Whether you're launching a new company, introducing a product, or rebranding an existing offering, figuring out how to name a brand can feel surprisingly difficult.
Naming can be one of the most subjective, politically charged, and anxiety-inducing decisions a marketing team makes. Everyone has an opinion, the loudest voice often wins, and you ship something only to wonder forever if it was actually right.
As the Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at SurveyMonkey, I recently led the work to name SurveyMonkey LaunchPad, our new brand that houses our automated market research solutions. I’ll be honest: naming is really hard. I walked away from this project with a massive amount of empathy for our customers who go through this same struggle to decide on a name for their product, event, program, etc.
When we set out to name this new brand, I had feedback coming at me from every angle, including some very strong executive opinions. To survive the process, we had to put a lot of rigor into our approach. We moved away from "gut feel" and toward a repeatable, evidence-based framework.
If you're wondering how to come up with a brand name or how to choose a brand name that resonates with customers, here's the six-step framework we used.
Before you start brainstorming names, choose who's going to drive the process.
This may sound simple, but naming projects have a way of attracting opinions from every corner of an organization. Product teams want clarity. Marketers want differentiation. Executives want something memorable. Creative teams want something inspiring. Without a clear owner, naming discussions can quickly become endless debates.
Every successful naming project needs a driver: one person responsible for gathering input, keeping the process moving, and ultimately making a recommendation.
The best naming drivers possess two important qualities:
For SurveyMonkey LaunchPad, the naming process involved product, product marketing, brand, legal, and leadership teams. Everyone had perspectives worth considering. But having a clear owner helped us avoid decision paralysis and maintain momentum.
Once you've identified your naming driver, it's time to define the strategic guardrails.
One of the biggest mistakes teams make when trying to choose a brand name is jumping straight into brainstorming without first defining what success looks like.
A strong naming brief should answer a few critical questions:
For LaunchPad, we started by studying the competitive landscape to understand where we could differentiate ourselves. Looking at how other companies positioned automated research tools helped us identify the "white space" where the SurveyMonkey brand could stand apart.
We grounded ourselves in some initial decisions:
It was important to frame up who our audience was AND who it wasn’t. The go-to-market strategy identified marketers, product teams, founders, and agencies as our primary audience. Notably, research and insights professionals weren't the core target for this offering. That decision influenced everything that followed, because it meant we needed to lean less heavily on technical terms and more on approachable terms that would resonate with marketers, PMs, and founders.
We wanted the name to fit naturally within the SurveyMonkey product family alongside offerings like SurveyMonkey Apply and SurveyMonkey Rewards. We decided to follow the existing "SurveyMonkey ___" naming convention.
We knew the name needed to communicate something more premium and automated than a standard survey. It needed to signal confidence and readiness for people launching products, campaigns, and ideas into the market.
The clearer your brief, the easier it becomes to evaluate ideas later.
This was the fun part! The part where we all got to flex our creative muscles.
When people think about how to create a brand name, they often assume the goal is to come up with a brilliant idea as quickly as possible. In reality, the goal is volume first, judgment second. Go big in order to reach a solid shortlist.
Rather than searching for a single perfect name, we explored multiple strategic directions simultaneously using mind mapping exercises and AI-assisted ideation.
We organized potential names into several categories:
Suite or collection: names that suggested a connected ecosystem of solutions:
Research rigor: names emphasizing expertise and methodology:
Spaces for creativity and innovation: names inspired by physical places where ideas are built:
Directional guidance: names that convey the insights we deliver to help make a decision:
JTBD orientation: names focused on what our users were trying to accomplish, which is launching and bringing new ideas to market:
We also used AI to generate about 100 additional options within these categories. AI didn't make the decision for us. It simply helped us expand the universe of possibilities much faster than traditional brainstorming alone.
Then came the debates. Reactions immediately eliminated names (and entire categories of names). This happened mostly in two cross-functional workshops we hosted.
We wanted to inject rigor into our process.
Sometimes teams can spend weeks debating names internally, and then launch without ever asking customers what they think or getting real market validation. Doing so reinforces internal biases and may miss uncovering options that resonate better with the intended audience. Once we narrowed our shortlist, we made sure to do a legal trademark check and a localization check for global meaning. Then, we used our own Name Testing solution to gather feedback from more than 4,500 employees, customers, and prospective users.
We evaluated each name across several key dimensions:
The results were eye-opening. I personally preferred “Launch” for the energy it had and “Methods” because it felt rigorous and research-oriented. Other stakeholders had different favorites.
But when the data came back, one name consistently outperformed the rest: SurveyMonkey LaunchPad.
The market had spoken! That's the power of getting feedback from hundreds (or thousands, in our case) of real people. It takes the emotion out of the decision and replaces it with evidence.
The next challenge we faced was helping everyone else get comfortable with our decision.
Even when research provides a clear winner, stakeholders still need confidence in our path forward. Product leaders, marketers, executives, legal teams, and brand teams all want to understand the rationale.
That's where data becomes invaluable. Rather than defending opinions, we could point to measurable audience feedback and show exactly why LaunchPad emerged as the strongest option.
Data transformed the conversation from "I like this one better" to "Our audience likes this one better." And it helped us tell the story internally at department-level All Hands and company-wide Town Hall meetings.
Once SurveyMonkey LaunchPad emerged as the clear winner, our focus shifted from decision-making to execution. A name gains meaning through everything that surrounds it: the visual identity, the messaging, the story you tell, and the experience customers have when they encounter it.
For LaunchPad, that meant translating the name into a complete go-to-market narrative.
"LaunchPad" immediately evoked imagery of liftoff, momentum, innovation, and new beginnings. It gave our creative team a rich foundation for developing visual concepts, campaign assets, and design elements that reinforced the promise of the product. (And the rocket emoji pairing was an easy one!)
A name should never have to do all the work by itself. We spent time refining the messaging around LaunchPad so customers would immediately understand what it was, who it was for, and why it was different. The name opened the door, and the positioning and messaging helped customers connect the dots.
A successful naming project doesn't end with a PowerPoint slide announcing the winner. It’s one piece of a broader launch initiative. Product marketing, brand, communications, customer-facing teams, and leadership all need to understand the story behind the name, how to talk about it consistently, and soon, it will feel like second nature to everyone—the same way “Google” or “iPod” do today.
The more alignment you create before launch, the more confidently the name enters the market.
Naming a product often feels like a battle of a few strong opinions, but it doesn't have to be. By moving from subjective preferences to objective evidence, we were able to take the emotional angst out of the final decision.
If you are currently struggling with how to choose a brand name, my best advice is simple: stop guessing and start testing. The market usually has the answer; you just have to ask.
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