Naming the company or naming the product

Most companies start with one product, so the company and the product get one name. That is efficient, it is what almost every early stage business does, and it quietly settles a question nobody asked: what the second product will be called.

The question arrives later, usually at a good moment rather than a bad one. Something is working, a customer asks whether you also do the adjacent thing, and you do. Then somebody has to write the sentence that describes both, and discovers the name only covers one.

The two jobs are different

A product name describes a thing that exists. It can be specific, because the thing is specific, and specificity is what makes it easy to explain and easy to remember. If the thing goes away, the name goes with it, and that is fine.

A company name has to survive the thing going away. It stands above whatever is being sold this year, and the only property it genuinely needs is that it can still be said with a straight face after the business has changed. Those two briefs pull in opposite directions, and a single name has to serve both.

How to tell which one you have

Write the sentence where your company sells something adjacent to what it sells now. Not a fantasy: the nearest plausible neighbour, the thing a customer has already asked for. Read it aloud.

If the sentence sounds ordinary, the name is doing the company job. If it sounds like a correction, or like a joke, the name is a product name wearing a company's coat. That is not a crisis. It is a fact to know before you spend three years making the name famous.

The same test decides arguments that look like taste. A room split between a descriptive finalist and an abstract one is usually split about scope rather than about sound, which is the argument worth having out loud. The difference between invented and descriptive names is the long version of that decision.

Three architectures, and the cost of each

Once you have more than one thing to sell there are three honest ways to organise the names, and you pick one whether or not you notice.

Everything carries the company name

One name, applied to every product, with plain descriptive labels after it. Every release builds the same word, nothing needs its own launch, and a customer who trusts one product arrives at the next already convinced.

The cost is that the products cannot differ much. A reputation shared between everything is shared in both directions, and a bad one takes the others with it. The naming discipline also has to hold: once product names start getting invented internally, this architecture goes quietly.

The company sits quietly above named products

Each product gets a name that can stand alone, and the company name appears in the footer and on the contract. Products can be sold, retired or aimed at people who would never buy the others, and none of that reaches the parent.

The cost is that you are building several names at once, each from nothing, and most companies cannot afford more than two. This is the architecture that looks most impressive on a slide and is most expensive to run.

One strong name, with the rest attached to it

The company name leads and product names hang off it as a modifier rather than a separate identity. The parent does the credibility, the modifier does the specificity, and a new product needs a word rather than a launch.

The cost is mostly grammatical: the compound has to stay sayable. Two words is comfortable, three is a mouthful, and once a product needs four the architecture has stopped working and nobody has said so.

Names that leave the door open

A name built from the category suggests a direction without naming a product. A name built from a feeling suggests a register without naming anything. Both leave room. A name built from what you currently sell is the one that closes the door, which is why the most common rename is not a bad name replaced by a good one but a product name replaced by a company name.

Founders tend to overestimate what a rename costs. Much of the recognition a company has is in the product and the people, not the word, and a rename done early is nearly invisible. The ones that hurt are the ones left until the word is on packaging in other people's warehouses.

The practical order

Name the company for the business you can describe in five years. Name the product for what it does this year. If one word has to do both, choose it for the company job, because that is the one you cannot redo cheaply. Then check the name is actually obtainable before the room falls in love with it, which is the order that stops most of this becoming theoretical. What to check before you commit to a name is that list.

Four names with room above the product

Names that suggest a category without naming a thing, which is what a company name has to do.

Short .com namesShort names, which tend to survive a change of product better than long ones.