How to create names using the world's most powerful naming tool

 
Words inspire me.

The more words I see, the more inspired I become. So when I create brand names, I want to be overwhelmed by endless lists of words.

Publications and dictionaries offer words in abundance, but they don't offer an easy way of discovering masses of words relevant to specific ideas or attributes, such as those found in a naming brief.

In my experience, a corpus – a large sample of words in context – is the most useful and comprehensive stockpile of words, especially when searchable in a database.

I have several go-to corpus resources, but one favorite: Sketch Engine.

Sketch Engine: The Most Powerful Naming Tool I've Ever Used
Published by Lexical Computing, Sketch Engine has over 60 corpora to choose from. There are seven English corpora, each comprising millions of words from spoken and written sources. The other 50+ corpora are non-English, spanning the familiar to the exotic. If you are looking for a corpus of German, the Polish Bible or Igbo, you're in luck.

Some of the corpora you'll find on Sketch Engine

How to Create Names with Sketch Engine
My starting point for creating names is a review of the name objectives I've developed, particularly the brand's key attributes. To show what Sketch Engine can do, let's pretend we're naming a new brand that should be perceived as strong.

Sketch Engine will provide a deep exploration of the word strong, and inspire names that are differentiated yet relevant.

After logging-in to Sketch Engine – which requires a well-worth-it paid subscription – I click on a specific corpus link to load it. I choose UKWaC, comprised of a mind-boggling 1.3 billion words culled from UK web sites.

Having loaded the corpus, the option to make a concordance is presented by default. Concordances are a great tool for creating natural-sounding compound names because they show how two words have appeared together in a real-world written or spoken context. For example, a concordance of the word "sun" would include beam, burn, flower and moon -- words that commonly appear next to or near the word "sun".

But we're not going to do a simple concordance because another, more powerful tool is available: Word Sketch. A Word Sketch is a like a concordance on steroids. It shows you every word that has appeared next to your query word, organized by part of speech.

Click Word Sketch on the left to get started

Let's make a Word Sketch of the word "strong". Click Word Sketch in the blue box on the left, and you're asked to enter a "lemma". A lemma is the most basic form of a word, as you'd find in the headwords of a dictionary. Enter "strong" in the lemma field and choose "adjective" from the pop-up menu.

After clicking the "Show Word Sketch" button, we're presented with listing tables of the specific words that have appeared near or next to "strong" in the texts of the corpus. Tables are organized by grammatical context and include frequency information about each collocation.

Before studying our Word Sketch of "strong", click "More data" in the blue box on the left to fetch more results. Click it a few more times after the data loads to get even more results. And you do want more results, right?

Part of the Word Sketch of "strong"

Our Word Sketch of "strong" can be used in different ways to create new brand names.

How to Create Compound Names with Word Sketch
To create compound names that include "strong", navigate to the "adj_subject" and "modifies" columns. These words have been modified by the adjective "strong". Combine "strong" with them and you'll have a nice list of natural-sounding compound names:

Strong Tide
Strong Bond
Strong Wind
Strong Link
Strong Force
Strong Lead

You can also consider these words without "strong" as stand-alone names or combine them with other words.

Scroll through the Word Sketch to explore further

The columns "adj_comp_of" and "np_comp_of" include words that naturally precede "strong", giving us potential names – or slogans – like:

Feel Strong
Grow Strong
Stand Strong
Think Strong

How to Develop Symbolic Names with Word Sketch
Our Word Sketch also tells us what symbolizes strong. To see what's "stronger than ___" or "as strong as __", navigate to the columns "pp_than_i" and "pp_as_i":

Steel
Desire
Bond
Fear
Love
Force
Ox
Alloy
Rope
Lust
Glue
Armor

Can your dictionary do that?

Some of these words will combine well with words from other columns, giving us interesting ideas like:

Steel Bond
Tide Force
Alloy Strength
Oxwood 

Discover New Creative Directions with Word Sketch
The column "and/or" tells us what words combine with "strong" in an and/or phrase. This is helpful for finding words that pair with "strong":

Healthy
Durable
Fit
Vibrant
Stable
Tall
Brave
Independent
Thick
Bold

You can use these words as springboards for new creative directions that indirectly reflect "strong". For example, "tall" and "healthy" could be separately explored for synonyms, associations and metaphors that lead to new, relevant names.

A Totally New Thesaurus 
Sketch Engine also features an interesting thesaurus that gives you options Roget never thought of. The results from this thesaurus are generated automatically, so they include words that aren't synonymous yet are related.

No ordinary thesaurus

Click the "Thesaurus" link in the blue box, enter your lemma and choose the part of speech. The results of "strong" offer these interesting ideas:

Real
Clear
Big
Positive
Original

You might find viable names in this thesaurus or springboards for new directions.

Compare Two Concepts Using Word Sketch
Sketch Engine also has a word comparison tool called Sketch-Diff which reveals the intersection of two words. Let's imagine that we're naming a technology brand that should be perceived as strong and fast.

What qualities do strong and fast have in common?

Click "Sketch-Diff" on the left and enter "strong" for the first lemma and "fast" for the second. Then click "Show Diff".

Learn what two words have in common

The result is a an integrated Word Sketch, color coded by the degree to which words collocate with one word or both. Words in red or green collocate with one word, and words in white are common to both.

