Descriptive names are purely descriptive of what a company or product does or its function. They might also take the form of an acronym or the names of the company founders. In the past, most names were Descriptive, and that is still the path chosen by the majority of brands. These names have never been the most powerful, and unfortunately, since the rise of the Internet and online searching, it has become nearly impossible to build an effective brand around a Descriptive name. For example: if you named your new automobile company “Fast Cars,” nobody would be able to find you online, because your name would disappear among all the search results for “fast cars.”

The notion that a name should be Descriptive in order to “describe what we do,” is completely wrong. A name rarely has to describe what the brand is all about — that will become evident by the context surrounding the brand. The job of the name is to get your brand noticed, remembered and talked about, and that is rarely achieved by Descriptive names.