Reinventing the wheel with a product name

Written by verbal identity and branding specialist Phil Ramsell, joint founder of Sticky Name Design and native English copywriter & creative director based in Hamburg, Germany

It doesn’t matter how life-changing or cutting-edge a new product is, give it a sucky name and prospective customers may not even be prepared to see beyond that – and actually consider what it can do for them. The first impression your product makes through the name you give it really can be a deal maker or breaker. So getting your name right is absolutely critical if you want to give your new product the best possible start in life.

Product naming’s biggest challenge

But here’s the rub, often the biggest challenge to getting product naming right comes from having to overcome the legacy mindsets of the product creators themselves. And this is understandable. Those who have spent so much time in conceiving, designing and developing a new product quite rightly see it as their ‘baby’ – and for this reason, see themselves as the people best qualified to name it. Their level of personal and collective investment in bringing their baby to life (often over many years) also invariably leads them to develop their own codename for it. A name that undoubtedly has an incredibly sticky meaning for them but will almost always lack the power to resonate with actual customers of their product.

This is the situation facing Creative Director, Don Draper as he prepares to pitch a product name to Kodak for a new circular slide projector they have codenamed ‘The Wheel’. Watch the video below to see how Don masterfully delivers a pitch that counters his client’s legacy mindset and uses their own product to demonstrate exactly why they need a different name.

So what makes a great product name?

There are several lessons we can take away from this scene. Firstly, that we should all stick to what we’re best at. The expertise to create amazing new products resides firmly with product developers, the skills to successfully name new products with ad agencies or specialist name designers. There’s no upside in ever confusing the two.

The second lesson is in many ways contingent on the first. Those who are experts in creating new products tend to have tunnel vision when it comes to naming them. Their best efforts being almost always focused on the product’s technology or rational benefits. And again, this is understandable – because that’s what ‘moves’ them about what they’ve created. But those who are skilled in product naming recognise that these kind of names will never have the power to ‘move’ consumers in the same way. As Don explains in his pitch, “technology is a glittering lure”, but the real key to winning over consumers is to create a deeper emotional bond with the product. And that’s exactly what the name he proposes does.

By naming Kodak’s new circular slide projectior, ‘Carousel’, Don loads the product with emotional meaning anchored in people’s positive memories of childhood fairground rides. It’s a naming play to evergreen nostalgia that takes the product way beyond where any association with a wheel could take it. On the one hand, it’s a sticky metaphor for how the device takes people on a circular journey through their photographic memories with all the wonder that a child feels on a carousel. On the other hand, it elevates the product into something even more magical – a “time machine” that enables people to travel backwards and forwards through all the good times they’ve ever captured with their camera. Something that truly is moving. So hats off to another unforgettable Mad Men pitch. One that just goes to show how it is possible to reinvent the wheel when it comes to product naming.