5 rules to follow to choose the name of a product

Choosing the name of a product is not a simple task. When choosing a name, you must keep in mind that that name will stay in the minds of the audience. The name and the product will be permanently associated. This is what creates brand recognition.

This is the reason why it is so difficult for companies to rename their brand or their products. For this reason, the actors keep their stage name even if their “real” name changes following a wedding, for example.

Names and words do not exist in a vacuum. They have a place in the history or the unconscious of individuals, and these elements must be taken into account. My parents wanted to call me Max. They changed their minds because they thought “Max White” sounded too much like a brand of laundry. Names are important.

A lot of my time at Brandwatch is spent naming new things: new features, new products, new services.

Traditionally, our choices have been rather descriptive and down to earth: dashboards, components, filter. But lately, we’ve been trying to come up with more interesting names that evoke something else.

When I choose the name of a product, I follow 5 rules that I share with you in this article.

5 rules to follow in choosing the name of a product

1. Choose a name that is easy to read and write
If the name of a product is difficult to pronounce, consumers will not talk about it. If it’s hard to write (or spell), it will be harder for consumers to google it when they hear about it.

Keep it simple, and don’t choose a wacky spelling just to stand out.

2. Choose a unique name
It has become very difficult to be completely unique, so you can give yourself a little leeway, but the name of a product has to be unique, at least in your industry.

This will make it easier to acquire the domain, help you rank well in search results, and, when someone mentions your name, you (and the public) will have no doubts that it is your product. you can also name a generator like dragonborn name generator which can generate dragon names similar product name generator can generate product names to choose your product name.

3. Choose a name that is short, punchy, and memorable.
The longer a name, the harder it is to remember.

Likewise, people tend to use abbreviations for longer names, and very often, you won’t have the ability to choose or control them.

4. Choose a name that sounds and spells well
The name of a product must stand out from other words written on the same page. It must be obvious to readers.

When someone says the name of your product in a sentence, they should grab the attention.

5. Choose a name referring to an emotion, a feeling or an idea
The name of a product should relate to your product’s nature, the feeling you want its use to inspire, and/or the idea you want people to have of it.

The name should be a source of emotion and inspiration.

Our own difficulties in naming products
Take the example of Brandwatch Vizia.

Vizia is our data visualization product; it can be described as a social media command center. It is the product at the heart of social rooms (also called war rooms) of large companies.

We had a hard time coming up with a name for Vizia. We spent hours brainstorming, going through many names, searching the dictionary, making word combinations, creating acronyms, etc., before making our final decision.

Ironically, Vizia was actually one of the first names we thought of, and that’s the one we ended up choosing.

Here’s how we made this choice:

I had already found the name for part of the product: Scenes. These are graphical representations of data specific to Vizia.

Scenes is a great name for data visualization; it evokes a history, beautiful landscapes, an interesting situation, which fits very well with my belief (and the goal we had for Vizia) that a visualization tool should tell the story of your data in a stylish way.

But what name were we going to give to the whole product?

Creating a unique name for a function is not as important, since it is only one component of a whole. But for the name of the product itself, being unique is important.

Our starting point was Vizia, a suggestion stemming from this idea of ​​beautiful landscapes that you want to admire for hours.

But the name vizia gave us a problem. We all remember the success of the last product called vizia.

Someone then suggested changing the name to “vizia”, to overcome the unfortunate reference and to introduce a pun with “visual”.

However, several other companies already use the term “Vista “. We were starting to lose hope. That’s when our design team made another suggestion:

Vizi.

The great thing about this simple change was that it met the five golden rules.
Using the Z increases the visual impact of the word, with all of its straight lines.He also makes it an ambigram, a word that keeps the same appearance when flipped (if we remove the Q bar), which inspired us for the logos and design of the features.Our choice was made. We now had a name that was easy to pronounce when reading it, and easy to spell when heard.

It is also unique, short, visually appealing, and most importantly, it evokes a feeling, emotion, and the idea of ​​images.

Vizia was launched, and it’s now a name our team, and many of our customers say, read, and write every day.

More recently, I had the (difficult) task of naming a new product that was announced on July 26: Audiences. I hope I have won the bet of choosing a name that is as interesting as the product itself.