Anatomy of a good name.

So what makes a good name anyway? We think a good name is:

Available:

You can come up with the most catchy name ever, but if you can’t use it because it belongs to someone else, it is useless.

Appropriate:

Does the name make sense to your audience? Will your sales guys snicker or cringe whenthey use the name with clients?

Accessible:

Is the name easy to pronounce, read, and spell? Will it pop up when someone types it into a search engine? Will it be confused with another offering in your product line?

An advocate for brand position: 

We feel a name should allude to the offering’s position in the market. For example, if you want to position the product as the most reliable product on the market, don’t give it a flimsy sounding name.

Our road map to name generation.

Pennebaker has a tried and true process for coming up with successful names. We start by digging into your company and market landscape. We want to know the ins and outs of your offering, the names that competitors use and what they say about their wares. Most importantly, we’ll want to look at the market from the perspective of your very best target customers. What are they looking for, and what drives their urgency?

All this information goes into a creative brief summarizing what we want to incorporate and accomplish. At this point, we are all literally on the same page.

Tweak, tweak, tweak.

Some people believe that names come to them in a dream, but we have a more businesslike approach.

Internally, we generate a whole bunch of names that would be appropriate, and a bunch that aren’t so appropriate (don’t even ask). Once we’ve narrowed down this list, we present you with Round 1 of name options, and collect your feedback.

Next we take that feedback and run it past our creative teams, come up with more names and massage some of the names you liked but didn’t love. Then it’s time for Round 2 presentation and feedback. We’ll do a Round 3 if necessary, but most of the time there is some buy-in by the second round. We have a short list of name candidates.

It’s at this point that we vet each name with a Google search and weed out the obvious conflicts. The next step will be for your legal department or our independent attorney to do a more robust trademark search to secure the name.

Executive presentations: Making the case to the C-suite.

Some of our clients like assistance in introducing the name to their executive team. We can help by preparing a presentation that explains the logic and evolution of the chosen name. Or, if you need a bit more support to convince the management team, one of our senior consultants can present the recommendation for you. No worries: we’ve been down the Name Game path many times before.