I often tell people that product naming is the most difficult and thankless job that product marketers do. Everyone has an opinion, it's subjective by nature, and often, the CEO ends up making the final call anyway.
But if you're a PMM, it's something ya gotta do, and I'm going to share the approach I use. There are 8 steps I follow:
- Set decision rights
- Establish guiding principles
- Determine naming strategy
- Perform competitive analysis
- Brainstorm naming options
- Run customer interviews (or focus groups if you work at a big company)
- Document strengths and weaknesses for each option
- Justify your recommendation
Set Decision Rights
First, it's super important to establish clear decision rights (via a DACI framework) to avoid the gridlock that can result from trying to build consensus. You want to identify clear roles for stakeholders in the process:
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Driver: The person responsible for doing the analysis, leading brainstorms, making the recommendation, and getting a decision made
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Approver: The person responsible for making the final decision
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Contributor: The people whose opinions are consulted and who contribute to the recommendation
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Informed: The people who are informed of the final decision
As a product marketer, you're typically the driver. I've rarely run a naming process for a major product line where the ultimate approver wasn't the CEO, but sometimes it's the CMO or the Chief Product Officer. I like to recruit product managers, brand marketers, UX designers, and representatives from the field (like sales engineers) as contributors.
Establish Guiding Principles
Next, it helps drive alignment among stakeholders if you establish some guiding principles up front. Write them down in a bulleted list and make it the first slide of your product naming analysis and proposal deck. Here are some guiding principles I try to follow when approaching product naming. Product names should:
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Clearly convey value
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Describe or evoke what a customer gets
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Be easy to say and to spell
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[In the case of a portfolio company] Work well together with other product names to bring the company narrative to life
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Stand the test of time – be sustainable as your company and market evolve
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Be straightforward for GTM teams to market and sell
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Be ownable and translate in all geographic regions
Determine Naming Conventions
The next, and most important, part of the process is to determine your desired naming conventions. This will provide appropriate guardrails for your brainstorm and help you zero in on the type of name to pursue. Naming conventions fall along a spectrum, as you can see below (with examples both from the B2C and B2B worlds):
Origin
These are typically named after founders or creators – Ford being the most obvious company example (after Henry Ford). But even in the B2B space, there are companies like HashiCorp (named after founder Mitchell Hashimoto) that follow this naming convention. I don't have a strong opinion either way about origin names – I don't think products win because of them, nor do they lose as a result of them. The one concrete advantage of an origin name is uniqueness.
Descriptive
Also referred to as functional names, these tend to work well for B2B product names because they most clearly describe what a customer gets, are simple, and require the least amount of cognitive load for customers to decipher and categorize.
But when used as a company name, they can box you in and make it hard to change people's perception as you innovate and expand your product portfolio. Survey Monkey is a case in point – the company rebranded itself to Momentive as it expanded its portfolio (before ultimately changing back). VMware will forever be associated with virtual machines. If Kentucky Fried Chicken suddenly decided to sell burritos, I would be skeptical.
That said, In my career as a B2B product marketer, I've most often biased toward descriptive naming conventions for products, because it is the shortest path to creating clarity in the minds of buyers.
Evocative
When done well, an evocative (or fanciful) name can make your product stand out from the pack. One of the risks with descriptive product names is that they fall flat and fail to inspire. Evocative names, on the other hand, tend to be aspirational or playful, and can convey value or spark curiosity by connoting what a customer will be able to achieve with the help of your product.
In the B2C space, Tropicana is one of my favorite examples – it evokes the tropics, summer, sunshine, and everything else that makes you want a cold glass of OJ. In the B2B space, Confluence (by Atlassian) is a great name for corporate intranet software – it evokes collaboration and bringing people together. Zoom (the video conferencing tool) is another – in a world of clunky, laggy and hard to use video conferencing tools, Zoom promised a better way, and its name evokes the speed and ease of use for which the company is now known.
Coined
Coined names are hard to pull off. When you get it right (as Google did), it's gold. Häagen-Dazs, with its fancy, Danish-sounding name, is masterful at creating the perception of elegance for a super premium ice cream brand. But it's actually a made up term, carefully constructed to sound luxurious and European. But for every Google and Häagen-Dazs, I'm sure there are many companies and products I've never heard of that bombed, in part, because they made up a name that didn't catch on.
One other piece of advice – descriptive product names tend to pair well with companies that have coined names. Google knows this and has consistently used descriptive naming conventions for many of its consumer products, like Maps, Mail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Search, etc.
Perform Competitive Analysis
Next, I like to dig into the competitive landscape, and see how competitors in my category position themselves and the naming conventions they follow. If I'm working on new-to-the-world technology with no direct competitors, I look at alternatives and substitutes in adjacent markets.
I look at how well the competitor's name connects to their value props. I look at whether there is a correlation between market share and the use of a particular type of naming convention in my category, as a proxy for consumer attitudes.
Brainstorm Candidates
This is where the creativity happens. I like to come up with a few options first to kickstart the creative process, then schedule a group brainstorm with key stakeholders, where we use a white board (or a Jamboard or shared doc in remote work environments) to generate ideas and short-list favorites.
Run Customer Interviews
Now it's time to get outside the building and talk to real customers (and even better, prospective customers).
Describe the product your team is building: why you're building it, the problems it solves and the value it provides. Ask customers what type of name would appeal to them for a product in this category, and if there are any names that immediately come to mind. Share your short-list of names and ask for feedback. How do you feel when you hear this name? Do any of these resonate? Why?
Document Strengths and Weaknesses For Each Option
Next, I create a slide for each of the short-listed favorites, with two columns. In the first column, the contributors and I document the strengths of the name, based on how well it meets the criteria set in our guiding principles. In the second column, we document the weaknesses of the candidate.
This exercise forces you to think critically and assess each option more objectively, vs. relying on gut feel or personal preference. Though, don't discount your instincts!
Justify Your Recommendation
Lastly, I summarize my recommendation and rationale on the final slide. I share the entire product naming analysis and proposal deck with key stakeholders (including the Approver) as a pre-read, and schedule a meeting to review the research, justify the recommendation, incorporate Approver feedback, and ultimately drive the decision.