A Sketch-Diff comparing "strong" and "fast"

Here's a sample of what strong and fast have in common:

secure
loud
fit
flexible
light
tall
connection
growth
response
action
car
flight
flow
time

To create names that reflect both strong and fast, use words from this list as springboards. Digging into the concepts of connection, travel (car and flight), flow, and growth will lead to new names that support or connote multiple aspects of the brand.

In the 20 years I've been creating brand names, I've used a lot of naming tools, but no one resource has been as useful as Word Sketch. Learn how to harness its power and you'll always be inspired.

Red Flags and Red Herrings: How to check brand names in foreign languages

Nova does not mean "it doesn't go".

The marketing myth persists that the Chevy Nova did not sell well in Latin America because "no va" means "doesn't go" en Español.

But the Nova legend is a lie -- a tenacious one at that. In fact, the car sold quite well in Latin America where Spanish-speaking consumers did not make the connection between Nova and "no va". Snopes documents the proof and Mark Liberman of Language Log refutes "false factoids" such as the alleged failures of the Chevy Nova and other brand names.

Although the story is fiction, it's irrefutable fact that Nova and "no va" are strikingly close.

But close is no cigar.

Apparently, even minor differences in spelling, sound or stress will distinguish two nearly-identical words. In this case, Spanish "no va" is two words and is accented on the second syllable. Just one space and a different pronunciation insulate Nova from "no va", as the word "legend" does not make people think of  "leg" and "end". 

It's now known that GM was aware in advance about Nova's  "doesn't go" issue, yet decided to go with it anyway.

If you were in GM marketing and learned before launch that Nova sounds like "no va", would you reject it?

It'd be hard not to. Fer chrissakes, they're nearly identical!

The whole point of a native speaker check (sometimes called a "cultural-linguistic check") is ostensibly to root out names with inappropriate foreign language associations, so how could a whopper like Nova/"no va" slide? 

Yet slide it did.

And in the end, Nova did just fine in Latin America.

Stranger than the fiction of a GM flub, is the truth that a brand name and its near-homonym remain distinct in the mind.

This phenomenon presents us with a native speaker check conundrum: 

How can red flags and red herrings be distinguished?

Which inappropriate foreign associations represent true problems and which are false alarms -- all bark and no bite?

I've compiled here principles and practices to make sense of native speaker checks and their nuances.   


A native speaker check should be separate from other name validation research.

An accurate observation of potential foreign language issues should be the singular objective of a native speaker check. This limits confounding variables. 

Ask a sufficient number of native speakers.

Several respondents helps distinguish idiosyncratic associations from those widely shared. I've found that the three, independent respondents are sufficient. 

Determine the right languages.

These are the usual suspects for most "global" naming projects:

French (Europe and Canada)
Italian
German
Spanish (Europe and Latin America)
Portuguese (Europe and Latin America)
Mandarin
Cantonese
Japanese

This can be expanded as appropriate to include the languages of Scandinavia, southeast Asia, the Mid-East, eastern Europe, etc. But, the task becomes more difficult and costly as the number of names and languages increase.

Multinational organizations have to weigh a cost-benefit equation. To save costs, most companies will check only a standard version of a language but not minor dialects; German: yes; Swiss German: no.

But some companies will, for peace of mind, invest in screening names in every language or dialect wherever they do business or might someday. I saw that firsthand during the Accenture corporate naming program, in which 50 candidate names were evaluated in 65 languages, each with three, in-country speakers. Clearly, Accenture thrives on peace of mind.

Ask for observations, not opinions.

You need to know specific and detailed information about the foreign words or phrases that resemble your name candidates. Do not ask foreign speakers about which they "like". Your questions to respondents should elicit observations, not opinions.

This is what I ask:

How will this word be pronounced by a native speaker of your language?

Is the word similar in sound or appearance to other words in your language? If so, what are those words, how are they pronounced, and what do they mean?

Is the word similar to other brands in your country? If so, what brands?

Are there any inappropriate associations that a native speaker of your language might have with this word? If so, what exactly are those associations and why would they be associated?

Do you, as a native speaker of the language, find this word relatively easy or difficult to say? If it’s relatively difficult, what sounds in the word make it difficult?

The answers reveal more than name associations. They also detail the proximity in sound and spelling to the foreign word associations. This information will help you judge the results.

That's the hard part of native speaker checks: Interpreting the data and making the right judgment calls.

Consider these factors to strengthen your judgment of native speaker responses:

How similar are the name and its associations in sound and spelling?
Pay close attention to those identical. 

How prevalent are the name associations among respondents?
If every participant has the same association, it's more likely -- though not certain -- to be widespread after launch.  

How important is the market where the name might be a problem?
Maybe it doesn't matter that your brand means "ugly" in Igbo. 

What's the culture in the country where the name could pose a problem?
An inappropriate association might be acceptable in one country but not another. Native French speakers, in my experience, make naughty name associations so predictably, I wonder if such skills are a point of national pride, like the Eiffel Tower or cream sauces. Francophone responses I take with a grain of sel. In China, less tolerance and preponderance of negative associations makes them more damning.    

Will the name inspire marketing communications that divorce it from unwanted associations?
When Wii and Banana Republic launched, communications were built around their names. Wii's anthropomorphized vowels bowed in animation to help set it apart from "wee (wee)". Banana Republic deflected pejorative associations by silkscreening jungle critters on t-shirts bearing their name.    

