Much of what I know about marketing and advertising, I learned from the books of Reis and Trout. They say that the single most important decision about a new product is deciding on its name. I imagine that engineers, complaint departments and accountants would disagree but I can see how the name can matter.
I see several ways that names are approached. To me, the current worldwide communication network, including more and more ways to quickly translate from one language to another, means that nearly any word may well be used already, quite possibly in a way that will put a product at a disadvantage. I have read that "Nova" can be said in Spanish in a way that sounds like "no va" or doesn't go. So, that was not a good name for a car. The habit of picturing the contents of canned goods on the label of the can was not good for baby food that had a picture of a baby on the can.
I named my blog in the order that I thought my thoughts happened: fear first, then amusement or pleasure and finally consideration of the matter. Thus, "fear", "fun" and philosophy. I used the more phonetic spelling of "filosofy" shortened to just "filoz". I would probably not have used that spelling if I had known that "filoz" is a type of pancake. When I put the word into Google, I get more than a quarter million results.
Some names are not evocative, such as "Stoneway" or Elmstone, which Google just told me is the name of a village in England.
The computer game "Angry Birds" has been coming up in what I look at quite often recently. My great-grandson plays the game on the iPad and I guess a couple of million other people do, too. I wonder if there is an interesting story on the derivation of the name. Using the game's success as a model in naming, emotional words and animal words might be combined, I guess. But when I tried "happy snails" and "grouchy crickets", I found thousands of uses of those terms already. But when I tried that last term without the space between (grouchycrickets) I found no uses. That is something I have seen before, little use of wordsstrungtogether.
I think the book "Space Between Words" says that the spaces we are used to these days were invented by Irish monks about the year 700 AD. Before that wordswereoftenstrungtogethermakingthemmuchhardertoread.
Trying for a unique name is hard work, as is finding a name that reminds of the product. Blogs, rock and other musical groups and, no doubt, many other projects, products and people are using up all our names at a great rate. I hope we don't run out!
