31–40 of 55 posts
The energy behind a great name will give your product momentum, it'll make it easier to evangelise, as the name will trigger off a narrative that pretty much tells itself.
Yes, names matter a lot. Being that a name is a basis for a brand, and building the right brand is a core of building a successful business, you can not underestimate it. Two of my favorite naming examples are Dropbox and GoPro, both manage to be memorable, succinct and convey a clear purpose without being cheap, literal or generic (e.g. "ShareAnywhere"). I'm sure these names helped the brands get to where they are.
For every Dropbox, there's a Heroku.
People mock Lady Gaga for her clothing, similarly Lorde gets criticism for dancing funny. The occupy protesters were dismissed with comments like "They might have a point but they're not going to convince anyone dressed like that". People have said that DuckDuckGo is awesome but they can't recommend it to people because of the name. In the last few days I have seen people say they wouldn't trust the cubieboard because http://cubieboard.org/ isn't a very good website.
So appearance matters. Your name is part of your appearance. This means from a pragmatic perspective I agree with pg's comment comparing it to aerodynamic drag. On the other hand I don't thing this is a healthy state for the world. In all of the examples above the substance is far more important than the presentation. In many cases accepting the presentation in it's own right would be even better. Looking different should not be a sin, and often it should be embraced as adding flavour to the world.
A final note, It is interesting to note that in the dotcom bubble, Many of the big survivers were businesses where their name did not reflect their function. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay. I think a big part of this is that while they built on a core product, their name didn't present the notion that they were restricted to their core product or even that their core product could change entirely.
Yes, names matter a lot. Being that a name is a basis for a brand, and building the right brand is a core of building a successful business, you can not underestimate it. Two of my favorite naming examples are Dropbox and GoPro, both manage to be memorable, succinct and convey a clear purpose without being cheap, literal or generic (e.g. "ShareAnywhere"). I'm sure these names helped the brands get to where they are.
Unless you adopt a definition of the term "brand" that is so general as to be useless, building the right brand is not the core of building a successful business; that is the kind of thing a PR firm would say. For every Dropbox, there's a Heroku.
As one example, I can't think of a more generic name than Southwest Airlines, but somehow they've managed to brand themselves as the fun airline. With a little more effort, I'm sure even better examples could be identified. Coca-cola? McDonald's? Meaningless names.
Yes, names matter a lot. Being that a name is a basis for a brand, and building the right brand is a core of building a successful business, you can not underestimate it. Two of my favorite naming examples are Dropbox and GoPro, both manage to be memorable, succinct and convey a clear purpose without being cheap, literal or generic (e.g. "ShareAnywhere"). I'm sure these names helped the brands get to where they are.
Unless you adopt a definition of the term "brand" that is so general as to be useless, building the right brand is not the core of building a successful business; that is the kind of thing a PR firm would say. For every Dropbox, there's a Heroku.
This is especially important in the consumer space (when you buy a GoPro you don't just buy a camera, but buy into the whole extreme filming experience). There are other comparable cameras, but consumers don't even bother researching them. They buy the brand. This is why GoPro is a $2.5bn company today; Panasonic or Sony could have made the same product with typically obscure naming (XVH-800 whatever) and it would have remained just a niche thing.
People are buying an experience no less than they buy utility, and branding is core to that. I do look at branding in a very wide sense; to me GoPro's branding starts with the name, continues with their sponsored videos and ends with the product packaging and store display.
Look.. Last I checked, there's a product called SOYLENT that people are willingly consuming.
The best metaphor for this might be aerodynamic drag. A bad name can slow you down. You'll prevail eventually if you're good enough, but slower than you would have done with a good name. Whereas a good name won't get you anywhere without a good product, just as a plane with a low drag coefficient won't go anywhere without powerful engines.
"a plane with a low drag coefficient won't go anywhere without powerful engines." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_%28aircraft%29
I assume the author of the poll isn't asking whether the difference between "Zap" and "Quacyxloctl" matters, but rather how important marginal differences between names are. I think they're much less important than people think they are, and usually cite both Airbnb (a name that actually has negative connotations to the positioning Airbnb aspires to now) and Ebay (an utterly meaningless name) as examples. Earlier com…