Is the name also a real word in English?
If so, negative associations are more likely to be overlooked. English has name cachet in many countries. 

What's the product category?
Offensive associations are more damning for food, beverage and personal-care product names than for electronics, software and other things we don't put in or on our bodies. And mom won't buy children's products with names connoting danger or risk.  

Who's the customer?
Play it safe with names intended for audiences with conservative or traditional values. This applies to geographic segments (e.g. the Mid-East), demographic ones (e.g. the elderly) and certain industries (e.g. insurance). Some audiences are attracted by controversial or contrarian names. Four-letter retailer FCUK targets young iconoclasts, not elderly conservatives. And unlike adults, kids are undaunted by gross-out foods like Garbage Pail Kids, White Chocolate Maggots, and booger-flavored jelly beans; just don't expect Mom to pick them up on the way home.  

These details will inform your decision, but they might not make it easy. A mitigating factor called the "positivity principle" complicates things -- but also illuminates why the name Chevy Nova wasn't actually a problem in Latin America.

The Positivity Principle:
When people see a brand name in the real world -- on a sign, package or business card -- they assume it's intended it to be perceived positively.

When a proposed name is seen the context of a native speaker check or naming research -- when names are presented as hypothetical or speculative -- the positivity principle doesn't manifest so negative associations are easily triggered. Prospective names do not yet have validity conferred upon them because a company has not yet adopted them.

Imagine how Virgin, Motley Fool, Yelp, Alibaba, the Gap, Dirty potato chips, and Bazooka gum would have been excoriated as part of an English native speaker check. Yet, as living brands, they evade obvious, unflattering associations.
 
These names are given the benefit of the doubt because (1) they have already been adapted and launched by companies and (2) they harbor positive and relevant connotations that divert attention from negative denotations:

• Virgin symbolizes the philosophy of conducting business as it's never been done;
• A Motley Fool was the only one who'd tell the king the truth; 
• Dirty Potato Chips are called that because the potatoes' natural juices aren't washed away before frying.

The positivity principle has limits. You can't just go and adopt offensive names willy-nilly expecting they'll be warmly received by everyone.

The positivity principle does not seem to benefit a name whose negative connotations have no conceivable positive relevance to its product. For instance:

Calpis
This Japanese beverage is marketed as Calpico in the States because the original name sounds very close to "cow piss". When you're selling an unfamiliar, foreign beverage at retail, it's best to avoid anything disgusting.

Reebok Incubus
Apparently Reebok didn't know that this is a demon that attacks women in their sleep. If Reebok had, this word wouldn't have been used as the name for a short-lived women's running shoe.

True naming blunders like the Reebok Incubus are rare, though it might not seem so. Infamous naming gaffes are retold again and again in the media, belying their actual rarity. Yet the examples typically trotted out for public pillory -- Chevy Nova, Ford Pinto, et al. -- are pure fiction.

In the end, it might not matter that a brand can be a bad word in foreign dictionary and yet be a good name to those foreign customers. If enough journalists mock the moniker, it could turn a red herring into a red flag. International name problems, even imagined or manufactured ones, are still problems. The public's perception will become a company's reality.

A native speaker check can help a company make a fully-informed name decision. But it is just one data point, and one which can easily mislead. The greatest risk to a business might not be the adoption of a potentially offensive name, but the rejection of a truly great one.      

I hope the principles and practices I've outlined here will help you distinguish native speaker red herrings from red flags.

Just remember to:

Ask the right questions...

listen closely to the answers...

then, on occasion, ignore them.

What's in a namer?

It's ironic. I spend my days helping clients exercise discipline and economy in their brand expressions, but can't do that myself once I get talking about naming. Really, it's hard to shut me up. 

Case in point: What should have been a quick little interview for Grasp, a Spanish naming blog, I turned into diatribe so long that it couldn't fit into a single post.

Iberian blogger and namer Irene Gil faithfully translated my responses in their entirety. She must know what it feels like when fingers beg for mercy.  

My English answers to Irene's first two questions are below. Her painstaking Spanish translation can be read here. 

Q: Anthony, from your long experience, what is the best profile for a good namer? It's an MBA specialised in brand strategy? It's a linguistic with a sound knowledge of different languages? It's a very cultivated person with a broad vocabulary?...

Eleven years ago, a veteran namer told me the best namers are linguists with an MBA. That captures 2 dimensions of a good namer, but I believe that characterization is incomplete.   

Good namers are specialists who, paradoxically, are often the best generalists.

A namer must be a good:

Account manager
Listening to clients, building their trust, reading non-verbal cues from a room of executives, responding positively and not defensively to client concerns and building consensus are all vital naming skills, just as they are good skills in account managers.

Strategist/Account planner
A namer must think strategically to ensure their names support client's business objectives. Strategic thinking and rationale build the namer's credibility and make them more persuasive. Good namers, like good planners, always consider the customer perspective.

Creative
Creating good names requires looking at a client's business from many perspectives. Namers must be creatively prolific and fearless. And as fellow "grizzled veteran" namer Mark Gunnion said in this interview,

"You have to be thick-skinned -- 99.9% of what you create is rejected, usually without a second glance or explanation."

