrase ‘preservative free’ was inadvertently published in French ‘preservative free’, meaning ‘bareback’. ‘Nuff Said.

Shun mode
The duration of a bizarre name is short and sweet. It rises into the stratosphere of recognition then beaten obscurity faster than you can say, ‘radical’, ‘tube’ or ‘outta sight.’ Another problem is with the fashions are often limited to one demographic or clique. In a market as large and diverse as the United States, it is better to be safe than sorry.

Protect your image
If you’re like most companies, you worked hard and spent some real money and create the image of your company. So it only makes sense to protect your investment with the product name that is consistent with its existing brands and image. Rolls Royce has had to pull the name of its newest addition to the line Silver Cloud, which provisionally named ‘Silver Mist’, as in German, ‘fog’ means manure. Then build on what you have. A good example: the entry into online shopping with Froogle Google. Moreover, if you’re wondering if ‘Google’ came from, is a variation on the word ‘googol math, a huge number, with infinite zeros.

Do not forget legal
After fixing in some ideal future names, hire a good lawyer to make sure they are not already in use and not like someone else in his field.

Hopefully this brief overview will guide you through the subtleties of product naming. Remember, try to be unique and benefit oriented without confusion or offensive. Avoid fads, abbreviations and language twisters. And, by all means, protect your image.