Naming Process Filters – Evocative Names
One of the keys to successful company and product naming is understanding exactly how your audience will interact with a new name. Creating a filter that evaluates names in the same way that your target market will is essential to both creating the best name possible and to getting that name approved and implemented by your company. Since an evocative name is one of the toughest to develop and obtain buy-in for, we've detailed one of the necessary filters here.
The biggest challenge that evocative names face in surviving a naming exercise is the fact that they portray the positioning of a company or product rather than the goods and services or the experience of those goods and services. Unless everyone understands the positioning and the correlation between it and an evocative name, this is the type of feedback that evocative names will generate:
Virgin Airlines
- Says "we're new at this"
- Public wants airlines to be experienced, safe and professional
- Investors won’t take us seriously
- Religious people will be offended
Caterpillar
- Tiny, creepy-crawly bug
- Not macho enough – easy to squash
- Why not "bull" or "workhorse"?
- Destroys trees, crops, responsible for famine
Banana Republic
- Derogatory cultural slur
- You'll be picketed by people from small, hot countries
Yahoo!
- Yahoo!! It's Mountain Dew!
- Yoohoo! It’s a chocolate drink in a can!
- Nobody will take stock quotes and world news seriously from a bunch of "Yahoos"
Oracle
- Unscientific
- Unreliable
- Only foretold death and destruction
- Only fools put their faith in an Oracle
- Sounds like "orifice" – people will make fun of us
The Gap
- Means something is missing
- The Generation Gap is a bad thing – we want to sell clothes to all generations
- In need of repair
- Incomplete
- Negative
Stingray
- A slow, ugly, and dangerous fish – slow, ugly and dangerous are the last qualities we want to associate with our fast, powerful, sexy sports car
- The "bottom feeding fish" part isn't helping either
Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac
- I don't want hillbilly residents of Dogpatch handling my finances.
- They don't sound serious, and this is about a very serious matter.
Clearly, the public doesn't think about names in this fashion, but internal naming committees almost always do. Getting a committee to acknowledge this difference and to interact as the public does is step one. [See Theory of Negativity for more about this.]
Having the naming committee evaluate evocative names based on their positioning is the next step:
Virgin
- Positioning: different, confident, exciting, alive, human, provocative, fun. The innovative name forces people to create a separate box in their head to put it in.
- Qualities: Self-propelling, Connects Emotionally, Personality, Deep Well.
Oracle
- Positioning: different, confident, superhuman, evocative, powerful, forward thinking.
- Qualities: Self-propelling, Connects Emotionally, Personality, Deep Well.
Further reading:
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Name Evaluation |  |