Storyteller
Engendering client trust and helping a client see how a word could become their brand requires great storytelling. Your name story and rationale must be persuasive and pass the "sniff test". An effective name presentation brings together the right blend of emotion and logic.

"Sprachgefuhl"
It's a German word that means "a feeling for speech". Good namers understand the nuances of words and meanings. Good namers are articulate. And only a person madly in love with words could become a namer. But love and knowledge of words is not enough. As I wrote in Knowledge vs. Naivete, linguistic expertise is helpful for naming but so is the ability to "turn off" that knowledge and imagine how names would be perceived by a typical customer.

Marketing communicator
Good namers must consider how their names might come to life across all communications: Visual identity, advertising, messaging, PR, merchandising, etc. Although namers typically don't design logos or advertising campaigns, their ability to communicate their names' potential helps identify and persuade the client of the best ones.

Q: If everybody is able to create a brand, why subcontract this task to a namer? What is the added value?

I honestly believe that great names can come from anyone; founder-created names like Apple, Virgin, Amazon and Google prove this. But involving an expert namer can help in ways tangible and intangible:

Make clients money
A great name has the right sound and meaning, making it more likely to be shared by others through word-of-mouth. A great name inspires merchandising that becomes a new revenue source. Great names that can accomplish these bottom-line benefits (and clear trademark hurdles) are more likely to be created by an expert namer than a client who is not an experienced namer.        

Save clients money
A great name is intrinsically memorable so it needs less marketing to be remembered. By giving good advice, an expert namer can help clients' avoid trademark infringement and other costly problems. For example, in 1997 Reebok launched -- and then recalled -- a women's running shoe called Incubus. A good namer with a good liberal arts background would have advised Reebok against this name: an Incubus is a demon who attacks women in their sleep.

Build consensus
A namer is a neutral, disinterested party who can build client consensus and trust because they are insulated from their client's internal politics.      

Accelerate timing
A good namer helps clients avoid problems that can delay naming programs. Pro namers maintain forward momentum by managing expectations, building client consensus, developing a breadth and depth of unique names, and weeding out obviously problematic names in trademark and international linguistic assessment.

Build confidence
A good range of naming creative, logical rationale, name launch strategies and marketing approaches builds client confidence in their name choice. 

Ease client workloads
Clients already have a job to do, and it's probably not naming. An outside namer removes this burden from their client and shields them from the emotional perils of moderating a naming discussion. It's better if an outside expert rejects a [terrible] client-created name than a colleague.

After Irene's fingers recover, she'll translate and post more of my interview.

Pattern Energy: The story behind the name

When you're caught in a fast-moving stream of thought, just relax and follow the current. That’s what I was doing one May evening, riding a current of ideas creating names for a renewable energy company. Then I typed a word that suddenly stopped the current.

Pattern

I read it and re-read it. Two thoughts came to me:

I've never seen that name before!

It's perfect.

True, I can't be 100% sure I've never seen the name before. I've worked a thousand assignments, but Pattern was -- miraculously -- new to me.

It's rare that I'll think a name is "perfect". As I wrote in my post about brand name research, names aren't born perfect, but become ever-better as identity, messaging, and the entire brand is positively experienced.

But even as an abstract word on the page, Pattern was perfect for this company.

To understand why, I'll first share some background on my client.

Babcock & Brown, a diversified investment firm, was closing down its business, another casualty of the great recession. But their wind and solar power generation and transmission division was prospering despite the red-ink economy.

Green was good for business.

Babcock & Brown was selling off their renewable energy division and the folks in charge of that division asked me to name it.

Their Creative Director, Erin Fortes, invited me to the "fishbowl", a glass-walled conference room, where she, the CEO and others briefed me about what their business does, how it does it, and what makes it different.

Two oppositional themes emerged as differentiators:

The company has amazingly smart people who analyze financial, meteorological and financial data to figure out where to situate and how to finance an energy project.


They are salt-of-the-earth realists who take a pragmatic and hands-on approach to building and operating energy projects. This grounding in real-world construction makes their projects effective at generating a healthy return, not just clean energy.

Brains and brawn. Interesting.

The contrasting concepts made for a challenging naming exercise. On one hand, I wanted a smart name to support their intelligent, analytic approach. On the other hand, if the name was an unfamiliar or highfalutin word it would conflict with their no-nonsense, roll-up-their-sleeves side.

"We don't want a Greek or a new age name," CEO Mike Garland said

No coined names. Nothing tricky.

“We want a solid name for a solid company that’s going to be around in 20 years.”

After the naming brief was approved, I sunk my teeth into the creative.

Entropy fosters my creativity, so as I named this particular May evening, dozens of windows cluttered my laptop screen. Each open window held the tantalizing promise of revealing THE name.

Better yet, each window might reveal a name truly new, one I’ve never seen even after decades of reviewing literally hundreds of thousands of name candidates.

I started my creative focused on the company’s analytic side; words related to thought, problem solving, logic, math, science.

I bounced between inspirational naming resources: Visuwords, OneLook, MRC Psycholinguistic Database, Wikipedia and Word Menu. On this occasion, it was WordNet, a relational verbal database, that captivated me longest.

WordNet is not exactly a thesaurus; among other things, it lets you explore the hierarchical relationships between ideas and words.

