Name your company

There are three routes you can take when it comes to naming:

1. Descriptive: Fairly explicit about what your business is and does. Examples include Whole Foods, Toys "R" Us and PayPal.
2. Suggestive: Evokes or suggests what your business or product is about, often via metaphor. Examples include Amazon, which suggests a giant river/huge selection, and Mint, where money is created.
3. Fanciful: Has nothing directly to do with your company’s offering. Examples include Adobe and Apple.

When brainstorming:

1. Create three buckets for descriptive, suggestive and fanciful names. Let yourself be open to all three; you don’t know if you’ll happen upon a name you’ll fall in love with.
2. Take your written-out positioning statement and break it into nouns and verbs. For every meaningful word you can isolate, create a full list of synonyms. Once you have this list, you can try all kinds of different combinations:
   • Real words: Repurposed words (Examples: Apple, Gain, Square)
   • Compounds: Two words fused together (Salesforce, Facebook)
   • Blends: Part of one word combined with part of another (Pinterest, Microsoft)
   • Affixes: Tack something on like -er or -ly (Blogger, Contently)
   • Truncations: Shorten a word or concept (Cisco is a clipped version of San Francisco)
   • Other languages: Words that mean or suggest what you want to convey in other languages (Reebok, Asana)

Example: Web Browsers

• Descriptive: Internet Explorer
• Suggestive: Safari (connoting the idea of exploration)
• Fanciful: Firefox