What is naming and its role in branding
What type of naming to choose: from acronyms to metaphors
In practice, namerers work with a limited set of name-building models, and the choice of a specific one depends on the promotion budget, industry, and how much the name should 'explain' the product by itself.
| Type of naming | How it is constructed | When it works | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Descriptive | Direct description of the product or function | New market, need to explain the essence without advertising | «Fast Taxi», «Aeroflot» |
| Acronym | Abbreviation from the first letters of words | Long official name needs to be simplified in casual speech | IBM, MTS |
| Associative | Word that hints at benefit or emotion, without direct description | There is a marketing budget, freedom is needed to expand the product line | Nike (goddess of victory) |
| Metaphorical | Transferring an image from another sphere to a product | Need to fix an emotional image, not a function | Puma, Jaguar |
| Artificial (fantastical) | A word that does not exist in the language | A legally clean and unique mark from scratch is needed | Kodak, Xerox |
A common mistake in briefs is choosing a naming type based on the principle of 'what sounds more beautiful'. In practice, a descriptive name saves budget on explaining the product, but does not scale well if the company decides to enter another category. A fantastical name scales excellently, but the first one to two years will require doubled ad investments — simply because the word has no initial meaning that would hint to the audience what it's about.
Legal check: what will not pass trademark registration
The creative part of naming usually takes less time than the legal review. Roskomnadzor and Rospatent reject applications for quite predictable reasons, and knowing them before starting the name generation is a way to avoid wasting a month of work.
- Use of already protected common elements — if the word or its part is established for another owner in the same category of goods.
- Official names of states, international organizations, their abbreviations and symbolism — such elements are not registered without special permission.
- Designations that mislead consumers regarding the product, its properties or manufacturer.
- Words and phrases that contradict public interests, principles of humanity and morality.
- Industry common terms — for example, an attempt to register the word «milk» for dairy products.
Checking against these points takes weeks, sometimes even months, so a reasonable practice is to simultaneously send a shortlist of 10-15 options for a preliminary patent search along with creative generation, rather than wait for the final customer decision.
Why a creative name can acquire a bad meaning
A name can be impeccable in sound in the native language and completely fail in the neighboring market — and this is not a rarity, but a systemic problem that most articles on naming tend to overlook. The reason is that the meaning of a word lives not only in the dictionary, but also in phonetics, in the associations with everyday and profanity lexicon of another language.
Real failures confirm this. The mineral water brand Blue Water encountered a problem when entering the Russian market, as buyers openly laughed at the pronunciation of the brand name — it sounded comical rather than premium, as intended. The French brand of baby food Blédina is perceived in the Russian-speaking environment as being similar in sound to profanity, which destroys trust even before a buyer opens the packaging. The SUV Mitsubishi Pajero had to be renamed for Spanish-speaking countries — the word has an obscene slang meaning, and nobody considered this when developing the name for the Japanese market.
Such situations can only be prevented by a systematic phonetic and cultural check of the brand name on each target market language before the name is approved, not after the advertising campaign has launched. This is a separate stage that should be included in the naming budget for any ambitious international launch, not an optional feature like 'if there is time left.'
Naming and branding are different professions that are often confused
Naming is the development of one specific word or phrase. Branding is the construction of the entire system of meanings, visuals, tone of voice, and experience in which this word lives. It is easy to confuse them because the name often becomes the first visible point of contact with the brand, and clients often expect the namer to solve tasks that are actually related to positioning or visual identity.
In practice, this looks like this: naming answers the question 'what will this be called,' while branding answers 'what should the client feel and think about the company as a whole.' A name without the rest of the branding system is simply a word. A strong branding can pull even a neutral-sounding name, but the reverse is almost impossible: a brilliant name without a positioning strategy, visuals, and communication quickly loses its strength.
