There are many factors that affect how consumers make decisions about product brands. As practitioners in the brand strategy and naming field for over 40 years, we understand the nuances of what drives brand choice. One thing that’s highly important is the right product name.

We thought it would be an interesting exercise to, from time to time, visit the marketplace and ask consumers directly what they like or don’t like about certain product names.

Introducing the Siegel+Gale Moniker Monitor™.

Each month or so, we’ll select a different product category, do some market research (online survey with about 400 statistically significant potential purchasers), and find out what people think about the names of some newly launched products. This month, we’ve picked cell phone/smart phone names.

What do people think about today’s cell/smart phone names?

These days, so many models are being introduced that it’s hard to keep them all straight. We wanted to know to what degree their names have an impact on what phones consumers buy.

We picked seven cell phone/smart phone names to test (without mentioning the manufacturers):

• Comeback
• Glance
• LX-290
• Ozone
• Smooth
• Surge
• Tritan

We asked the following five questions:

Is it a good name for a cell phone/smart phone?

Does it sound cool?

Is it intriguing and does it make you want to find out more?

Does it suggest an innovative product?

Is it a unique name?

And here’s what we found out:

1. The more powerful sounding names scored best. Tritan and Surge consistently did better in response to all of the questions. That is, these names were the most appropriate, cool, intriguing, innovative, and unique. They’re also the names that people said they most preferred.

Why did they do so well? These names not only sound strong, but they capture the promise of power, speed, reach and connectivity—qualities essential to wireless service.

Most Preferred Names

2. Comeback performed by far the weakest against the questions. It’s also the name people least preferred.

Why would Comeback do so poorly? In naming, you need to be careful about unintended negative connotations. People might associate the name with previous performance problems or the fear that they may have to return the phone for repairs.

3. Interestingly, the alphanumeric entry LX-290 did OK. While people didn’t think it was a unique name, it did just about as well as Glance, Ozone, and Smooth on appropriateness and innovation. The letters LX, borrowed from car model naming, implies superior quality and luxury. We’ve seen this well-established naming convention do very well for computers and sporting equipment as well. It would make sense that it would resonate with phone buyers.

4. How important is the company name in driving the purchase decision? Apparently, very. Only 17% of the subjects found the model name more important, while 49% found the company name to be more important. In fact, 19% of those didn’t know the model name of the phone they currently had.

5. At the end of the survey, we asked the subjects to tell us which of the names they remembered. Here the results were a little different. Tritan and Smooth were the most memorable. Least memorable were Surge and Glance. So while Surge was a preferred name, it was hard to remember. Go figure.

So, what can we take from this study? It seems that power and innovation prevail as key attributes. And alphanumeric models, though not exciting, do better than names with vague or confusing brand benefits.

In the end, Tritan seems to be the kind of moniker that’s a good fit and one that consumers remember.