Brand Naming Showcase

Product Naming

From branded ingredients to CPG supplements for people and pets, MarketPlace has led successful naming projects for partners of all sizes (and in several languages) around the globe.

Company Naming

We love startups, and we love playing a part in the development of new business units for global brands. Naming a new company—three people or three hundred—is always a labor, always a love.

Specialized Naming

Though every project is unique, some are more specialized. We take pride in applying our industry expertise to name technologies, services, initiatives, equipment, and even colors.

B2C and B2B Brand Naming at MarketPlace

Everyone understands what a name is. We all understand the basic components of language that combine to form a brand name. Yet naming is perhaps the most misunderstood of all brand disciplines.  

With hundreds of naming projects under our belt, we know what work a brand name should do, and we know why brand naming fails (read why). We know how to bring key stakeholders to the table with brand managers and salespeople to move forward with a name that everyone—including regulatory—can get behind.

We’re able to do this as a result of decades of experience leading companies through the brand development process, and we’re able to do this well because of our focus in the food, pet, and wellness industries. And it doesn’t hurt to have highly trained language experts as part of our core team!

Naming covers a lot of ground. Building on brand discovery and ideation, which produces foundational brand components (value prop, brand promise, archetype, etc), we begin the formal brand naming process with concept generation, where we typically develop between 250 and 1000 words, ideas, morphemes, and what our naming experts lovingly refer to as “brandcrumbs.” Following concept generation, our strategy, writing, and design leads collaborate with the naming team to develop a list of 25-50 high-potential candidates, which are then vetted for competitive, cultural, and defensibility concerns.

In a typical naming project, we then narrow name options to single digits, where we do a more thorough assessment, including legal screening in relevant classes through USPTO and/or WIPO. In some cases, we also perform custom research, testing for speech stream visibility on Amazon/e-commerce and/or for unanticipated associations/bias through targeted consumer survey panels.

Finally, we present, for most projects, between three and seven highly vetted, strategic brand name options that our partners can confidently champion internally (and can present to their legal/regulatory departments without breaking a sweat), that our strategy and design team can bring to life through visual identity and messaging, and that customers and consumers will find engaging, meaningful, and memorable.

Food, pet, and wellness companies around the world entrust us to lead their teams through naming projects, and we couldn’t be more grateful.