How do you name/brand software? [closed]

Question

I am working on an application that is brand new. We have been using an internal name up to this point, but it's not very imaginative and is definitely not good from a branding standpoint. I have been tasked to come up with a name for the software. I am really struggling with this as every name I have thought about really doesn't seem to do the software justice. I have tried acronyms, mythology names, scientific names, etc. I may be being a bit picky, but I feel like the name should just hit me when its right. Here are my requirements:

• The name has to be easy to say (and hopefully catchy).
• The name has to relate back to what the software does.
• The name has to be able to be branded. (For example, vivid imagery, tagline, etc.)

So, although I can't give the specifics of the software, I was hoping the brains here could provide some insight as to how I should go about naming/branding a piece of software?

Answer 1

Acronyms is normally what I go for. Sometimes a name or acronym doesn't seem like it does something justice, but if the software does take off, the name will become common and not sound as strange as it first did. (Example: GIMP).

Answer 2

Ask the people who would be using the software to come up with names, then pick through them using your requirements and see what one works best. Perhaps take the top 3-5 names and have a vote among the users about which one they like best.

It makes them feel more like the software is theirs, or that they had something to do with it.

PS - from my experience, the people funding and creating the software usually come up with horrible names. Let the people who use the software come up with the name.

Answer 3

I tend to be rather practical with my stuff:

• BuildBotIcon - a system tray icon for buildbot
• ThrustRacer - a racing game using ships and gravity (ala the old Arcade Trust)
• MetaBuild - a buildsystem that starts other build systems
• EnumIO - a C++ lib to convert enums to/from strings

...but these are pretty focused projects.

I tend to dislike overly vague or artistic names for software tools, since it just confuses me. Games are welcome to have more of a "proper" name, if they have a setting, story and world to back it up.

I think Antz and Bee Movie are great movie names for instnance. All these other movies that's just the name of the character, IMO, kinda suck.

But then again, I'm not very good with names, so I'm biased. ;)

Answer 4

I was texting with a fellow programmer about the project we were trying to name and one of us had a word auto-corrected incorrectly. It was only three letters long and we liked it, so we created a backronym for it and called it a day. Then we moved on to actually writing the software.

Moral of the story: Just take something goofy or interesting that's currently around you and use it.

Answer 5

Well, I once though of a cool acronym I wanted to name my software in advance, and then used grep on a file containing lots of English words (I think it was the spellchecker file from Open Office) to get a word with these letters in the right order.