Things not to do when you’re naming your new product
Elicit input from all stakeholders. Don’t tell them what you’re going to do with it. Ignore it.
Elicit input from all stakeholders. Let them think that you have a process for deciding the name. Don’t let on that there is no process.
Elicit input from all stakeholders. Pretend you’re going to take it seriously. Go ahead and name the product whatever you were going to name it.
Hire an outside party to help you name the product. Ask them to help you create a process. Ignore the process.
Hire an outside party to help you name the product. Let them elicit input from all stakeholders. See above “elicit input from all stakeholders” points.
Hire an outside party to help you name the product. Forget to tell them there are rules (e.g., ‘product names cannot begin with a vowel’). Reveal rules only after names have been presented.
Hire an outside party to help you name the product. Work with outside party to identify key attributes you’d like reflected in product name (e.g., ‘our product is all things to all people’.) Reject names based on key attributes because you don’t want to be seen as exaggerating those attributes. (e.g., ‘if we call the product “AllThingsToAllPeople” someone might interpret this as meaning that our product is all things to all people.’).
Hire an outside party to help you name the product. Neglect to tell them who has final say on the product name. On day of final presentation, introduce outside party to the president, who informs you that he likes the name Tiffany. In fact, he likes the name Tiffany so much that he wants to name the product Tiffany. In fact, he likes the name Tiffany so much that he asks outside party’s sponsor why they spent good budget money on an outside party that was too stupid to recognize that the product’s name must be Tiffany.
Ignore the first rule of B2B technology product naming: THE NAME REALLY DOESN’T MATTER. In 99.99% of all cases, your customers will refer to your product by the name of your company.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.
Yes - and then if you survive this - there’s the “Pantone color” discussion. Hire someone to do logos, obsess on colors and variations of those colors (#6600 versus #6601). CEO then says “But I like green; it should be green.”
Ugh - been there. Done that. Really ugly T-shirt and felt a little bit dirty afterward because regardless of the outcome someone has to sell a little bit of their soul.
Do you guys have twitter accounts? KS
Great post.
Product naming, logos and colours is just so tough; the CEO doesn’t have an opinion until the end of the process when he comes in on a Monday morning and says “my wife doesn’t like it”. To which we’d all like to answer “and your wife represents how much of our market?”.
I put a few fun examples in this post: