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Naming can be a difficult and thankless marketing undertaking. Anyone who has had to name a product or service can attest to how challenging it can be. Dealing with subjective opinions, tight timelines, managing approvals, trademarking, finding something original, that’s on brand, on strategy that will work in English and French…the list goes on. Here are some tips on how to manage and simplify an often-arduous process:
- Start with the brief: Develop a naming brief as your guiding source of truth for the project. Collaborate and socialize with with your key stakeholders. Include value proposition and product positioning, past research, competitive analysis, pricing and strategic work. This will all provide creative fodder and context for the agency.
- Establish guiding principles: To help govern the name development process, before you begin clearly identify who needs to provide input and who has final sign-off and at what key stages they should be engaged for review.
- Future proof your name: Determine where the product or service fits within your brand architecture. Will this be a stand-alone name or will it need to fit within an existing taxonomy. Do you need to plan for future product launches or expansion into new product categories/lines of business or are you renaming an existing product.
- Workshop it: Get all key stakeholders (agency, marketing, sales, product, pricing, insights, legal) into a room to collaborate on possible territories for exploration, work through the naming classifications. Do you want an experiential name, functional name, should it be abstract or image based? Including these teams early and throughout the process will help approvals go much more smoothly.
- Research:…
