What's In a Name
Literal, fusion, invented, borrowed, founder-led, acronym, metaphorical — the naming principles most founders never get shown, and why the name is one component, not the whole system.
Naming a brand feels like it should be the fun part. Then the whiteboard fills up, half the good options are already trademarked, and somebody in the room says “can we just call it what it does?” That instinct — name it what it does — is one of at least half a dozen legitimate paths. Most founders only know one or two of them exist, which is why so many naming sessions end in a compromise nobody loves.
The Literal Name
Say what the thing is. General Motors makes motors, generally. PayPal pays people. Instant Pot is an instant pot. There's real value here — zero explanation tax, instant clarity, a name that does half the marketing job by itself.
The cost shows up later. Literal names age badly the moment the company outgrows the literal description. General Electric doesn't sell much general electricity anymore, and the name now works purely on inherited weight, not on what it says. A literal name borrows clarity today against flexibility tomorrow.
The Fusion
Jam two words together and let the collision do the work. Microsoft is microcomputers plus software. Pinterest is pinning plus interest. Groupon is group plus coupon. A good fusion keeps a sliver of literal meaning — enough that a stranger can half-guess what you do — while sounding like nobody else's name.
The risk is the seam showing. A clumsy fusion reads like a compromise between two people who couldn't agree, because often it is one.
The Invented Word
Build a word that didn't exist before you needed it: Kodak, Xerox, Google, Häagen-Dazs. Nothing here means anything on day one. That's the entire point.
An invented name is the strongest asset a legal team will ever thank you for — nobody else owns “Kodak” in any language, in any context, for any reason. It's also the hardest sell in the room, because it asks everyone to trust that meaning can be built rather than borrowed. It always can. It's just slower, and it costs marketing spend that a literal name gets for free.
The Paths People Forget
Those three get most of the airtime, but they're not the whole list. Borrowed words take something that already exists and repurpose it entirely — Apple, Amazon, Shell — with no inherent connection to the business, just ownable, easy to say, and not already claimed. Founder names trade on a real person — Ford, Dyson, Bloomberg — arriving with instant credibility and a built-in succession problem. Acronyms and initialisms compress a longer name into something sayable — IBM, HSBC, BMW — useful once a name is already established, strange as a starting point. And metaphorical names borrow a feeling without describing the business at all — Oracle, Nike — asking for a leap of imagination up front in exchange for real emotional weight later.
None of these is “correct.” Each one is a different trade between meaning now and meaning you build later — and every naming brief should say, out loud, which trade the business is actually making.
The Name Is a Component, Not the System
Here's the part that gets lost in every naming workshop: the name is one piece of the brand, not the brand itself. Google is a nonsense word that means nothing. Virgin was a strange choice for an airline and a stranger one for a bank. Uber just means “very” in German. None of these names carried their category's meaning on day one — they earned it, over years, through the product and everything the company did under that name after the naming decision was already made and mostly forgotten.
A decent name chosen quickly, backed by a strong brand system and years of consistent delivery, will always outperform a perfect name that took a year to agree on and left no runway to actually build the business. Get the name good enough. Spend the real effort on the system around it — the positioning, the messaging, the experience — because that's what actually fills the name with meaning.
The Question Worth Asking Before Anything Else
Before the workshop, before the shortlist, before anyone argues over a fusion versus an invented word, there's a structural question that decides more than any naming principle will: is this name meant to carry its own weight as a masterbrand — or is it built to live comfortably as a sub-brand under something bigger?
A masterbrand name has to be able to stretch, the way Amazon moved from books to nearly everything. A sub-brand name doesn't need that elasticity — it can be narrower and more literal, because a parent brand is already doing the heavy lifting of trust and reach. Answer that question first, and every naming principle after it stops being a matter of taste and starts being a matter of fit.