What’s in a Product Name ?
So what’s needed before a product goes to market? Obviously extensive research is undertaken with regards to sector requirements, quality, structure & content, design, cost and so on. Having ticked all the relevant boxes the fun part can start – naming the range and colours.
The product name is often short and snappy you only need to look at car ranges to see how names can work! They are often easy to remember with consideration given to text length for sampling and marketing purposes. Needless to say the name should be unique within its field and care taken that if translated the name isn’t offensive in any other languages – if you visit France often you’ll know that with every pizza you are offered ‘Spicy Pizz’ for your enjoyment.
Often the starting point is the design of the tile. For instance ‘Strobe’ took its name by association of its appearance. A bright intermittent insertion of colour on a neutral grey base gave rise to name options such as ‘proton’, ‘morse’, ‘dot-dash’, ‘infusion’ but ‘Strobe’ won the day.
‘Codec’ is another where the design helped the naming process. The striped design resembled a barcode and its imagery related to digital coding or encoding so the name ‘Codec’ was a perfect fit. As far as colours were concerned rather than simply opt for blue, red, grey, green etc. . . . associated words in the digital computing related fields were used, such as ‘hex’, ‘binary’, ‘pathway’ and ‘digital’ to continue the theme. Therefore often the product name helps with the colour names.
The ‘Workspace’ name on the other hand gives an image of a solid reliable product for business, office or educational use. As one of Paragon’s core products ‘Workspace Loop’ quickly became synonymous with a heavy wear dependable cost efficient commercial carpet tile. Colour names were a little more conventional as becoming a solid, middle market performer with names mostly descriptive against the colours themselves, i.e. ‘Ruby’, ‘Smoke’, ‘Bronze’ etc…
Other selected product names and meanings:
‘Macaw’ – colourful bird of paradise, long tailed parrot.
‘Sirocco’ – one of the names of the Mediterranean wind! (We could also have called it Mistral, Gregale, Levante, Panente, Libeccio, Ostro or Tramontane, but somehow ‘Sirocco’ just seems right!)
‘Toccarre’ – based on the Italian verb meaning ‘to touch’ or ‘to handle’ was chosen because the weave in the Toccarre product in prototype testing had many internal staff reaching for the tile surprised that the finish was simply an illusion and not a multi-level product.
One of our most recent additions, Sirocco Stripe found its colour names purely based on appearance and as a continuation of an existing brand name. One of the first colourways, a two toned grey stripe, reminded our marketing/design team of a humbug sweet – this fitted in with the product identity to be a bit different and more fun in demeanour than its long standing brother Sirocco. Other Sirocco Stripe colour names such as ‘Liquorice’, ‘Bubblegum’, ‘Blue Candy’ and ‘Spearmint’ compound the theme of fun and bright colourways to differentiate the range in tone from Sirocco.
Naming ranges and colour is a mix of rocket science, research and guesswork – Apple is a brand worth £150billion pounds but was the name really thought over and researched thoroughly after being created in a garage? Many vehicle names are simple but are heavily researched, firstly to create brand segments that rivals cannot copy such as Audi’s A1-A7 and secondly to create a spoken sound that sounds purposeful or sporty – would you buy a GTI if it was called the WXY!! At Paragon we try to employ a mixed effort of all 3 principles to generate products our distributors and clients can say and relate too easily while at the same time conveying its place in our hierarchy of Good, Better and Best.
How do you name yours ? get in touch with us [email protected]
This article published by South West Area Sales Manager – Steve Shoebottom