How a name becomes an asset: positioning and the cost of zero-fill
The word Adidas originally carried no marketing meaning — it was an abbreviation of the founder's name, Adolf Dassler. Puma was also not a metaphor for speed at the time of its creation — the association with a swift predator emerged later, as a result of decades of deliberate work on the brand image. Names like these are called 'names with zero marketing content': they do not hint at anything by themselves and require multiple times more resources at the start to be filled with meaning through advertising, sponsorship contracts, and product solutions. This is a fundamental point to consider when choosing a strategy: if the budget is limited, it is wiser to choose a name with an initial semantic hint toward benefit. If the budget allows for a long-term approach — a 'blank' name offers greater legal and stylistic freedom in the future.
A telling counterexample is the story of Chevrolet. The leadership of General Motors long officially forbade the use of the colloquial abbreviation 'Chevy,' believing that the diminutive form would devalue the brand and reduce its recognizability. Practice proved the opposite: the informal name took root in consumers' language on its own, came to be perceived warmly and familiarly, adding humanity to the brand, which the official name lacked. Over time, the name accumulates meanings independently of the original marketers' plan — and this is one of the reasons why a brand name should correctly be regarded as a material asset that grows in value along with the company's reputation, rather than as a one-time creative solution.
The connection to positioning here is direct: according to Harvard Business Review, 64% of respondents make a purchase precisely because they see shared values with the brand. The name is the first signal of these values, and if it contradicts the positioning (for example, a serious fintech company chooses a playful childish name), audience trust has to be built against the first impression rather than in support of it.
Five layers that make up a strong name
Professional nomenclature is the synthesis of five different aspects at once, and the weakness of almost any unsuccessful name can be explained by the fact that one of these layers was ignored.
- Semantic — what meaning the word itself carries, whether it has undesirable meanings in other languages.
- Syntactic — how the name is structured grammatically, whether it is inflected, whether it is easy to form derivative forms.
- Axiological — what values and assessments the word conveys, does it match the brand positioning.
- Psychological — how the name is perceived by ear, how easy it is to pronounce and remember, what emotions it evokes.
- Legal — can the name be registered as a trademark and protected from copying.
Development that checks only the sound and uniqueness — which is exactly how most simplified naming guides work — covers at best only two layers out of five. True strategic naming keeps all five in focus simultaneously, because a failure in any of them will sooner or later show up in court or at the cash register.
What type of naming to choose: from acronyms to metaphors
In practice, namerers work with a limited set of name-building models, and the choice of a specific one depends on the promotion budget, industry, and how much the name should 'explain' the product by itself.
| Type of naming | How it is constructed | When it works | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Descriptive | Direct description of the product or function | New market, need to explain the essence without advertising | «Fast Taxi», «Aeroflot» |
| Acronym | Abbreviation from the first letters of words | Long official name needs to be simplified in casual speech | IBM, MTS |
| Associative | Word that hints at benefit or emotion, without direct description | There is a marketing budget, freedom is needed to expand the product line | Nike (goddess of victory) |
| Metaphorical | Transferring an image from another sphere to a product | Need to fix an emotional image, not a function | Puma, Jaguar |
| Artificial (fantastical) | A word that does not exist in the language | A legally clean and unique mark from scratch is needed | Kodak, Xerox |
A common mistake in briefs is choosing a naming type based on the principle of 'what sounds more beautiful'. In practice, a descriptive name saves budget on explaining the product, but does not scale well if the company decides to enter another category. A fantastical name scales excellently, but the first one to two years will require doubled ad investments — simply because the word has no initial meaning that would hint to the audience what it's about.
Legal check: what will not pass trademark registration
The creative part of naming usually takes less time than the legal review. Roskomnadzor and Rospatent reject applications for quite predictable reasons, and knowing them before starting the name generation is a way to avoid wasting a month of work.
- Use of already protected common elements — if the word or its part is established for another owner in the same category of goods.
- Official names of states, international organizations, their abbreviations and symbolism — such elements are not registered without special permission.
- Designations that mislead consumers regarding the product, its properties or manufacturer.
- Words and phrases that contradict public interests, principles of humanity and morality.
- Industry common terms — for example, an attempt to register the word «milk» for dairy products.
Checking against these points takes weeks, sometimes even months, so a reasonable practice is to simultaneously send a shortlist of 10-15 options for a preliminary patent search along with creative generation, rather than wait for the final customer decision.
