Brand Name Testing

Brand name testing covers what each name suggests, whether people can say, spell and remember it, and whether it fits the product.

It is often confused with other work. A trademark search checks whether you may legally use a name; testing does not. Run the search first. Naming is the creative work of producing candidates. Brand testing is a wider term than name testing.

Related terms: probing questions are the follow-ups you ask in a session. Concept testing means testing an idea or proposition, usually before launch. It can include a name, but name testing focuses on sound, meaning and recall.

Sessions show why a name works or fails, and they let you hear it spoken. A survey can rank names, but a conversation shows that a name is read two ways or carries a meaning the team missed.

One experienced practitioner recommends keeping the first round to about 20 names and taking four or five finalists forward in depth, after trademark searches (Summers, Quirk's, 2006). The aim is to learn whether a name reflects the product's defining attributes, not only whether people like it.

Do not ask which name people prefer. A preference question rewards the familiar and gives no reasons. This is an inference, not a published finding.

Ease of saying a name matters beyond taste. In a study published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), shares with easy-to-pronounce names outperformed shares with hard names in the short term (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2006). That finding is about stocks. Treat it as a reason to test pronunciation, not as proof about your category.

Yes, and Tata Motors' hatchback is one Indian example. It was announced as Zica. On 22 February 2016 Tata renamed it Tiago because the Zika virus outbreak had changed what the name suggested, and the January launch was postponed (CarWale).

No session could have predicted an outbreak. The lesson is to repeat a short word-association check with fresh participants close to launch.

Recruit people who buy in your category, split by first language and city. Exclude friends, colleagues and anyone involved in the naming. Language comes first because sound is what you are testing. A screener is how you confirm who qualifies.

A name read aloud by a Tamil, Bengali or Marathi speaker is a different test from one read by an English speaker in Delhi. Summers (Quirk's, 2006) notes that regional dialects can shift the stressed syllable and that names used in other markets need a check for unwanted meanings.

Use this grid. Each test has a pass or a fail.

A good session has seven blocks, run one-to-one, with the participant saying the name before you do. A suggested script takes 55 minutes, plus a 5-minute call the next day. The timings are a suggestion, not a published standard.

Where name testing sits in the naming process

This script is for the second round: test the four or five finalists, not the first-round long list of about 20. The 20-name round is a shorter screening round.

Rotate the order of names between participants. Probe every reaction with "why".

A 2022 systematic review of saturation studies found 9 to 17 interviews were enough to reach code saturation in relatively homogeneous groups (Hennink and Kaiser, Social Science & Medicine, 2022). That review is not about naming research. Treat each language group in one city cluster as a segment, and plan 9 to 17 one-to-one interviews for each. The interview method is a related read.

Then recruit extra for no-shows (participants who do not turn up): recruit the target divided by one minus the no-show rate. Sample size in qualitative research explains how to adjust the range.

These are separate jobs. Name testing reads an audience's reaction; a trademark search checks legal use; concept testing checks an idea.

We recruit and schedule participants for in-depth interviews of 30 to 120 minutes and focus groups of 1 to 3 hours, online or in person. We recruit by city, hold sessions in languages other than English, and check participant identity before invitation. You can bring your own moderator.

Pricing is set by proposal, based on audience, method, geography and recruitment difficulty. For what to pay participants and how to budget recruitment, see what to pay focus group participants in India and user research recruitment cost in India. We can arrange a free pilot. See how we handle multilingual research.

Send your shortlist, audience, cities and languages to support@qualfacto.io, or message us on WhatsApp for quick queries. We aim to reply within one business day, Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 18:00 Indian Standard Time (IST).