This is useful because good brand naming requires looking at key words from every conceivable direction. For example, if a key word is ‘color’, I want endless examples of colors (like ‘crimson’), qualities of colors (like ‘hue’), things that are colorful (like ‘canary’), and other things related, even remotely, to ‘color’ (like ‘deep’ or ‘shrill’ or 'rainbow wig').

I typed ‘analyze’ -- a key word for my client’s new brand -- into WordNet and it responded with 20 different flavors of analyzing (diagnose, explore, audit, et al.).

I followed that into a geometry, architecture, math vein, typing words furiously. And that’s when I saw the name.

Vector…

Contour…

Array…

Column…

Pattern

A-ha!

My client finds patterns in data; they’re better at it than anyone.

They build patterns on land; pretty white windmills, all in a row.

Repeat business and profits, those are patterns too.

As a company name, Pattern is a springboard that’s grounded in strategy. The name would help their marketing:

It’s distinctive

It’s memorable

Its vivid associations can inspire all of their marketing communications

Pattern sounds solid. It has built-in phonetic bookends, what linguists call ‘stops’. The sounds that begin and end the word -- ‘p’ and ‘n’ -- serve to fortify and delineate it. No wishy-washy fricatives here. The word even looks well-defined: With no descenders to break the baseline, Pattern stands solid and even-keeled, even in ASCII.

All of these qualities, along with the inherent staying power of a real word and its timeless meaning, would contribute to the perception of Pattern as a solid brand that will be around for 20 years.

I didn’t stop naming after coming up with Pattern. In fact, I had just gotten started. To ensure divergent thinking, I hired two reliable freelancers, Alexandra Watkins and Marc Hershon, to contribute names.

From the master list of all names, I selected a subset of 188 for preliminary legal screening. Pattern was among the dozens of names that cleared the first trademark hurdle.

I presented about 20 names and the top six, including Pattern, were selected for full legal clearance. Pattern cleared that hurdle, too.

I was overjoyed when Pattern was ultimately anointed by the client as the final name. Though I pat myself on the back for creating it, the client deserves a lot of credit. Without their direction, courage and vision, this name might have been rejected.

The name chosen, Erin hired two designers for the logo, Graham Atkinson and Rebecca Titcomb. I used to work with them at Landor and was thrilled they’d bring the name to life visually.

Erin and I briefed the designers. I wrote for them this story behind the name:

Pattern is a renewable energy company that finds patterns and creates them.

In the chaos of complex economic, geologic and meteorologic data, this company finds patterns where others only see noise. These hidden patterns reveal to their trained eyes, the optimal places, scope, design and conditions for renewable energy projects.

This ability, coupled with their real-world, on-the-ground experience, makes them more effective than competitors at bringing projects to market and providing a healthy return.

When healthy returns repeat, they create patterns in spreadsheets and line charts, and in wave after wave of returning customers.

Patterns are created by what Pattern builds.

In their wind farms, against a landscape backdrop, columns and rows of lean, white turbines line in parallel on furrowed fields.

Patterns are created in the grooves of the brown soil, the green dots of growing vegetables, the connecting arcs of rolling hills and in gently turning windmills that generate clean energy.

Patterns are created by their transmission lines that carry electricity on long, thin strings under a big, blue sky.

Everything worth doing is worth repeating.

Everything that repeats creates a pattern.

Like the circle of life.

Plans well-executed.

Healthy returns.

And renewable energy.

Pattern is a renewable energy company that finds patterns and creates them.

Here’s the logo that the design team created under Erin Fortes’ direction:

That is the story behind the name Pattern. I thought it worth repeating.

Addendum

Following the adoption of the Pattern name, I was invited to create a tagline for the company. The result?

Energy For Generations

I'll point out the two distinct interpretations of the tagline. First: Pattern generates energy. Second: Pattern is here to stay for the long run. They are both messages that resonate with the landowners, financial investors and communities that Pattern serves.

Long may they run. 

The case for coining

I argue with myself.

I just can't help it. When a problem needs to be solved -- like which name I should recommend to a client -- I'll look at every angle of each proposed solution in light of its objectives. Each of their strengths and weaknesses grapple tooth and nail for supremacy as The Optimal Answer.

It's a bit like professional wrestling but without the leotards -- or the predetermined outcome.

I take comfort knowing there are others like me who, in their efforts to solve a problem, argue with themselves.

I learned this as part of my participation in a Center for Creative Leadership program, where I was assessed for my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This well-established (though sometimes questioned) personality test determines a person's specific personality type. According to the theory of MBTI, all six billion people on the planet Earth fall neatly into sixteen personality types.

Me? I'm an ENTP:

Extroverted (not Introverted)
iNtuition (not Sensing)
Thinking (not Feeling)
Perceiving (not Judging)

ENTPs are The Innovators, The Originators, The Lawyers, The Explorers, and The Visionaries.

They also play The Devil's Advocate.

Although a person's MBTI is codified as a pat, four-letter word (like ENTP or ISFJ), there is actually a continuum along each dimension. A numeric score along this continuum reflects the degree to which one is Extroverted or Introverted, Thinking or Feeling, and so on.

It turns out, I'm unusually compelled to argue and objectively consider all sides of an argument.

