Name That…

Posted on June 6, 2008

Company or Product or Concept….

It has always amazed me that companies have felt they have to go out and hire a naming consultant or whatever they are called to think up a name for their business or product. And what names they come up with. Often, they are simply unmemorable enough that we…well, forget them.

I don’t know know how much companies will use it, but now there’s a site that lets total strangers come up with a name. Honestly, I don’t know that this is a better idea than using the big guns, but it sure is more fun.

Startup Kluster (which began early in the year), publicly opened up a new site today called NameThis. It works pretty much like Kluster, except it is only for coming up with names for products or startups. A company puts up $99 to start a naming challenge. They describe what they want named, the community suggests names and votes for the best ones. The people who come up with, influence, or invest the most in the top three names split $80 among themselves, and Kluster keeps the rest as its fee.

Some are calling this concept crowdsourcing as opposed to the common outsourcing. It will be interesting to see what the crowd mentality comes up with. Right now, most of the challenges are for fun since they just started, but why not give it a try and see what your creative thinking comes up with? After all, since the good (dictionary) words are all gone, the name consultants have to be creative and the names usually bear no resemblance to the product. Kind of like drug names. Wonder if the same folks do work for the drug companies? Show ‘em what you can do.