Consumer naming is where the rules change.
In B2B, clarity is usually the first thing you protect. Enterprise buyers need to quickly understand what they're evaluating. Ambiguity creates friction, and friction kills deals.
For consumer brands, the calculation is different. Clarity helps. But personality sells.
Why consumer brands can afford to be more interesting
A consumer brand gets thousands of touchpoints to communicate what it is. Packaging, advertising, social, in-store experience, the product itself. The name doesn't have to carry the entire explanation. It just has to be memorable, ownable, and charged with the right feeling.
That opens up space that B2B rarely gets. You can name a brand after something unexpected, something evocative, something that captures a mood or a moment rather than a category. You can let the name be the hook and let everything else do the explaining.
Think about Liquid Death. Functionally, it's canned water. The name says nothing about what it is — and that's entirely the point. The brand was built around a specific cultural energy, and the name carries that energy better than anything literal could.
That strategy would fail catastrophically for an enterprise software company. For consumers, it creates a cult following.
The clarity spectrum in consumer naming
That said, personality doesn't mean obscurity. There's still a spectrum, and where you land on it should be intentional.
Some consumer brands thrive on clarity. Whole Foods, Dollar Shave Club — names that communicate something useful, even if not everything. These brands gain from easy comprehension. The name does some of the legwork so marketing doesn't have to.
Other consumer brands build their identity entirely around feeling. Glossier. Patagonia. Anthropologie. The name doesn't describe the product; it establishes a world. You have to experience the brand to understand it, and that's by design.
Neither end of the spectrum is wrong. The mistake is landing on one without knowing why.
The three things consumer names need to do
Whatever tone and strategy a consumer name adopts, it still has to do three things well.
- It needs to stick. Memory is the baseline for all consumer brand work. A name that doesn't stick doesn't matter how good the strategy behind it was.
- It needs to own a feeling. Not just a category. Every product category has countless options. What makes someone choose yours — and come back — is emotional. The name should tap into that emotion, or at least be consistent with it.
- It needs to hold up at scale. A name that feels right on Instagram might feel thin on a billboard or a shelf at a major retailer. Consumer brands don't stay small. Build the name for where you're going.
How to decide between personality and clarity
There's a shortcut I use when working on consumer naming: look at the category you're entering and ask whether it's emotionally charged or functionally driven.
Emotionally charged categories (like beauty, wellness, food and beverage, fashion, pet care) are where personality tends to win. The purchase decision is rooted in feeling. The name should speak to that.
Functionally driven categories (think appliances, insurance, utilities, financial services) are where clarity tends to build more trust. The purchase decision is more rational. Ambiguity becomes friction.
Most categories sit somewhere in between. The interesting work happens in figuring out where your brand specifically wants to live — and naming it accordingly.