My own MBTI test revealed that I am almost 100% Thinking, having scored a 59 out of 60 along the Thinking-Feeling continuum. This reflects that I'm governed by head more than heart. I'll always follow the logical, objective, fact-based path over the one that makes me (or others) just feel good.

And so, here I go again in typical ENTP fashion, arguing with myself.

As I wrote in Real words make better brand names, I believe that real words rich with meaning generally offer advantages over made-up words like Kodak.

I also noted that coined names are not utterly bereft of benefits. In the spirit of devil's advocacy, I'd like to build on that and go further into the benefits of coined names and share what makes for a good coined name.

Distinctiveness
A coined name is more likely to jump off the page than one that's a product-relevant, real word. Humans are hard-wired to notice things that are different, so a word you've never seen before stands out.

Trademarkability
Made-up words are more likely to be available for trademark clearance than a real word.

Domain Availability
Online companies gotta have that dotcom domain name. That's why so many have adopted misspelled real words or entirely made-up ones.

Flexibility
Coined names are less likely to reference a specific feature or function than real-word names. Coined names, being more ambiguous, can withstand changes in a company's or product's features, benefits and positioning.

International Appeal
In non-English speaking markets, they generally prefer non-English names. The projects I've directed throughout Asia, Europe and the Mideast revealed to me that, for those audiences, the sound of a name is more important than what it means. Euphony often trumps semantics in non-English speaking countries.

Consensus Building
It's easier for a group to agree on a name that means nothing. Names that are real words will trigger associations, and those associations can become liabilities when picked apart by a large or risk-averse group.

It's no accident that big branding agencies like Landor and Interbrand have a lot of coined names in their portfolio. They attract large, risk-averse clients that have large decision-making teams. There's often someone in the room who "poisons the well" by sharing their own negative, albeit subjective and idiosyncratic, reaction to a real-word name. Large companies also tend to research names to death by using focus groups.

Like I said, it's easier for a group -- any group -- to agree on a name that means nothing.

Given these benefits of coined names, why do I still generally recommend real, meaningful English words to clients?

• Real words, especially "arbitrary" ones such as Apple, Amazon and Feather, can be just as distinctive, trademarkable and flexible as coined names.
  
• They are more memorable than coined names. Words that trigger emotions or images are particularly memorable.
• Because they are easier to recall, real-word names are more likely to be shared with others by word-of-mouth.
• They can inspire marketing campaigns, product and feature naming and messaging. Names that don't mean anything won't do this, unless it's just to clarify how to pronounce their name. Take a bow, Geico and Aflac, for turning your lemon names into lemonade.
• Thanks to their superior memorability, shareability and campaignability, arbitrary real-word names are cheaper to build than coined names. [I'd love to see those differences quantified. Any ideas?]
  

Coined names still hold an advantage over real words in their appeal to non-English speaking markets, and they are easier for large and risk-averse companies to stomach.

So, let's pretend you're a Fortune 500 company and you're planning to spin-off a big division that will focus on international markets. I'd suggest you include real-word brand names in your mix of name candidates along with coined names.

Up to now, I've painted coined names with a broad brush. But in truth there are good coined names and bad coined names.

What makes a good coined name? In a word: Naturalness.

A natural coined name is one that follows a language's naturally-occurring phonetics (individual sounds), phonology (how those sounds are organized) and morphology (how words are formed). The trick here is that languages differ in these dimensions. If your brand name is going to be marketed to Chinese, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Arabic speakers, you have to aim for a lowest common denominator, linguistically speaking.

Here are a few tips:

• Avoid stringing consonants together, as many languages disallow that in their phonology. In Japanese, for example, the name Hasbro is pronounced "ha-su-bu-ro". The brand Adidas, formed from its founder Adi Dassler, will be pronounced the same the world over. It has a universally-natural "open" syllable structure of alternating consonants and vowels.

• When combining morphemes (salient word parts) to create new words, use the same source language. A Greek morpheme should be paired with another Greek morpheme. Mash together morphemes from different languages and the resulting name might feel contrived. Compare Interbrand (Latin+Anglo-Saxon) to Lenovo (Italian+Italian). Interbrand, who actually created the name Lenovo, served their client better than themselves.
  

• Pair prefixes with roots, or roots with suffixes. A name that combines prefixes, roots, or suffixes in ways that don't naturally occur will feel contrived. The name InBev unnaturally combines the prefix "In" with the first part of the word "beverage". There are no English words that have "bev" in the middle, so InBev feels unnatural. Another example: Compare Aricent (unnatural) to Lucent (natural). Aricent is based on "arise" plus "ascent", but "ari-" is not a real prefix. Lucent, on the other hand, is built from the productive Latin root "luc-" (meaning light) and the "-ent" suffix, also from Latin and also a common suffix.

• Consider your consonants. Brand names with phonemes that don't naturally occur in other languages will be pronounced differently, with an accent. This is not disastrous, but it's something to be mindful of. It's well-known that "l" and "r" are pronounced the same in some Asian countries, so "Red Hat" sounds the same as "Led Hat". In Japanese and Spanish "v" is pronounced "b". The sounds "th" and "sh" are fairly uncommon, so those will change, too.

