There's a new settop box in town. The ROKU streams Netflix video to your TV. And the folks at ROKU have answered the top concerns in five bullets.

Alas, it doesn't fix the problem that the studios will not allow Netflix to stream all of their content so there's only 10,000 movies instead of 100,000+. And strangely, it doesn't have a hard drive so it cannot buffer the stream, which seems a poor decision.

In any case, the messaging on this is so clean and clear I have to admire it. Maybe it's just easier for consumer goods but could you do the same with your positioning?

If you want to start an argument, offer your opinion about product and company names. One person loves the name “nuvi” and another hates it. Some folks love putting the company name in the product name; some don’t. The basic principles of naming apply to both products and companies. In general, business-to-business (B2B) names tend to be meaningful while business-to-consumer (B2C) names tend to be unique. Meaningful names tell us what the product or company does. Unique names can be trademarked. Ideally good product names are both meaningful and unique.

Some good names that are both meaningful and unique are WebSurveyor, NetBackup, Uninstaller, SalesForce.com, and Solution Selling. Each name explains what the product does and has the added benefit of being unique. The challenge of course is that so many meaningful names are already taken. That’s why unique-but-meaningless names are so popular. One of the great things about combination names is that at least some of those are still available. You’ll want to check WHOIS before you commit to any name to make sure you can get the URL.

The value of a meaningful name is that you don’t have to educate the buyer on the name. How much money was spent getting us to equate Seibel with sales force automation? Ideally, the product’s name is also its chief benefit or capability; the product’s name articulates its position. Do a search on Google for “sales force automation” and look at the sponsored links. Will you click on salesforce.com or NetSuite? Will you click on SalesLogix or Miles Technologies? A sales force automation product should surely have the word “sales” in the name, shouldn’t it?

Sadly, despite being one of my favorite “good” names, the WebSurveyor people have changed their name to Vovici—a unique name but not meaningful. And they probably paid big bucks to a naming service for it. Uninstaller was once a single product but is now a category; I forget who originally had the name but I guess they didn’t trademark it. Solution Selling is still going strong even though its creator, Mike Bosworth, has a new method called Customer Centric Selling. “Customer Centric Selling” is seven syllables versus Solution Selling’s five but it’s really not as descriptive, is it?

Unique-but-not-meaningful names are everywhere in B2C: Squidoo, Yahoo, Google, Nuvi, iPod, Apple, and the list goes on. Because the names themselves are meaningless, your marketing efforts become branding efforts as you attempt to educate customers on what the product is and how to say the name. Sony used to have a sidebar on their PC page explaining how to pronounce “vaio” (rhymes with “hi-ho.”)

Suites

A popular technique that creates unique and meaningful names is to use a product family name in conjunction with a product name. For example, Adobe Acrobat Reader combines company, family, and product names. Using this technique, you can use the full name (long family name and product name) the first time and the shortened name (product name only) for all subsequent uses. In effect, teach a nickname to your clients. In printed pieces, you could write, “Adobe Acrobat Reader lets your customers read formatted documents without the application that created them. Download Reader from our website.” The problem with the suite approach is that there are often too many names to remember. NetBackup is officially Veritas NetBackup from Symantec. Wow! TMI: Too Much Information. Three brands in one product. Each has three syllables so we’re likely to only remember one of them. Company, suite, and product. Which matters? Apparently, Adobe has found the family name confusing because its now just called Adobe Reader.

Short names and letter names

Good product names should be short or easily shortened. If you give your product a long name, your clients will give it a nickname. Federal Express became FedEx but Total Reconciliation became Total Rec ("wreck").

Tech companies continue to use letters rather than names. Letter name are always bad because the brain simply cannot retain letters. For instance, IBM isn't a good name but shows what you can do with a bad name when you spend billions of promotional dollars over a century.

Bad names are those with poor connotations ("Total Wreck"), hard to spell ("Vovici"), hard to pronounce ("Vaio"), or hard to remember ("IBM"). Bad names aren't fatal, they're just expensive. You have to waste your marketing emphasis on the name instead of on the product and its benefits.

Test your name

Got a name picked out? Here’s a trick: put your idea for the product name on a flip chart and leave it in the lunchroom. When you check back at the end of the day, you’ll find every possible way to misinterpret the name. Developers and sales people are quick to find the flaws in a name and won’t hesitate to scrawl comments on the flip chart. “Sales Time” becomes “Sales Slime.” “Nova” becomes “No-Va doesn’t go.” “Automated Sales System” becomes “ASS.” Better your colleagues tell you of a bad name than to learn it from the market after you’ve created all your collateral and your logo and your brochures.

