Naming a Product: How to Launch with a Name People Remember

Naming a product is a different challenge from naming a company. Your company name is the umbrella; your product names live beneath it. They need to work within your brand architecture, appeal to your target audience, stand out in a crowded market, and—ideally—become the word people use when they talk about your category. Think about how "Google it" replaced "search for it" or how "Slack" became a verb in offices worldwide. That's the power of a great product name. This guide gives you the frameworks, strategies, and real-world examples to name your product with intention.

Brand Architecture: Where Does Your Product Name Live?

Before you brainstorm a single name, you need to decide on your brand architecture—the relationship between your company name and your product names. This decision shapes everything downstream.

Branded House

One master brand, with products named as extensions of that brand. This is the simplest approach and the most common for tech companies.

Google is the textbook example: Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Docs, Google Cloud. The parent brand does all the heavy lifting. Individual product names are descriptive—they tell you exactly what the product does. The advantage is that every new product inherits the trust and recognition of the master brand. The risk is that a failure in one product can damage the entire brand.

When to use this: When your company brand is strong and you want maximum brand coherence. Best for companies with related products serving a similar audience.

House of Brands

Each product has its own distinct brand identity, with minimal connection to the parent company. Most consumers don't know (or care) about the parent company.

Procter & Gamble owns Tide, Pampers, Gillette, Old Spice, and Crest—each with its own name, personality, and audience. In tech, Alphabet operates this way with Google, Waymo, Verily, and DeepMind as distinct brands.

When to use this: When your products serve different markets or audiences, when you want to isolate brand risk, or when individual product brands are stronger than the parent company.

Endorsed Brands

Products have their own names but are visibly connected to a parent brand. The parent provides credibility; the product name provides distinctiveness.

Apple sits in this space: iPhone, MacBook, AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple TV. The product names are distinctive and memorable on their own, but the Apple association gives each one instant credibility. Notice how some products lead with the Apple name (Apple Watch, Apple TV) while others stand alone (iPhone, MacBook, AirPods). This flexibility is the strength of the endorsed model.

When to use this: When you want the best of both worlds—individual product distinctiveness plus parent brand credibility. This is the most flexible and scalable architecture for growing companies.

Product Naming Frameworks

There are four fundamental types of product names, each with distinct advantages and trade-offs. Understanding them helps you choose the right approach for your specific product.

1. Descriptive Names

Names that say exactly what the product does. No guessing required.

• Examples: Google Maps, Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, GitHub Copilot, YouTube Music
• Advantages: Instantly communicative. Zero learning curve. Good for SEO (people search for what products do).
• Disadvantages: Hard to trademark (you can't own "Maps"). Limiting if the product evolves beyond its original description. Can feel generic.
• Best for: Products within a branded house architecture, utility products, and features within a larger platform.

2. Suggestive Names

Names that hint at what the product does without spelling it out. They evoke a quality, benefit, or experience.

• Examples: Slack (casual, laid-back communication), Pinterest (pin your interests), Kindle (ignite your reading), Zoom (fast, seamless meetings), Notion (ideas and concepts)
• Advantages: Memorable and evocative. Easier to trademark than descriptive names. Creates an emotional connection. Allows the product to evolve without outgrowing its name.
• Disadvantages: Requires some marketing investment to establish the connection between name and product.
• Best for: Consumer-facing products, SaaS platforms, and products where the experience matters as much as the function.

3. Arbitrary Names

Real words used in a completely unrelated context. The word exists in the dictionary, but has nothing to do with the product category.

• Examples: Apple (computers), Amazon (e-commerce), Stripe (payments), Linear (project management), Arc (browser)
• Advantages: Highly distinctive and trademarkable. Can carry metaphorical weight (Amazon = vast, Apple = simple). Clean .com domains are sometimes available for common words with new meanings.
• Disadvantages: Requires significant marketing to build the association between name and product. The word may carry unintended connotations.
• Best for: Companies building entirely new categories, products with ambitious brand visions, and teams willing to invest in brand building.

4. Fanciful (Invented) Names

Completely made-up words with no prior meaning.

• Examples: Spotify, Hulu, Xerox, Kodak, Verizon, Zillow
• Advantages: Maximum uniqueness and trademarkability. No competing meanings or associations. Domain availability is typically good since the word never existed before.
• Disadvantages: Carries zero inherent meaning—all associations must be built through marketing. Risk of sounding like random syllables. Pronunciation can be ambiguous.
• Best for: Global products (no language conflicts), companies with significant marketing budgets, and brands that want to own a word entirely.

Testing Names with Your Target Audience

Naming by committee is slow and produces mediocre results. Naming by instinct alone is risky. The sweet spot is generating names with a small, decisive team, then validating with real data from your target audience.

Quick Testing Methods

1. The 5-second test. Show someone the name for 5 seconds, then ask: "What do you think this product does?" If the answer is close to correct (or intriguingly wrong in a good way), the name is working. If the answer is blank confusion, iterate.
2. The phone test. Say the name out loud over a phone call: "Have you tried [product name]?" If the person asks you to spell it or repeat it, the name has a friction problem. Great product names survive low-bandwidth communication.
3. The competitor shelf test. Write your candidate names alongside your competitors' names. Which ones stand out? Which blend in? Your name needs to be visually and phonetically distinct from the names it will sit next to in app stores, search results, and review sites.
4. The social media test. Search for your candidate name on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Is anyone already using it? Is the hashtag polluted with unrelated content? A name that's already heavily used in another context will be hard to own in social search.
5. The A/B landing page test. Create two identical landing pages with different product names and drive paid traffic equally to both. Measure click-through rates and sign-up conversions. This is the most rigorous test, and the data doesn't lie.

