So you’re worried that your new product name might prove to be commercial Kryptonite? Or perhaps you just want to share your genius for naming products and earn some extra cash. A new web service harnesses the wisdom of crowds to suggest and rate product/business names for you. It’s 48-hour pre-market research with a US$99 price tag. And the spoils are shared with the winning name authors.
NameThis.com allows users to suggest product names based on another user’s brief. They can invest points (called “watts”) in their own names or in the best ideas of others. Extra watts are earned by completing demographic information, referring new users and generally interacting throughout the site. The community has 48 hours to suggest names before a custom NameThis algorithm selects three winners. Of the US$99 listing fee, US$40 goes to the author of the first-placed name, US$10 is shared among the investees in that winning name, and the remaining US$30 is distributed in similar proportions across the second and third place ‘stakeholders’.
Recently, a new Australian pharmacy asked the NameThis community to come up with a catchy name. The winning suggestion: “PharmAussie”. This same community named a new B2B webTV system: “eTeeVee”. There’s much to be said for tapping the creativity of a savvy network. Add a concrete business model that compensates community members for their genius and you have a pretty exciting proposition.
Just one criticism: Why have an algorithm pick the top three names and not the person who listed the brief? After all, this is a marketing exercise. The client is always right. (At least until the market sorts them out…) There are also issues surrounding the web domain availability of proposed names. It has been suggested that NameThis could charge a much higher fee if it packaged the domain and trademark along with the name. But it’s a terrifically simple idea in early beta. Definitely worth checking out.
