How to name your brand or product

Faye Brown's class does exactly what its title promises and nothing more: it hands beginners a ten-part framework for generating brand name ideas, illustrated with brand history and paired with a worksheet meant to be filled in alongside the video. At 31 minutes across fourteen short lessons, it moves fast, and that pace is both the class's biggest strength and its clearest limitation.

The structure is simple and effective. After a two-minute intro, each of the ten naming routes gets its own lesson: descriptive, evocative, historical, arbitrary, composite, invented, geographical, paired-word, acronym, and eponymous names. Each lesson follows the same rhythm: a definition, two or three brand examples, a quick pros-and-cons rundown, and one or two worksheet questions to answer before moving on. That repetition makes the class easy to follow and easy to skim back through later when you only need a refresher on one route.

The brand examples carry more weight than they first appear to. Learning that Amazon nearly became Cadabra, or that Starbucks pulled its name from a character in Moby Dick, or that IKEA is an acronym built from the founder's initials plus his farm and hometown, does more than entertain. It shows, case by case, that naming rarely happens in one clean flash of inspiration, which is a useful reassurance for anyone stuck on a blank worksheet page. The Marlboro story, named after a London street rather than an American plain, works the same way: it undercuts the assumption that a good name has to feel inevitable rather than accidental.

Where the exercises land

The strongest single exercise is the descriptive-name test in lesson three: describe your business in plain terms, no adjectives, no emotional language, just what it does. It is a genuinely useful diagnostic, forcing clarity before creativity. The evocative-name exercise, asking what feeling you want a customer to have, is nearly as strong and pairs naturally with it. By the time the class reaches pairing words and next steps, the exercises start to feel thinner, more like prompts to free-associate than structured thinking, and the acronym and composite lessons in particular admit outright that testing your own name against them is difficult to do on the spot.

Where it falls short

The class is explicit that it will not cover trademark search, domain registration strategy, or international naming pitfalls in any depth, gesturing at the UK gov.uk trademark checker and leaving the rest to the learner. For a beginner naming a first business, that gap matters, since a name that clears every creative hurdle can still be legally unusable. The class also leans heavily on a worksheet that is not demonstrated in the video itself, so learners have to trust the process rather than see it modeled.

This is a genuinely useful starting point for someone who has not yet named their brand and wants ten different angles to try rather than one. It is not a substitute for legal or strategic naming guidance, and anyone past the idea-generation stage will find little new here.

What you will learn

• ·How to categorize naming approaches into ten distinct types: descriptive, evocative, historical, arbitrary, composite, invented, geographical, paired-word, acronym, and eponymous
• ·How to write a plain-language description of your business stripped of emotional language, as a diagnostic for the descriptive route
• ·How to identify emotional associations you want customers to feel and translate them into evocative name candidates
• ·How to weigh trademark and URL availability against creativity and memorability for each naming route
• ·How to combine and pair words generated across exercises into new composite or two-word brand names
• ·How to evaluate whether using your own name fits your growth plans and how visible you want to be in the brand