Does Our Philosophy Hold Up to the Facts?
When you’ve been in the naming business for as long as Taylor Swift has been alive, you learn a few things. Over the years, we’ve tirelessly revised our naming process, honing in on what works and what doesn’t. If you can imagine a creative process, we’ve likely tried it. The results are names that speak for themselves.
Taking a qualitative approach puts us in the minority in this industry. We don’t have an in-house linguist (sorry, Linguistics majors). We don’t use Proprietary Lexical Analysis® or whatever trademarked jargon you may encounter elsewhere. We don’t do focus groups. Agencies do these things to mollify anxious clients. They try to reassure them by portraying an inherently subjective process as something that can be neatly measured. It can’t. This is art, not science.
We do things our way: not to be novel, or out of some contrarian impulse, but because we’ve proofed the process over the past 26 years. If algorithms and customer surveys brought home the goods, we’d turn half our office into a server room and the other half into a phone bank. But they don’t, so we haven’t.
One of the things we do is read a lot, and we recently came across a few academic studies on naming. We found that a lot of the research supported things we’ve found to be true over the years. So for the skeptics, armchair naming experts, and inline citation enthusiasts, we’re going to lay some of it out.
About the researchers:
Dr. Darren Schmidt is a clinical psychologist working whose research has explored the psychology of branding and naming. His treatise “Psycholinguistic Investigations of Brand Names via Word Recognition and Memory Experiments,” is, well, pretty much what the title says.
Dr. Kim Robertson is a faculty member at Trinity University in San Antonio, where he studies consumer behavior and branding. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Psychology and Marketing, and the International Marketing Review, among other publications, and he has served as an expert legal witness in his field.
- Short vs Memorable
People love short names. Whether for legitimate reasons (interesting typography, spelling concerns) or dubious ones (My client base is busier than God and doesn’t have time for three syllables!), they’re popular. Thing is, they’re at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to carrying meaning. There are only so many combinations of four letters. Most of them aren’t words. Many of them will be taken. Do you want to call your dating app for cinephiles Prjktr or Mister Lonely?
The academics say: “For a brand name to be effective, it should provide some level of arousal in terms of triggering meaning, thus creating a stronger connection to the brand name” (Schmidt 4). So while there’s no one-to-one relationship between longer names and better ones, it’s tough to create meaning when you’re constrained by word length.
Real vs Coined
We like using real words to create names. Our aversion to wordsmash (AirTran, PolyCom) is well-documented. While we’ll occasionally suggest empty vessels, we prefer using words from the English language that can tell a story or elicit a response.
The academics say: “[Researchers found] a decrement (reduction) in recall for brand names that were created by semantic blending (e.g., Aspergum)” (Schmidt 7).
“Using real English words as a basis for brand names helps enhance recognition, possibly due to the semantic or lexical connections that already existed for those real English words” (Schmidt 31-32).
- Differentiation
We want to give you a name that’ll help you stand out from the pack. Getting noticed is free advertising for you, and a novel name can suggest a novel approach.
The academics say: “The recall advantage of a meaningful name has been found to be especially noticeable when the name was not otherwise particularly ‘fitting’ in some way to the product class” (Robertson 64).
There you have it, folks. But if you need a name, JSTOR is the wrong place to look. And you won’t get one from the minds behind boring, vanilla names, or hucksters who know more about consumer research than actual consumers. Give us a call instead.
