# Naming research — reference notes

Background for the `business-name-fit` skill. Read this when you need the reasoning
behind a check, when a founder asks *why* a rule exists, or when you need to explain
name categories, sound effects, or the naming process in more depth.

All three sources below are free to download and were link-checked in July 2026.

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## 1. WIPO — *Making a Mark: An Introduction to Trademarks for SMEs*

World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO Publication No. 900.1E (2019 edition).
Free to download, available in seven languages, aimed specifically at small businesses.
© WIPO, 2019, licensed [CC BY 3.0 IGO](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/).

📥 https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-900-1-en-making-a-mark-an-introduction-to-trademarks-for-small-and-medium-sized-enterprises.pdf

**Why it matters here:** it explains which kinds of names can actually be protected —
the difference between a name a founder merely likes and a name they can own.

**The five name categories it sets out:**

| Category | What it is | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Generic | The ordinary word for the thing itself | Cannot be registered |
| Descriptive | States a quality or characteristic of the product | Weak; usually refused |
| Deceptive | Misleads about nature, quality, or origin | Refused; also unethical |
| Suggestive | Hints at a quality without stating it | Strong |
| Coined / fanciful | Invented word with no prior meaning | Strongest |

A sixth type, **arbitrary** (a real word unrelated to the product), also registers well.

**Practical rule for the skill:** push candidates toward suggestive, arbitrary, or coined.
Warn plainly when a name is generic or descriptive — it may be unregistrable, meaning the
founder can build a business on it and still not own it. Reject deceptive names outright.

**Note on a cross-cultural trap:** a word that is generic or descriptive *in the origin
language* may be treated as arbitrary and registrable in a foreign market — and vice
versa. Judge distinctiveness separately for each market.

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## 2. Kohli & LaBahn (1997) — *Creating Effective Brand Names: A Study of the Naming Process*

*Journal of Advertising Research*, 37(1), 67–75. Full text free in the WPI repository.
The standard descriptive study of how companies actually name things, based on a survey
of 101 companies.

📥 https://digital.wpi.edu/downloads/g445cd54j?locale=en

**The five-stage process it identifies:** set objectives → generate names → evaluate →
select → register the trademark.

**Evaluation criteria it reports:** relevance to the product category, connotations,
overall liking, ease of recognition, distinctiveness, and ease of recall.

**The most useful warning in the paper:** managers routinely undermine their own naming
work by cutting the evaluation stage short — falling for a favourite early and skipping
the honest testing. The study also found that firms tend to blur marketing goals with
name criteria, and only articulate what they actually want from a name once they are
already evaluating candidates.

**Practical rules for the skill:**
- Write the naming brief *before* generating candidates, never after.
- Never present a single favourite. Always evaluate several against stated criteria.
- Treat trademark registration as part of the process, not an afterthought.
   
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## 3. Pogacar, Plant, Rosulek & Kouril (2015) — *Sounds good: Phonetic sound patterns in top brand names*

*Marketing Letters*, 26(4), 549–563. Free copy on an author's site.

  📥 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/586d3b8c579fb3b92bfadb89/t/58725a088419c2902d0983f7/1483889162049/Sounds+good_Phonetic+sound+patterns+in+top+brand+names+2015.pdf

  **What it found:** comparing the Interbrand top 100 brand names against brand names
  generally, the top names show measurably different sound patterns. The authors argue
  sound symbolism — the link between how a word sounds and what it feels like it means —
  may be one contributor to brand performance, and that sounds common among top brands
  may carry brand-enhancing properties while rarer ones may do the opposite. Follow-up
  work by the same group found people both implicitly and explicitly prefer the sounds
  that are more frequent in top brand names, among them S, M, L and E.

  **Practical rules for the skill:**
  - Judge a candidate by ear, not only on the page. Say it aloud before deciding.
- Broad sound-feel associations worth weighing: front vowels (ee, i) read as small, light, quick; back vowels (o, u) as large, solid, heavy; hard plosives (p, t, k, b, d, g) as sharp and firm; soft fricatives and nasals (s, f, m, l, n) as smooth and gentle. Match the feel to the industry — softness for childcare, solidity for finance.

**Important limit — state this honestly when it matters:** this research examines mainly English and Western global brands. Sound associations are *not* universal; they differ by language and culture. Use them as a guide for English-speaking and Western markets, and do not assume they transfer to Persian, Arabic, Mandarin, or any other target market without checking. This is exactly the kind of assumption the skill exists to question.

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## Additional sources (added at merge review)

4. **USPTO — Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure (TMEP) §1209, "Refusal on Basis of Descriptiveness"** — [tmep.uspto.gov](https://tmep.uspto.gov/RDMS/TMEP/current#/current/TMEP-1200d1e5502.html). The operative US standard behind Step 5's distinctiveness spectrum: merely descriptive marks are refused registration on the Principal Register absent acquired distinctiveness, which is why a "perfect-sounding" descriptive name can be legally close to worthless.
5. **Usunier, J.-C. & Shaner, J. (2002), "Using linguistics for creating better international brand names", *Journal of Marketing Communications* 8(4)** — cross-linguistic brand-naming framework (phonetic, morphological, semantic screening across target languages); the academic grounding for this skill's rule that spoken and written forms must be checked separately per market.

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## A note on what is missing

The most-cited work on brand-name sound symbolism, Klink (2000), sits behind a paywall and has no legal free version. The open-access sources above are the best available combination of credibility and genuinely open access.
