Who said YouTube is a waste of time? It can even teach you on how to come up with a great company or product name!
Naming a company or a product is so crucial in a product start-up. You can call your services company – “The Great Maharashtra IT Services and Systems Company” and your clients may not care too much! Product startups, especially in the consumer space, need to think a lot before naming their company or their product. This is only because it needs to be simple to pronounce and spell, may not mean something bad in another language, and most importantly, domain names need to be available and make for good branding and trademark protection!
Rather than me making this a lecture, I thought this time around I will have YouTube videos tell you the story of why Company and Product naming is important and more importantly, how to go about doing it in a systematic way. And how not to do it!
Here is a five minute video that gives you a quick overview of why names are important and a systematic way of going about it! This company’s own name CatchWord is a great name for a consulting company that specializes in providing naming services! They seem to have come up with that name following their own process.
The main takeaway from the video above is that it is an involved process and worth taking the time to do it carefully and painstakingly!
If you think that some very successful companies have not made mistakes in their own names, watch this clip from the movie The Social Network. Facebook was once The Facebook until Sean Parker, Co-Founder of Napster advises Mark Zuckerberg to take the “the” out!
If you are wondering where the name Apple came from, here’s a video that explains that! The Macintosh was almost called The Bicycle and the iMac was about to be called MacMan! And those were Steve Jobs’ ideas!
If you want to be rolling on the floor laughing, here’s a presentation of failed product names! Good lesson in checking what your company or product name means in other languages and your own!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet – William Shakespeare.
Well…..May be Not!!
