Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Shakespeare was right when Juliette asked “What's in a name?” because, as it turns out, it’s quite a lot.

Everything we interact with has a name. People, places, items, brands, they’re all referred to with words so entwined with their being that we often neglect the fact they could have just as easily been called anything else. Without getting too semiotic about how the word “Tree” and the signified Tree that we talk about are not inherently linked outside of linguistics, today my reader I want you to interrogate the meaning found in some of the names you interact with every day.

In the professional world one of the most obvious examples of a ‘name’ is a brand name or a company name. Take your own for example, you might be intimately familiar with its background, its meaning, its reference, heck you may have been present when it was first scrawled out on a napkin. However it was manifested, have you ever considered what the name alone communicates to its potential customers?

Granted, with some brands their names have grown to instill security, reliability, profitability solely by the nature of them already being a major player in their field for decades. Nothing about Apple necessarily communicates that it’s the world's most valuable technology brand other than the fact that we’re all aware it has been dominating the field and that roughly 2.2 billion people on the planet own one of its products. The cache of the name came from its accomplishments, but it could have just as easily been named ‘Tree’ and maintained a similar market cap.

That said, for the brands that don’t quite make the Fortune 500, a good name serves both to communicate things to ourselves and our audience. A name should ideally give a gist of its purpose, values, goals, and identity. Sometimes this can be quite literal like Canadian Pacific Railway. For small-scale cottage industry projects a pun or play on words is a tried-and-true way to endear yourself to clients. A personal favorite of mine comes from a hair salon I spotted in the UK dubbed Curl Up And Dye which expertly deploys both methods at once.

There should be a level of uniqueness to your name that distinguishes you from direct competition. Memorable, pronounceable, and able to pass the phone test (i.e. can you hear and accurately write the name down if told it over the phone) these are all great metrics to aim for, but understanding what your name communicates to someone that’s never heard of you is crucial to making a powerful first impression.

Begin by considering the values and purposes of your organization. A bank might value security, stability, and trust, which can be seen in The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce which conveys an old-money colonial sentiment, while a name like Chase has always confused me. Even though the name comes from Salmon P. Chase, the US Treasury Secretary under Lincoln, and remains a wildly successful bank throughout The States, I’m personally not that comforted by the idea of needing to ‘chase’ my money from place to place if I ever wanted to withdraw it.

When it comes to tech-startups the ‘drop a few vowels from a noun’ strategy, delightfully dubbed ‘disemvoweling’, demonstrates that brands begun spending less time considering the actual “meaning” of their names than they did their memorability and if they could be used as a vehicle to capture the traffic of a common word. This was largely in response to the cornering of single words during the .com goldrush which quickly led to the ownership of nearly every word in the English Dictionary followed by .com. This accumulation forced many tech founders to focus more on pronunciation than on grammar. David Karp the founder of Tumblr.com put this succinctly saying, “At the end of the day… it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com (with an ‘e’) looks f---- stupid.”

A clear instance of the emotional bond an audience can form with your name can be seen in Twitter which started its life as Twttr when the domain name Twitter.com was owned by a bird enthusiast that the Twitter founders eventually agreed to buy the domain from at a massive markup. Though it’s recent transition to the much maligned ‘X’ might just be the ultimate example of the gutting of meaning from company names. X is everything and nothing all at once, it’s a mathematical symbol, a sexual symbol, a mark, a cross, a negative, an unnamable ‘factor’, and of course was chosen as “the ‘coolest’ letter of the alphabet” when polling both Elon Musk and 12-year-olds worldwide. With a name like X there was certainly buzz generated about the drastic rebranding of an internet staple, but despite the ongoing skirmishes between the Xvangelists and the Orthodox Twitterites, the adoption of the new name has broadly been integrated and moved past. The attention it once grabbed was drawn more by temporary novelty than anything else.

There has been some recent reversal of the brand disemvowelment trend to full, grammatically correct words being used by companies to be both literal and explicit with their business, while continuing to corner entire concepts like the clothing store Wardrobe. Take Blast as an example. Mike explained his reasoning behind the name as an origin story. “When I began working as an independent company, I wanted to create a brand that encapsulated what was unique and different about the way I work. I would just say that it conveys speed, simplicity, clarity and high impact. When I thought about words that were short and conveyed this “Blast” surfaced right away.”

When thinking of what name represents your brand, remember that the name will always be secondary to the content of the service. Your identity as a brand can feel concrete and unchangeable. Shaking up your identity can be costly, labor intensive, and unintuitive to users that have gotten used to the precedent. For Mike, the brand name arose by primarily grounding it in the values and goals of the company.

Deciding on a good name is a highly personal decision that will fundamentally shape how your company or organization is seen. But, before you indulge in the temptation to emulate what you see other successful brands doing by following trends like disemvowelment, literal names, or joining the X-ify X-ly family of brands, heed this warning:

“You don’t want your business name to be part of a trend. Trends have short life cycles.” -Mariana Glazman, Founder of Suitely

If you don’t know who Mariana is or what Suitely was, take this as proof enough that she’s speaking from experience.