What to Test For

• Recall — Can people remember the name 24 hours later without seeing it again?
• Associations — What feelings, images, or concepts does the name evoke? Are they aligned with your brand?
• Pronunciation — Does everyone say it the same way?
• Appeal — Do people in your target audience like the name? (Note: your friends' opinions don't count unless they're your target audience.)
• Distinctiveness — Can people distinguish it from competitors' names?

The psychology of brand names runs deeper than most founders realize—understanding the cognitive science behind naming can give you a significant advantage in these tests.

Naming for Product Lines and Extensions

One product is a naming exercise. A product line is a naming system. You need rules that scale.

Naming Systems That Scale

Apple's approach is worth studying closely. Their naming system uses a clear hierarchy:

• Product families use distinctive coined names: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch
• Variants use modifiers: iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro
• Generations use numbers: iPhone 16, Apple Watch Series 10
• Features get their own branded names: Face ID, MagSafe, Dynamic Island

This system is infinitely extensible. When Apple launches a new product category, they add a new family name. When they launch a variant, they add a modifier. The system never breaks.

Atlassian takes a different approach—mythology-inspired names: Jira (Gojira/Godzilla), Confluence (flowing together), Trello (a riff on "trellis"), Bitbucket. Each product has a completely distinct identity, reflecting their house-of-brands-lite architecture.

Modifier Strategies for Variants

When you have multiple tiers or versions of a product, your modifier names communicate positioning:

• Performance tiers: Lite, Standard, Pro, Enterprise, Ultimate
• Size/scope tiers: Mini, Air, Plus, Max
• Audience tiers: Personal, Team, Business, Enterprise
• Version numbers: Simple and unambiguous, but lack personality (Version 3.0, Series 5)

International Considerations

If your product will be used (or someday might be used) outside your home country, international naming pitfalls are real and sometimes devastating. The history of product naming is littered with expensive mistakes.

Common International Naming Pitfalls

• Unintended meanings in other languages. The Chevy Nova famously struggled in Spanish-speaking markets because "no va" means "it doesn't go." The Mitsubishi Pajero had to be renamed in Spanish markets because "pajero" is a crude insult. These stories are almost cliche, but the underlying lesson is real: check your name in every major language.
• Pronunciation difficulties. Names with sounds that don't exist in certain languages create problems. The "th" sound in English doesn't exist in most Asian and European languages. The letter "r" is pronounced differently in English, French, Japanese, and Spanish. If your name relies on specific phonetics, test it with native speakers.
• Character set compatibility. Can your name be written in the local script? Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and Hindi speakers may need a localized version of your name. Some global brands maintain their English name alongside a localized transliteration (Coca-Cola is "ke kou ke le" in Chinese, meaning "tasty happiness").
• Domain availability by country. If you plan to use country-specific domains (yourbrand.co.uk, yourbrand.de), check availability for each market. Country-code TLDs often have residency or business presence requirements.

Strategies for Global Names

• Invented words are safest. Spotify, Hulu, and Zillow have no unintended meanings in any language because they didn't exist in any language before they were created.
• Short, simple phonetics travel well. Names built from universal sounds (simple consonant-vowel patterns like "Zara," "Uber," or "Lego") work across languages.
• Avoid idioms and cultural references. A name that's a clever pun in English is just a confusing word in other markets.
• Test with native speakers, not just translators. A translator can tell you the literal meaning. A native speaker can tell you the connotations, slang associations, and cultural baggage.

Learning from Failed Product Names

Studying failures is as valuable as studying successes. Here are product naming decisions that went wrong and what they teach us:

• Google+ (Google Plus) — Naming a social network after your search engine with a punctuation mark didn't work. The name was unsearchable (try Googling "Google+"), the plus sign caused URL encoding issues, and it didn't communicate anything social. Compare this to Instagram (instant + telegram) or Snapchat (snap + chat), which both communicate the core experience.
• Microsoft Zune — The name didn't mean anything, didn't evoke anything, and didn't suggest music, portability, or joy. Against the iPod (a pod for yourself—intimate, personal, futuristic), Zune sounded clinical and cold.
• Amazon Fire Phone — "Fire" worked brilliantly for the Kindle Fire tablet, where it evoked the spark of reading. But for a phone, "Fire" felt aggressive and hot—not the comforting, reliable qualities people want from a device they carry against their body all day.
• Facebook's Meta rebrand — Renaming an established brand to something as generic and abstract as "Meta" cost billions in recognition and trust. The lesson: arbitrary name changes need overwhelming strategic justification. Rebrands work best when they solve a real problem (Alphabet solved Google's conglomerate identity issue because each subsidiary kept its own name).

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Your Product Naming Action Plan

Here's the process distilled into actionable steps:

1. Define your brand architecture. Decide whether this product name will live under your company brand (branded house), stand alone (house of brands), or be endorsed by the parent (endorsed brand).
2. Choose your naming framework. Descriptive for clarity, suggestive for emotional resonance, arbitrary for distinctiveness, or fanciful for maximum ownership.
3. Generate 50+ candidates. Use brainstorming sessions, thesaurus exploration, word combination tools, and AI name generators. Quantity produces quality at this stage.
4. Filter for availability. Check domain names, social handles, and trademark databases. Eliminate any name that isn't legally and digitally available.
5. Test your top 5. Run the phone test, the 5-second test, and the competitor shelf test. If budget allows, run an A/B landing page test.
6. Make the decision. Don't consensus-seek forever. One person with good taste should make the final call. The best name is the one you commit to fully.
7. Protect it. Register the domain, claim social handles, and file a trademark application within 30 days of launch.

The most common mistake in product naming isn't choosing the wrong name—it's spending so long choosing that you delay the launch. A good name executed with commitment will always outperform a perfect name that never ships. For more guidance on the company-level naming process, see our guide on how to come up with a company name.