Behind a Naming Workshop: The Logics and The Story
Few weeks ago, I conducted naming workshop with content and branding team in Singapore. In my career as a UX Writer, this would be the 5th product that I named upon; and still a whole different story and approach for each of them. However, if I can formulate something behind every naming workshops I will do as follows.
Before that, it is important to understand the elements to a good name. A good product name should consider at least these 4 elements;
- Representativeness; the name should represent the product well and able to communicate how it works or what it is,
- Coherency; the name should be coherent with the company branding guideline,
- Positive; heck yeah, you sure don’t want to name your product with a negative slang, right?
- Easy-to-Digest; the name should spark the intended feeling/thought in seconds when someone hear it.
A good product name is an encapsulated description of the product itself.
Now that we understand what makes a good product name, we can go through the process of brainstorming a product name. I like to call it a “naming workshop” because usually I gather people and actually ask them to do several activities together to generate names. That’s what a workshop stands for, right?
So, how to do a naming workshop?
Preparation
Before conducting a naming workshop, you should do these following process;
- Understanding The Product In and Out; before you name a product you should understand it well, in and out. You can either conduct a stakeholder interview or a product dive deep to really understand it. After all, you can’t actually describe something when you don’t understand it well, right?
- Desk Research; in order to understand a product well, don’t be hesitate to conduct a desk research to dig deep into the product itself. Try to understand why the product is built, the segmentation, the vision, and basically everything about it.
The Workshop
To conduct a naming workshop, you can do these following activities to actually generate as many name as possible. Please note that these activities are designed to match the need of the product and totally customizeable to meet your needs.
Warm Up Session;
I usually will start the workshop with an Association Exercise to let the brain use to give something a meaning.
How do I do it? I’d usually use a picture or a song then ask the participants to explain their feelings towards the picture/the song in adjectives.
Why is it important? It is important to get the brain familiar with the action of giving meaning to everything that they feel. This small exercise will help participants to understand how to use adjectives to describe their feeling; which later we will use on the next session.

Adjective Exercise;
After the brain is getting warmed up, not it’s time to eat the main course.
How do I do it? I will put several keywords from the product on the screen then asking the participants to put adjectives that they feel regarding these keywords.
Why is it important? Adjectives is so flexible that it can cover lots of aspect of the feeling; the taste, the ambience, the feel, the sound, etc. We’d like to extract adjectives from the product keywords to broaden the horizon for us to see the product itself.

Post-It Marathon;
Using the adjectives that we have gotten from the previous session, it’s time to actually give the name to the product.
How do I do it? I will ask participants to generate as many as possible from the adjectives that they got from the previous session. I’d like them to exclude the product keywords and actually focus on the adjectives.
Why is it important? If Adjective Exercise is extracting, this activity is the reverse version of it. We go with inductive method to actually produce names based on the feeling that we feel towards what it is.

Name Mapping;
After getting so many name candidates, it’s time to put them into the map.
How do I do it? I usually use the metrics of AssociativeVSDescriptive and EmotionalVSUtilitarian to map the name. You can really modify the metrics based on your needs.
Why is it important? Getting so many names is confusing, so this activity will reduce the confusion by putting the name into its spectrum. It will be easier then to see which name is which and where we, as a company, would like to move forward with the name.

Cherry Picking;
After getting mapped out, we will do a voting to choose which name is 1) the most favourite, and 2) the most feasible.
How do I do it? Each participants will get 2 stickers to pick 1) their favourite name, and 2) the name they think is the most feasible.
Why is it important? It’s actually a mini market research to see the perception towards the product name.

The Aftermath
After these fun activities, it’s the time for you to actually work. As we know, the burden of a research is the synthesize; and here’s where your brain is actually working. I usually conduct these follow up activities to company the synthesize process.
- Internal Survey; I will take the 3 top name candidates from the survey then conduct an internal survey to actually see the perception of ‘user’. I usually use deductive method where I give the name then ask the participants to pick the options they think is best describing the name (could be the feature of the product too). This will help you a lot to see the market perception towards your product before you actually release it.
- Stakeholder Presentation; after all, stekaholder’s voice is an important voice to be heard. I usually will conduct a meeting with higher stakeholder to present the research result and get the feedback from them.
So, that’s the wrap of what I did during a naming workshop. Let us know what you think about these methods!
