So you have a new product or service. or maybe you decided to start-up your own company. Quick, what’s the most important thing to figure out with your new venture? It’s the name.

A good name can be memorable, informative, and easy to say and can spell success for your product, service, or company. A bad name, on the other hand, can mean doom.

There is a great post by The Name Inspector on his eponymous blog entitled, “10 Tips for Naming Your Company, Product, or Service“. In case you are unfamiliar, the Name Inspector has a PhD in Linguistics and is the most rationally strategic person on the science of naming that I have found online.

Here’s an excerpt of his #1 tip:

1. Quantity and diversity yield quality
Naming is a matter of satisfying many competing constraints. Ideally a name is relevant, positive, memorable, reasonably short, not too generic, not too similar to a competing name, associated with an available domain name, and distinctive enough to bring your web page to the top of search engine results. The odds are against having a name just pop into your head that satisfies all these constraints. That means the most effective way to come up with a name is to think of lots of different ideas, carefully screen and choose, and repeat. A good metaphor for the naming process is evolution through variation and natural selection.

One of the categories The name Inspector does not cover in this post is the science of choosing URLs for your company or product. Names could be great on paper or rolled off your tongue but could also be disastrous when mashed together as a URL.

Take the Company, “Who Represents”. Great name when you know that they are a company that allows you to find out the names of celebrity agents. But put it together in a url and you get: www.whorepresents.com. Or how about the programmer knowledge base site called Experts Exchange. Makes sense right? Not when you have www.expertsexchange.

Finally there are the following: penisland.net (an online pen store called Pen Island), www.therapistfinder.com (a therapist search engine), and www.powergenitalia.com (an Italian Power company).

It’s important to think out every possible scenario when naming your product or company. So you don’t run into situations like this. And this applies to toll free numbers as well: Benjamin Moore paints has a toll free number: 1-800-BM-COLOR. I don’t think that is what they had in mind.

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