The High-Stakes Theatre of Naming a New Product
Before we get into it, let me confess something. I’ve spent the better part of this week lurking in the naming backlogs of New Zealand startups. Not for a scoop, not even for a laugh. Just curiosity. What I found was equal parts theatre, existential dread and a tragic misunderstanding of how humans think.
Naming a product should feel like writing a haiku with a baseball bat over your shoulder. You want art, clarity and the potential to knock someone off balance. Instead, many settle for Frankenwords. Smushed syllables that promise tech innovation but sound like prescription medicine side effects. Somewhere along the line, marketers forgot that names are spoken aloud. Heard in cafes. Remembered during walks.
Take Wynyard, for example. The now-defunct crime analytics platform targeting global police forces. It was named after a ferry terminal. No chrome sci-fi suffixes, just something local and grounded. It worked until it didn’t. But the name was never the problem. What I love about names like that is what they omit. They leave space. They trust the product to carry the weight.
My advice? Spend less time generating ten thousand options with synonyms for ‘connect’ and ‘cloud’. Spend more time walking. Eavesdropping. Listening to what people actually say when they’re not in brainstorm meetings. Or, better yet, pull out the Scrabble set. Real words still work. Even for digital things.
Naming a product should feel like writing a haiku with a baseball bat over your shoulder. You want art, clarity and the potential to knock someone off balance. Instead, many settle for Frankenwords. Smushed syllables that promise tech innovation but sound like prescription medicine side effects. Somewhere along the line, marketers forgot that names are spoken aloud. Heard in cafes. Remembered during walks.
Take Wynyard, for example. The now-defunct crime analytics platform targeting global police forces. It was named after a ferry terminal. No chrome sci-fi suffixes, just something local and grounded. It worked until it didn’t. But the name was never the problem. What I love about names like that is what they omit. They leave space. They trust the product to carry the weight.
My advice? Spend less time generating ten thousand options with synonyms for ‘connect’ and ‘cloud’. Spend more time walking. Eavesdropping. Listening to what people actually say when they’re not in brainstorm meetings. Or, better yet, pull out the Scrabble set. Real words still work. Even for digital things.