NAMING

Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet

O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

And yet we know from polls and anecdotal evidence that a name can make a huge difference in marketing. For instance any product called “this is a piece of junk” won’t sell and neither will any product with a really long or hard to pronounce name. So there are traditionally three rules of NAMING in marketing.

They are usually abbreviated SRC

1. SHORT

2. ROLL

3. CREATIVE

A variety of jokes surrounding the same pun are often heard when introducing this topic.

Typically it goes something like this

Marketing Professor: what is income?

Student: the financial gain (earned or unearned) accruing over a given period of time

Marketing Professor: and what is the source of your income?

Student: screwing the customer

Marketing Professor: No, selling the customer junk under a different name always remember SRC

Anyway back to the topic at hand

1. The first step is to always remember to keep it short and to make it easy to guess what you are trying to sell.
2. The second step is to make sure the name rolls of the tongue like IPOD or MACBOOK or OS X JAGUAR all fine examples of Roll. Which means that a name should be short but not hard to pronounce. For example “ghungtra” is short but it does not Roll.
3. The third step is to be creative with the way your name is associated to your product. This ensures that people will talk about how you came up with such an idea and creates publicity and memory which is what you always want unless of course its negative memory. A good way to find a creative name is pay attention when people talk about other companies and their names and you will find what key things are attractive and what is not.

Ultimately it is always a good idea to test it out on your friends but to understand that if all they do is critique and have no better suggestions. you either have a really good idea or a not so good idea (to put it nicely).