


1. Know Thyself

Levi's, Peet's, Hewlett-Packard, and Disney are all names that allude to the history of the companies through their founders. They seek to start conversations centered on the company's origin story.

Highlighting the vision and influence of your company's founders builds an air of trust and relatability among customers. However, this strategy limits options and says little about your company's mission or positioning.

To dive into subtler naming territory, examine your founders' interests and common values. Consider the software company Asana, which refers to a restorative pose in yoga—a meaningful practice of the company's founders.

Sometimes the greatest names come from within a company.

2. ¿Cómo Se Llama?

At a namer's right hand is the thesaurus, but at a namer's left are English-paired dictionaries of many foreign languages.

Although a name could be taken from any language, Swahili and Hawaiian are worth listing because they have regular, pronounceable word constructions. Many successful companies have built a unique tone with foreign names, such as the online payment service Boku (from the French "beaucoup," meaning "much" or "many") or the tomato sauce Prego (Italian for "please").

Such names, when chosen well, can pique interest in your company and make customers ask what language your name comes from or what it means. Those questions are not signs of confusion; they are signs that your company's name has captured customers' curiosity.

3. In Touch With Nature


Amazon, for example, evokes wildness, wonder, and large scale much more effectively than a name like Bargainland would. And whether the name Apple is meant to evoke freshness, Isaac Newton, Adam and Eve, or education, the name starts a conversation. Burt's Bees pays homage to the founder's bee colonies, which he cultivated to make honey and candles to sell at farmers markets, later producing a full line of natural products and sharing his love of nature with customers.


4. Location (Location, Location)

Like nature, the names of places and the planet's physical features are a great place to look for naming inspiration. Cisco (from San Francisco) and Fujifilm (named after Mt. Fuji, in Japan) are companies that looked to geography in the naming process.



5. Know It, You're a Poet!

A good metaphor, when used strategically as a name, can speak volumes. Vudu (a name we created at Catchword) delivers online movie and TV content. Derived from "voodoo," the name aptly conveys the magical qualities of the delivery mechanism, high definition, and surround sound—in just four letters! Other great metaphorical names are Amazon Kindle and Ford Mustang.


6. Your Inner Goddess

Mythology and religion are humanity's standbys. Virtually every culture has a collection of symbolic stories full of explanations for life's great mysteries. Those stories are also full of great name ideas.



7. Celebrity Shout-Outs




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Deep-naming is the art of choosing a specific message and generating an extensive list of names to convey it in countless different ways (we usually create over 2,000 names for a naming project). The deeper your company's name and its message, the more you stand out from the competition. The tips in this article are avenues that can lead you there.

A deep name makes your customers ask, "Where did your name come from?"—a question you can then answer with a compelling story.

Continue reading "Seven Tips for Creating a Company Name That Tells a Compelling Story" ... Read the full article

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image of Mark Skoultchi

Mark Skoultchi is a partner at Catchword, a full-service naming company founded in 1998, with offices in the San Francisco Bay area and New York City. Contact Mark at 212-472-8936.

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