Friday, August 10, 2007

How to Create a Web 2.0 Brand Name

1. Choose one of the following:

A. Misspelled word OR two misspelled words
B. misCapitalize
C. Funny name
D. Punned Phrase OR joined phrase

A. Misspelled word(s)

a. Drop a letter from the word. Dropping an "e" is popular, e.g. Flickr. Or a vowel before a letter which sounds like itself, phonetically, such as "l" or "r", e.g. Vowl.
b. Double a letter, such as "r". Grrls.
c. Change a vowel sound into the appropriate number. Gr8!
d. Add an extraneous letter in front: iTomato, jDiapers, eSnoring, xFiles.
e. For two misspelled words, misspell one or both and concaten8.

B. misCapitalize

E.g. tUnes. MissPell. grbagE.

C. Funny name

Choose a color and an animal, e.g. Blue Octopus. Red Shellfish. Turquoise Tomato. Or try an alcoholic drink (or something that sounds like one), e.g. Blue Martini, Purple Jamaica.

D. Phrases

SingShot. PhoneHomey. SecludedSound. TVGlide. Human Textuality. BlahBlahBlah.

For best results, try to get a "hip" word into the name, like "click", "dot", "web", "share", "connect", etc...

Yehuda

6 comments:

Dave The Game said...

I was hoping for an example that used all of those together, to form the ultimate Web 2.0 name :)

MaksimSmelchak said...

Hi Yehusa,

Very clever. I really enjoyed this post! Thanks!

Shabbat Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

gnome said...

How very true. Excellent post!

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Thanks. Sorry, Dave.

Yehuda

Gavin Schmitt said...

It's so true it hurts! Except misspellings, I remember going using all of these techniques when coming up with my own company's name.

Web 2.0 or not, I guess it isn't surprising when company names have to be recognizable and memorable, easy to remember / type in correctly as a URL, and be 'different' from the names of their competitors.

I'm just waiting for a company to try something 'too different' (like Blue Infant Games) and get flack for it :)

Anonymous said...

You forgot the best technique of all... pick a tribal sounding name (e.g. Mambo, Joomla, Xuga, Tribe, Imeem, Veoh, etc.)