Here's the story of Lululemon, a brand name that was specifically created to sound foreign to its target audience:

It was thought that a Japanese marketing firm would not try to create a North American sounding brand with the letter “L” because the sound does not exist in Japanese phonetics. By including an “L” in the name it was thought the Japanese consumer would find the name innately North American and authentic. Chip [the company founder] felt that the distributor had paid a premium for the “L” [in their original name, Homless] so he challenged himself to come up with a name that had 3 “L’s” for his new company.

• Use a real foreign word. Back in the day, I gave the name Kanisa to a "knowledge management" company. The word comes from an African language called Lingala and means "you must think". It has no obvious meaning outside of central Africa, but the story behind the name is relevant and it's easy to say the world over. And Samsung might seem made-up, but it's actually Korean for "three stars". Like the trademark attorneys say, "What's arbitrary to one man is fanciful to another". [OK, they don't really say that, but perhaps they'll start.]
  

• Try swapping out just one letter of a known word. Zune came from "tune" and Viagra from "Niagra".

There are other coining techniques you can find here.

Keep in mind the principle of naturalness and your coined brand name might not turn out half-bad.

At least, that's what I'd argue.

Knowledge vs. naivete

A Linguistics student asked namers on LinkedIn a simple question: Is linguistic analysis of candidate brand names helpful?

As a brand namer, my background in Linguistics and cognitive psychology has been wildly useful. A deep understanding of language and creativity informs naming briefs that inspire both me and my team. I am able to create objectives for candidate names that facilitate their evaluation, fit with strategy and assure customer appeal. And metaphor expertise fuels my creative generation, resulting in exceptionally long lists of prospective names that are relevant and have a shot at trademark clearance.

If a client wants to consider a coined brand name, as they often do in non-English speaking markets, understanding morphology, phonology and sound symbolism is essential. The same holds true for pharmaceutical naming.

For some clients, the detailed, linguistic analysis of a candidate name helps build consensus. For large companies and their large decision-making teams, this analysis grounds them in logical rationale, bringing solid objectivity to an essentially emotional and subjective exercise.

But I am also mindful of The Curse of Knowledge. When you know a lot about something like language, it’s easy to magnify the importance of details that are actually academic or esoteric. Brand names should help sell products or services to people who don’t know nearly as much about language. Consumers are not enamored nor won over by linguistic minutiae. Linguist-namers should never think that what they find fascinating in a name will be shared or recognized by the people who really matter: Customers.

The importance of empathy cannot be overstated.

Some of the very best brand namers I know have not been to college. They wouldn’t know a phoneme from a phone booth. But they have a gift. They have the ability to create names without breaking down sounds and syllables. They see names as a consumer would. No smoke. No mirrors. No academic bull.

My linguistic knowledge and analytic inclinations have certainly been valuable. But at least as important is the ability to that turn off. Training myself to become naive and forget what I know, at least temporarily, has helped me create ever-better product and company names intended for real customers in real world.

The linguist in me wants to call this quality, ‘ambilextrous’.

But then again, no.

Kick the bucket

Those who know me, know I hate 'buckets'.

The way the word 'bucket' is bandied about in business meetings drives me nuts. After a brainstorming session, do we really have to put the ideas into 'buckets'? Couldn't we just, you know, 'group' them? Buckets are for chum, not ideas. I wonder if people in certain parts of America organize their ideas into 'pails' instead.

But beyond my word choice peeve, there is another, bigger issue with buckets. And it's not the word I'm referring to, but the very act of categorizing ideas.

When you label a group of things, you change how people perceive them.

This came to life last week during a corporate naming presentation I gave. The meeting objective was for my client to select at least six names to undergo full trademark screening. The 30 candidate names I presented were organized in four categories, each reflecting a direction in the client-approved creative brief.

Going into this, I knew there was some risk categorizing the names. That's because really good name candidates, being multidimensional, will fit well in multiple categories, not just one. But to avoid fatigue, each name is shown just once (plus a summary of all candidates at the end).

In some cases, the category assigned to a name was a toss-up, or an attempt to balance the number of names in each category. I advised my client to see the names as more multifaceted than their singular categorization would suggest; to see the names as a customer would in the real world, without the construct of these behind-the-scenes groupings.

The names presented, we discussed their relative merits and shortcomings. The client rejected the names belonging to two of the four categories. I reasoned that a few of those discarded candidates were actually similar to the keepers from the other categories, therefore, shouldn't they also be finalists? But they were dropped along with others in their category.

As a seasoned namer, I am accustomed to seeing names fall by the wayside. In fact, names have to be rejected. A company is just not going to adopt more than one name for itself.

But the rejection of similar names that happened to be labeled differently was frustrating. It confounded my sense of logic.

At the same time, the experience was instructive.

Evidently, the labels ascribed had undermined and overshadowed the names themselves. They cordoned off meaning. The signifier eclipsed the signified.

Had I not categorized the names, or if had I better-worded the category labels, I think some of the rejects might have been accepted. Then again, it's also possible some of the finalists would have been left behind, had they not had the good fortune be grouped under a well-liked category label.

Although a few too many babies got thrown out with the bathwater, the client and I both agreed the meeting was a resounding success. There were plenty of names brought forward for full legal screening.

That evening while relaxing at home, I cracked open my new book, Psycholinguistic Phenomena in Marketing Communications. For an analytically-minded word wallower like me, this collection of academic studies is pure heaven.

