Are you a bouba or a kiki?
Why naming is both arbitrary and universal.
The Bouba-Kiki effect is a universal association between visual shapes and verbal sounds.
Are you trying to rename your business? Prepare to step into a world of exploration and discussion that feels a little like a college party where everyone is lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and asking if “what if my yellow is actually your blue?” (See footnote 1.)
While this headspace can be uncomfortable, some of us find it fun, and enjoy digging into linguistics in order to guide the conversation.
Did you know that when you think about a word so much that it loses all meaning, it’s called “semantic satiation?” That’s because words actually are arbitrary on their own—it’s our social agreements that give them meaning. If you sit and think about the name “Nike” for five minutes, it’s probably going to start melting into the corners of you brain.
The inherent meaningless of words is a major reason why choosing a company name is so hard. The associations we develop with a word are what give it meaning, rather than any sort of universally objective logic. This is why a word can paradoxically evolve to mean its opposite, like “literally.” (Or why a phrase can grow to be used incorrectly consistently, like mano a mano being used to mean “man to man” when it actually means “hand to hand.”)
The Good News
While words, other than onomatopoeia, are fairly dissociated from their objective meaning, there are still many commonalities in how people interpret them. Take the shapes at the top of this post. They’re part of an experiment that unearthed the “Bouba-Kiki” effect, which revealed that 95-98% of people surveyed across linguistic cultures associated the round shape with the word “Bouba” and the pointy shape with the word “Kiki.” Turns out we’ve all got a tad of shape-sound synesthesia, and we didn’t even know it!
If you break down the Bouba-Kiki effect even more, there are probably a host of other associations you can bring to these shapes.
Bouba is probably relaxed, nurturing, easy-going and slow-moving, whereas Kiki is a firecracker, a bit too energized, excited and ready for what’s next.
It brings to mind that across world cultures, the words for “mom” and “dad” are often similar. That’s because “Mama” and “Dada / Papa / Baba” are among some of the first sounds that babies learn to babble. (I have a baby, and trust me, they learn “Dada” first.)
So what does this have to do with naming?
A great branding specialist should be able to guide your team in finding a word that matches your brand positioning, and ideally, your brand archetype. If your brand is a Hero, which will convey energy, dynamism and motivation, you’ll probably want more of a “Kiki” name (see footnote 2).
But sound associations are just one consideration. Finding your team’s ideal taste among many linguistic parameters is the first task of naming. For example, do you want a name derived from Latin or Greek? Or a colloquial, friendly English phrase? Do you want something inventive, playful and easy to “verbify” like Google? Or do you want something that plays on mythology like Oracle?
They will probably steer you away from a name that functionally describes what you do today, like Midwest Paper Services, because 1) They’re hard to trademark 2) They tend to be long 3) They box you into what you do today 4) They aren’t terribly inspiring or useful for storytelling. I often use “Fiver” as an example of this phenomenon. While it’s catchy and short, it describes a marketplace that pays people five dollars for doing various tasks, which has ultimately been a barrier for their ability to evolve.
Instead, a branding expert will help you find a name that symbolizes the spirt, ethos and culture of your company, rather than your products, your founder, your headquarters or your search engine description. While it can be scary to pick a name that might need instruction and supplemental storytelling, it’s usually the right move. Yes Nike is hard to pronounce, and requires a light knowledge of Greek mythology to understand, but it now stands for the biggest brand in the world. (On that note, brand names that are hard to pronounce seem to have no trouble blowing up globally and standing the test of time: Chipotle, Fage, Pfizer, Huawei, Aetna, etc.)
The last consideration is the hardest: availability for trademark. Many brands would like to have a name like “Catalyst” or “Dynama,” where the meaning is immediately apparent. Yet categories like software and healthcare are incredibly crowded, and you’ll quickly run into competitors with similar names across the globe. (Thus why pharmaceuticals sometimes have names like “Xeljanz.” Hard-to-use Scrabble letters to the front please!) Finding an open name is also why using AI or a site like Name-Bucket-Free.net isn’t always going to work for companies. Yes they can come up with ideas, but they have no process of checking for availability. To avoid a cease and desist, it’s best to work with a branding firm, and a good lawyer.
As an avid fan of the podcast “How I Built This” with Guy Raz, I’ve noticed something interesting. Many company founders take credit for the name of their company. That’s because the leaders of a company want to have their fingerprints on this incredibly important decision. As someone who’s run dozens of naming processes, I’ve learned never to conduct naming exercises unilaterally. I make it a collaborative exploration, gathering all the back-of-the-napkin ideas a company’s leaders have accumulated over time and using them as inspiration. In the end, it’s not about who dreamed up the right name. It’s about aligning all kinds of different minds, perspectives and tastes around a decision that’s right for a business and its story.
I hope this post helped anyone thinking of a new company name. I’d love to chat if you’re looking for an outside perspective.
Footnotes:
Don Draper had the best response to this question: “I know that there is a blue that at least 45% of the population sees as the same. Maybe half those people think they're looking at yellow. Maybe, but the truth is, people may see things differently, but they don't really want to.”
I had a client who was convinced the best brand names in the world started with the letter “K” because it conveys strength and is visually memorable. She cited “Kodak,” which is a made-up word. “I devised the name myself,” said George Eastman, Kodak’s founder. “The letter ‘K’ had been a favorite with me - it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with 'K.' The word 'Kodak' is the result."
