It’s all in a name –
I have a name, you have a name – in fact most people I know have a name….hey come to think of it, most things I know have a name. I guess it should be no surprise then that we come to identify things by those names – and retail products are no different.
In looking at a name for a product what are we trying to accomplish? Are we looking for - fun, catchy, descriptive, short…all of those? Yes, all of those things rolled up into a nice easy to remember, simple to spell, don’t take up too much room on the label name.
We start by looking at the function of the product – in our case the Bags, then we try to fold in the other values such as convenient, compact, the strap, disposable…and so on.
In this case we almost have to use the word bag in the name because looking at the tightly rolled product in the plastic case it’s not apparent that it contains bags – so we have to start off by communicating that to the consumer. Once we’ve done that it changes the priority of the remaining values because the consumer can now make certain assumptions about the bag - such as - it’s disposable, it’s plastic, and it’s not very large. With this in mind, we now have to go back and re prioritize the value points we want to try to include in the name to eliminate obviousness and to overcome some of the less flattering assumptions the consumer is making now that they see the compact roll and know it’s a set of bags. So lets’ list them out in order of how they should be communicated.
Convenient
Large volume
Small size
Durable
Disposable
Recyclable
This is good, but it doesn’t help us in getting the actual mate for the word “Bag” in the name. For that we turn to the Thesaurus. We’ll take “Convenient” as an example. Right off the bat the thesaurus spits out a good candidate in the word “Handy”.
“Handy Bag” Add a quick tag line (a line of text that modifies, explains, or enhances the product name) like “The disposable bag that helps when you need it most” and we have something we can use to describe our new product.
Handy Bag
The Disposable bag that helps when you need it most.