As luck would have it, the first article was Linguistic Framing of Sensory Experience: There Is Some Accounting for Taste. The authors, JoAndrea Hoegg and Joseph Alba, researched whether labels on cups of orange juice would alter people's taste perception.

Labels matter, they found. (Huh. Imagine that.)

In the study, participants reported that two cups of juice labeled the same also tasted the same, even though one was secretly sweetened. A corollary result was that cups of identical juice which were labeled differently also differed in perceived taste.

In essence, the study's participants were no different from my clients (nor, I suppose, the rest of us).

My experience last week and the results of this research make the conclusion clear:

Labels increase perceived differences across categories and diminish differences within categories.

People see things in the same group as similar, even if they are not. And things in different categories are seen as more different than they actually are.

Upon reflection, this truth should come as no surprise. Brand architecture and nomenclature decisions are based on it; positioning, too.

So if you're going to group things, group wisely.

Please, just don't 'bucket' them.

Real words make better brand names

Brand names based on familiar, real words -- the kind of words you’d use in everyday speech -- offer advantages over completely made-up names.

In other words, names like Amazon trump names like Kodak.

Two sources provide solid evidence that real-word brand names are more readily adopted and remembered than coined names. One source, an academic paper, features research about brand name memorability. The other source is a book that analyzed the types of new words adopted into English over a fifty-year period; it casts light on the types of names English speakers are predisposed to adopting.

The academic paper (a paid download), Recall and Recognition of Brand Names: A Comparison of Word and Nonword Name Types, demonstrates that real-word brand names are much more likely to be recalled than "nonword" brand names (68.8% recall vs. 38.1%). The authors, Dawn Lerman of Fordham University and Ellen Garbarino of Case Western Reserve University, also found that "irrelevant" names are recalled at about the same rate as "relevant" names, thus validating so-called arbitrary names like Apple and Grey Goose. You don't have to call your online bookstore Books.com if you want to be remembered. In fact, you shouldn't.

Nonword brand names are not all bad. If the brand name is a nonword, it will be more distinctive and therefore stand out more. The hypothetical camera brand names in the article, Monit and Parade, do differ in their distinctiveness. Monit stands out because you've never seen it.

But irrelevant real-word names are also more distinctive than relevant real-word names. A small email device named PocketLink would not stand out like one called BlackBerry.

The lesson here is you’re better off with a name that's an arbitrary real word rather than a coined name. Although both will be distinctive, the arbitrary name will be more memorable. Amazon: 2. Kodak: 1.

The other source, Fifty Years Among the New Words (A Dictionary of Neologisms) by John Algeo, catalogs the words introduced into English between 1941 and 1991. Algeo documented new words not brand names. I'll take it as a given that what Algeo observed with words also applies to brand names.¹

To Algeo, a “new" word is one “not recorded in general dictionaries.” This includes single words (e.g. guesstimate), multiple words (e.g. sandwich generation) or idiomatic phrases (e.g. out of the loop).

Algeo cites six etymological processes behind new words:

• borrowing from different languages
• combining two existing words to create a compound
• shortening an existing word
• blending existing words both combined and shortened
• shifting the meaning of an existing word
• creating new words not based on existing words, like the "nonwords" cited above

He found that these processes were not equally productive toward generating new words. For example, over 50% of the new words came from the process of combining, in which two known words created a new one. “Moonlighting” and “user-friendly” are good examples.

As it turns out, the least productive process leading to the fewest new words in English is the creation of new words without a clear link to existing language (i.e., nonwords). Algeo observed that very few words are created from nothing and then widely adopted. “To make something out of nothing does not seem to be a human talent,” wrote Algeo.

The reason so few invented words are created and adopted is because our brains follow a path of least resistance. When we need a new word, re-defining something known or combining words in a new way is easier than starting from scratch. When new words are shared, it's easier to recall a known word than to create and remember an entirely new lexical entry. It’s Occam’s Razor as applied to word adoption.

The implications for brand naming are clear: People remember brand names more readily if based on known words rather than made-up ones. But with this generalization come caveats:

• Not all real words are equally memorable. Another fascinating research paper, Recall and Recognition Effects of Brand Name Imagery, documents that "high imagery" words (ones easily pictured) are more memorable than "low imagery" names that are abstract. So an abstract and undifferentiated real-word name like General Software will be far less memorable than a vivid real-word name like Firefly. Moreover, a coined name can be made unforgettable if it’s euphonious and paired with a good jingle or a mnemonic mascot.
• Money talks. With enough promotion, any name whether real or coined will be remembered. A spectacular example, and one in which I participated, is the $175 million that transformed the unknown word Accenture into the best-known name in business consulting.
  
• Longevity has its rewards. With decades of interaction with customers, brand names like Kodak and Oreo instill a great deal of meaning and associations, even if they began as meaningless words.
• Algeo’s observations were based on English speakers so it’s possible the results would differ if he researched new words in other languages. A former Landor colleague told me the French are quite fond of coining words. As Steve Martin observed, "They have a different word for everything."

There is abundant and clear evidence that English speakers are more likely to adopt new names if they are based on known, arbitrary words. Marketers pay heed.



Thanks to Matthew Cross for his help.

1. There is evidence (PDF will download) that brand names, like proper nouns, are processed differently than other words, but those differences don't apply here.