Why a creative name can acquire a bad meaning
A name can be impeccable in sound in the native language and completely fail in the neighboring market — and this is not a rarity, but a systemic problem that most articles on naming tend to overlook. The reason is that the meaning of a word lives not only in the dictionary, but also in phonetics, in the associations with everyday and profanity lexicon of another language.
Real failures confirm this. The mineral water brand Blue Water encountered a problem when entering the Russian market, as buyers openly laughed at the pronunciation of the brand name — it sounded comical rather than premium, as intended. The French brand of baby food Blédina is perceived in the Russian-speaking environment as being similar in sound to profanity, which destroys trust even before a buyer opens the packaging. The SUV Mitsubishi Pajero had to be renamed for Spanish-speaking countries — the word has an obscene slang meaning, and nobody considered this when developing the name for the Japanese market.
Such situations can only be prevented by a systematic phonetic and cultural check of the brand name on each target market language before the name is approved, not after the advertising campaign has launched. This is a separate stage that should be included in the naming budget for any ambitious international launch, not an optional feature like 'if there is time left.'
Naming and branding are different professions that are often confused
Naming is the development of one specific word or phrase. Branding is the construction of the entire system of meanings, visuals, tone of voice, and experience in which this word lives. It is easy to confuse them because the name often becomes the first visible point of contact with the brand, and clients often expect the namer to solve tasks that are actually related to positioning or visual identity.
In practice, this looks like this: naming answers the question 'what will this be called,' while branding answers 'what should the client feel and think about the company as a whole.' A name without the rest of the branding system is simply a word. A strong branding can pull even a neutral-sounding name, but the reverse is almost impossible: a brilliant name without a positioning strategy, visuals, and communication quickly loses its strength.
How a name becomes an asset: positioning and the cost of zero-fill
The word Adidas originally carried no marketing meaning — it was an abbreviation of the founder's name, Adolf Dassler. Puma was also not a metaphor for speed at the time of its creation — the association with a swift predator emerged later, as a result of decades of deliberate work on the brand image. Names like these are called 'names with zero marketing content': they do not hint at anything by themselves and require multiple times more resources at the start to be filled with meaning through advertising, sponsorship contracts, and product solutions. This is a fundamental point to consider when choosing a strategy: if the budget is limited, it is wiser to choose a name with an initial semantic hint toward benefit. If the budget allows for a long-term approach — a 'blank' name offers greater legal and stylistic freedom in the future.
A telling counterexample is the story of Chevrolet. The leadership of General Motors long officially forbade the use of the colloquial abbreviation 'Chevy,' believing that the diminutive form would devalue the brand and reduce its recognizability. Practice proved the opposite: the informal name took root in consumers' language on its own, came to be perceived warmly and familiarly, adding humanity to the brand, which the official name lacked. Over time, the name accumulates meanings independently of the original marketers' plan — and this is one of the reasons why a brand name should correctly be regarded as a material asset that grows in value along with the company's reputation, rather than as a one-time creative solution.
The connection to positioning here is direct: according to Harvard Business Review, 64% of respondents make a purchase precisely because they see shared values with the brand. The name is the first signal of these values, and if it contradicts the positioning (for example, a serious fintech company chooses a playful childish name), audience trust has to be built against the first impression rather than in support of it.
Five layers that make up a strong name
Professional nomenclature is the synthesis of five different aspects at once, and the weakness of almost any unsuccessful name can be explained by the fact that one of these layers was ignored.
- Semantic — what meaning the word itself carries, whether it has undesirable meanings in other languages.
- Syntactic — how the name is structured grammatically, whether it is inflected, whether it is easy to form derivative forms.
- Axiological — what values and assessments the word conveys, does it match the brand positioning.
- Psychological — how the name is perceived by ear, how easy it is to pronounce and remember, what emotions it evokes.
- Legal — can the name be registered as a trademark and protected from copying.
Development that checks only the sound and uniqueness — which is exactly how most simplified naming guides work — covers at best only two layers out of five. True strategic naming keeps all five in focus simultaneously, because a failure in any of them will sooner or later show up in court or at the cash register.
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