Of course once you have a few names on a short list, test them on some customers to see if the name conveys what you intend.

Related Links

• Laura Reis discusses naming on The Origin of Brands blog
  
• Roger Cauvin offers his opinions about naming.
  
• Wikipedia has this article on naming.
  

Sometimes I pine for the simple days of a single, great product. The product managers I meet are usually in an enterprise, B2B software world with a single sales force selling hundreds of products, each with its own message and value proposition. Product managers spend a disproportionate time selling to their sales people and then supporting each sale. Their web sites are a morass of links and it is truly difficult to find anything.

In some book I read recently (probably Good to Great) the author proposed that 250 people as the largest a company could be and remain effective. Beyond that, companies become internally focused and spend too much time talking to one another instead of to the market.

What got me thinking about this single product orientation is The Coffee Fool. They have a single value proposition: fresh coffee is better than store-bought. Period. Actually, they're not a "one product" company: they sell 30+ flavors of coffee. But they have positioned themselves as one thing, one product, one message: fresh coffee. The web site is humorous, easy to navigate, easy to use, and makes it easy to buy. They caution you to not buy or be forever dissatisfied with any other coffee. I've ordered some and I'll let you know if they keep the promise.

Could an enterprise company use this approach? First we'd need to organize our products into logical families or suites and then promote each with a single message. Most of all, we'd need the courage to keep it simple. Contrast the Yahoo! home page with Google's. Can you imagine how many product managers want their product featured on the Google home page? Yet someone there has the conviction to say no.

Could you use these techniques in marketing your products?

Naming seems to be a really emotional issue for some product marketers. We have to suffer the naming contest and the call to enlist a naming service. There's the ongoing argument of whether a name should be meaningful versus nonsensical. The Name Inspector offers these 10 company name types with examples and pros and cons for each. Compare these thoughts with my previous rant on naming.

ComputerWorld reports: CA Inc. has unveiled plans to simplify the naming of its entire software range over the next 12 to 18 months to better brand its products and more clearly indicate their function. The software vendor will do away with the names currently denoting its various software families, like its Unicenter systems management offerings and its BrightStor storage products, according to a company spokesman. CA will also drop specific product brand names such as PestPatrol and FileSurf in favor of the company's name and a descriptive term for the particular piece of software. For instance, Unicenter Service Desk will become CA Service Desk, while eTrust Access Control will be called CA Access Control.

A few years ago, one of my collegues at CA told me that they estimated the cost of renaming a product at $1,000,000. As those of us who have worked closely with code know, as much as we might plan to put the product name in a constant so it can be easily changed, the product name is usually hard-coded in plenty of places. A name change isn't as trivial as it appears to marketing and management. Nothing seems difficult to those who don't actually have to do it.

So, if it's so hard and so expensive, why do it?

For companies with limited promotional dollars, we need to make every dollar count. The company focuses all of its promotion at a single entity rather than spreading small amounts here and there with little impact. Even Microsoft, with all of their marketing money, tends to invest in promotion for the suites rather than the products. That is, MS Office tends to get the lion's share of promotional spending rather than individual products like Word or Visio.

There are two strategies for naming: descriptive or unique. Names that are unique like iPod, Nuvi, and RAZR work best for B2C products. For B2B products, the descriptive approach, such as that CA is following, is best. Certainly when you have hundreds of products, the name has to carry the positioning message along with it so that customers (and sales people) know what the product does just by reading the name.

Most companies can afford to brand only one thing: the company, the product suites, or the individual products. How about you? Is your product message lost in your naming schema?

On Tuesday, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple iPhone product. Wow! This thing looks amazing. I hope Motorola, Nokia, and the rest will see the power of great design. Maybe this product will show them that software shouldn't be an afterthought but a key element of the design.

But the name. iPhone? Ugh. It's not meaningful nor is it trademarkable. Well, I guess it is trademarkable except Apple doesn't own the trademark, Cisco does. It's perhaps a clever name for Cisco's VoIP phone, invoking as it does the idea of an internet phone. Yet as far as I can tell, Cisco doesn't own the URL; some company called Nuvio does (or is that really a Cisco company? I dunno). Didn't Apple learn anything from their 20-year battle with The Beatles?

Either way it's a dumb name for Apple. Isn't the whole 'i' thing over already? iPod, iTunes, iLife, iWork, iWhatever. Yeesh.

I want this product but I hate the name. Is the iPhone name a monument to Steve's ego or was it a project code name that went awry. Since it won't ship until mid-year, I'm hoping the product managers can convince Apple to use a good name when they actually deliver the product.