“What Makes A Good Name?”

A “professional namer” for a branding agency, who was on the teams that came up with Bing and Cingular, among other corporate names, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Care to name my johnson?

Answer:

Tiny.

Question:

Well, this backfired.

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Question:

What makes a name a good name?

Answer:

A good name should either say what the thing is (or what benefits it offers) or it should at least be memorable somehow–it be easy to say and talk about. There’s a lot more than that, but that’s a big one (and even that one has some exceptions…Haagen Dazs anyone?)

Names tend to change from horrible to awesome based just on people’s perspectives of the brand though. Imagine you were on the board at what is now Google, and one of the board members says, “OK, we’ve narrowed it down to 2 potential names for our company: WebSearcher or Google.” I’d say at least 9 out of 10 people would’ve gone with “WebSearcher” and said “what a ridiculously stupid name!” about Google. Admittedly though, we have heard some names that just leave us speechless…usually those are names that people have come up with themselves for their own business/product.

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Question:

So how do you come up with new names?

Answer:

Lots of things: brainstorming sessions, interviews, focus groups, thesaurus-mining, Excel tables, magazines, scrabble–you name it. Every once in a while though, the perfect answer really does appear to you out of nowhere, which can be very nice.

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Question:

How much does a job like this pay?

Answer:

Starting pay at most agencies is around 30-35K. If you’re the CEO at a big agency, you could be making 8-10 million a year–everyone else is somewhere in between.

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Question:

What would you name a man with no arms and no legs floating in the ocean? 

Answer:

I’d call him f**ked, but that’s my non-professional opinion.•