What’s in a brand name?

Twitter, one of the world’s most recognizable brands, is now X.

Pundits say the rebrand is part of Elon Musk’s bigger goal to create an “everything app,” where users can come to do, well, everything. Whether X ends up delivering on this isn’t yet clear. What is clear is that Musk likes the letter: there’s SpaceX, xAI (his new AI startup), X.com (which later became PayPal), and more.

Time will tell if users like this latest iteration (though two of our marketing professors, Tim Calkins and Kevin McTigue, both have their doubts).

Still, we do know that whenever a company needs to come up with a name—for a new product or an existing one—it has to build new associations from scratch. That’s a daunting task! Today, we’ll talk more generally about best practices for naming a brand.

No formula, just best practices

In our podcast series “Insight Unpacked: Extraordinary Brands and How to Build Them,” Kellogg’s Paul Earle explains there’s no real formula for creating a stellar name. But you can draw inspiration from a few tried-and-true places.

One of the most obvious places to look for inspiration is your brand’s purpose. This is your brand’s reason for existing in the world. Earle thinks the oral-care brand “Hello,” which was created by his friend Craig Dubitsky, did this well.

“So as Craig was assessing the oral-care category, he noticed a lot of nomenclatures that were hostile and warring. So, you know, ‘Fight plaque! Kill bad breath! Assault cavities!’” he said. “And Craig said, ‘Well, that’s not very friendly. Why don’t I create a line of toothpaste and other oral-care products that are actually friendly?’”

The name “Hello” felt more welcoming and less hostile, which Earle says was “a great way to flip the script in that category completely.”

You could also take your naming cues from the actual product. Consider what it does, and how it looks and feels, and decide if it makes sense to reflect those features in the branding.

“Mush,” a brand of overnight oats, took this route. Earle says that the founder, as a kid, liked to soak her breakfast cereal in milk overnight so that it would be really mushy in the morning.

“And as she was older, she would take this mushy concoction into work, and people tried it and loved it. And so she was thinking, ‘What do I call this mushy delight?’ And she was like, ‘How about Mush?’ That’s a great name,” Earle says.

A good story

Another thing “Mush” has going for it: the name is relevant to the product. It also has a story behind it. These are rules all brands should follow, Earle says.

He thinks professional sports teams tend to do this well. The best ones are relevant to their home markets: The name “Columbus Blue Jackets,” a professional hockey team in Ohio, was inspired by the high number of Civil War soldiers in the state. In professional football, the name “Patriots” was fitting for New England, which was home to the American Revolution.

Those meaningful tie-ins are what make a brand really resonate, Earle says. And on the flip side, they can be the key to avoiding a really bad name. One common mistake that brands make is choosing a name that has nothing to do with their product or market. A name that Earle finds especially frustrating was chosen by a relatively young franchise in the National Hockey League: The Vegas Golden Knights.

“The owner of the team was in the Army, and he really liked the Army parachute team called the Golden Knights and decided that instead of calling his team the Aces or Blackjack, or any number of really cool, relevant names, he called them the Golden Knights. And not only is it completely irrelevant, he got himself into a legal dispute with the Army!” Earle says.

So, if a strong brand name is relevant, with meaningful tie-ins and a story behind it, what does that say about X?

Here’s Calkins’s take:

“What is this new brand called X? We have no idea. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino posted Sunday that it was a mix of audio, video, messaging, and banking; ‘X will be the platform that can deliver, well … everything.’

What?

Previously, Musk said that he wanted Twitter to become an everything app. With this he ignores one of the great marketing lessons that a brand cannot be all things to all people.”

You can read—or listen to—more in Kellogg Insight.

You can also check out Professor Kevin McTigue’s post on Twitter’s name change on LinkedIn here and the rest of Professor Tim Calkins’s post on his blog here.