I somehow was invited to participate in one meeting of the "naming committee" for a product I worked on. Fortunately I only had to attend one all-day meeting, and that was more than enough for me. Got a free lunch out of the deal though.
We had to find and present on products whose names we liked and provide our reasons, and some consideration was made as to the positives and negatives to all our choices. We spent some hours doing some sort of "word association" activity where we tried to associate the product with various adjectives and "feelings". Those were then ranked. There was a discussion about product names and "brand/industry fit", because you try to make your product name in some way consistent with other similar products produced by your company and by competitors in the market. There were various rounds where people threw out a bunch of name ideas that people voted on that they associated with the adjectives and emotions that were highly ranked, and we came up with a "top 3" list that got sent up the flagpole.
I think later meetings that I wasn't involved with had other similar groups of people coming up with similar "top 3" lists, and even more meetings whittled those "top 3" lists down to something more manageable that could be presented to the execs. But thankfully as a simple engineer I didn't have to do any of that
All the committee choices were rejected by the responsible exec, who looked at all of them, declared them all garbage (which they were), and spit-balled a name that was vastly superior to any of the ones we had come up with and that ended up being the product's name. That rubbed some people the wrong way but I didn't have a problem with it because "name by committee" didn't seem like a very smart idea to me.
But after that process the lawyers get involved doing things like international trademark searches and making sure the name isn't some sort of insult, slur, or joke anywhere in the world (to avoid the "FAG Detector" problem). Then of course you have to come up with all the branding that goes along with the name.
Probably took at least two years from that first meeting to when everything was done. And a lot of it was marketing doing nothing and engineering telling them that they needed to provide us released logos and branding so we could get shit printed and painted.
I somehow was invited to participate in one meeting of the "naming committee" for a product I worked on. Fortunately I only had to attend one all-day meeting, and that was more than enough for me. Got a free lunch out of the deal though.
We had to find and present on products whose names we liked and provide our reasons, and some consideration was made as to the positives and negatives to all our choices. We spent some hours doing some sort of "word association" activity where we tried to associate the product with various adjectives and "feelings". Those were then ranked. There was a discussion about product names and "brand/industry fit", because you try to make your product name in some way consistent with other similar products produced by your company and by competitors in the market. There were various rounds where people threw out a bunch of name ideas that people voted on that they associated with the adjectives and emotions that were highly ranked, and we came up with a "top 3" list that got sent up the flagpole.
I think later meetings that I wasn't involved with had other similar groups of people coming up with similar "top 3" lists, and even more meetings whittled those "top 3" lists down to something more manageable that could be presented to the execs. But thankfully as a simple engineer I didn't have to do any of that
All the committee choices were rejected by the responsible exec, who looked at all of them, declared them all garbage (which they were), and spit-balled a name that was vastly superior to any of the ones we had come up with and that ended up being the product's name. That rubbed some people the wrong way but I didn't have a problem with it because "name by committee" didn't seem like a very smart idea to me.
But after that process the lawyers get involved doing things like international trademark searches and making sure the name isn't some sort of insult, slur, or joke anywhere in the world (to avoid the "FAG Detector" problem). Then of course you have to come up with all the branding that goes along with the name.
Probably took at least two years from that first meeting to when everything was done. And a lot of it was marketing doing nothing and engineering telling them that they needed to provide us released logos and branding so we could get shit printed and painted.