Breakout Brand Names Have DNA in Common

Category-defining brand names all share a well-defined set of qualities.  To find your perfect name, you need to identify and seek out these qualities.

Our guidebook provides the clear principles & actionable insights necessary for you to create the most powerful name in your space, like a brand naming expert.  An essential framework, it gives your team a shared set of criteria and a strategy for evaluating names.

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When your brand positioning requires a name that expresses two very different ideas in a single word, one proven strategy is to have the look, sound and personality convey idea “A” and the meaning of the name convey idea “Z”.

A real-world execution of this strategy is Trillium, a family of processors we named for Arm. The name needed to convey “high tech” AND “organic”. The name Trillium has a futuristic/sci-fi/high tech look, sound and personality. Trillium could be what powers the ships of Starfleet, the name of a fictional planet or an element on the periodic table.

Trillium covers “organic” with its meaning. It’s a type of flower, a three-petalled white lily. And now it’s a processor. It’s one of a few strategies you should explore in parallel

Back when a name like Slack was unimaginable in Silicon Valley, it was rife with off-putting names. The stubbornly held falsehood that B2B names needed to be full of dehumanizing gravitas was rarely defied, even though Oracle had broken the mold 14 years earlier.