When you are choosing a soon-to-be-born child’s name, there is an excitement that is indescribable. You have a chance to create a moniker that will be known to everyone they meet. You probably have a list of 10 or more and start to shortlist the names until you are down to just a few, or even one.
Then the moment of glory occurs and you meet that little person the first time and you say their new name and it immediately makes sense. It’s their name because you chose it, and it just fits. The process is beautiful and surreal.
Let’s take a quick moment to explain why this matters for how you name your product.
Don’t Overthink Branding and Product Naming
The moment you say the name of your product, it should feel obvious. Sounds easy, right? I saw this product in Trader Joe’s and couldn’t resist buying it for the name alone. It was aptly named “A Handful of Tiny Dark Chocolate-Covered Pretzels.”
It’s literally a description of the product. Elegant in its simplicity.
Don’t Create Naming (or Renaming) Friction
We had an amazing sports arena built in Toronto in 1989 called the SkyDome. This popular sports venue was since renamed to the Rogers Centre to align with the new owners and corporate branding in 2004, but most people still call it SkyDome.
The story is important for the lesson of how consumers know your product. The name should be:
- Crisp: Don’t try to get too exotic because it has to just look simple and clean when you view it.
- Obvious: Branding should reflect the purpose or value of your product.
- Memorable: It should stick in the minds and memories of consumers.
- Meaningful: It should ideally personify the reason your platform exists.
Names like SkyDome are about as crisp, obvious, memorable, and meaningful as you can get. It’s as obvious as a handful of tiny dark chocolate covered pretzels.
What Do Pretzels and SkyDome Have to Do with Naming Your Product?
I saw a pop-up in Google Analytics this morning. Google has decided to rename “Conversions” to “Key Events” in their widely adopted analytics platform. Renaming happens for a lot of reasons, often because customers may refer to something as a name that doesn’t match your chosen product name.
The problem is that this will be like nails on a chalkboard to a lot of Google Analytics users. We all use common phrasing because Google even created the original label for conversion. From now on, we need to make map conversions a “key event”. The trick is that we will still call them conversions. But the platform will call them key events, and we have to translate that into our minds every…single…time.
I urge you to rethink why you are renaming this product or feature when your customers predominantly refer to it by a common name that reflects its specific purpose
It’s not that Google shouldn’t rename something on the platform. However, when nearly every single person in the industry uses the product to track conversions, you should probably call it conversions. If you had to be a little different, you could call it a conversion event.
If you look at a tree and decide to call it a wood stick, but everyone who visits the wood stick calls it a tree, maybe you should go with the obvious choice.
Keep it simple and Familiar
Don’t overthink your name. Listen to your customers and the technology community as they use products and features. Don’t be afraid to be as simple as you can be. Maybe I just want to eat a handful of tiny chocolate-covered pretzels in the SkyDome while I track my conversions without needing a decoder ring or thesaurus to map onto simple things.