Review
Naming is a task that arrives without warning, gets decided in a meeting by whoever is loudest, and then sticks for a decade. This is a short, funny book about doing it less badly.
Watkins gives a set of criteria a name should meet and, more usefully, a list of failure modes she has clearly watched happen many times. The one that changed how I think is the test of whether a name can be spoken over the phone and spelled correctly without help. An enormous number of startup names fail that instantly, including several I had thought were fine.
She's scathing about the vowel-dropping, misspelled, made-up-word naming convention, and she's right, though the book was written near the peak of it so a lot of its targets have already disappeared.
The limitation is that it's really about consumer brand names. If you're naming an internal service or a feature inside a product, most of the trademark and domain advice doesn't apply, and the criteria still translate. It's an hour well spent before a naming conversation, and it will save you from at least one bad decision.
Key Takeaways
The parts worth keeping:
What a good name has to do
- Suggest something about the product or the feeling it creates, rather than being an empty container you then have to fill with expensive advertising.
- Be easy to say, spell and remember after hearing it once. The phone test is brutal and fast: say it aloud and see whether the other person can write it down.
- Look good written down and survive being said in a noisy room.
Common ways names fail
| Failure | Why it costs you |
|---|---|
| Invented word with no associations | You pay to teach the world what it means |
| Deliberate misspelling | Every mention needs a spelling correction |
| Founder surnames | Says nothing, and ages awkwardly if they leave |
| Generic descriptive phrase | Impossible to protect and impossible to remember |
| Initials | Meaningless until you are already famous |
How to run the process
- Generate far more candidates than feels sensible, then cut. Naming fails when a shortlist of three appears in the first meeting.
- Decide the criteria before you see the options, or the discussion becomes personal taste with criteria invented to justify it.
- Check availability early. Falling in love with a name that is unusable wastes weeks.
Do not design by committee
- Group voting reliably selects the least objectionable option, which is not the same as the best one and is usually the most forgettable.
- Someone has to decide. Consensus naming produces names nobody hates and nobody remembers.