NameLab creates product and company names using a process we invented in 1981— constructional linguistics. Here is how it works.

Like all English nouns, product and company names are constructed from linguistic elements called morphemes.

Morphemes are small, semantic units that, when combined, form words. The van in advantage is a morpheme that means front of, top of or leading edge of wherever it appears. American English contains more than 6,000 morphemes.

At NameLab, we extract all morphemes that might express your desired message(s). By combining these morphemes, we construct every word or short phrase possible in English to create candidate names.

Unlike natural language, a product or company name derives much of its meaning from the perceiver's experience with names of similar products or companies.

Because your proprietary name's positioning can either exploit or be hindered by your customer's experience with similar products or services, we analyze the set of proprietary names your new identity will join to establish linguistic rules that describe an effective naming solution. These rules differ from category to category.

Candidate names are screened against the rules of legitimacy and positioning defined by our category analysis, eliminating those that are structurally "mis-symbolic."

The remaining names are analyzed and culled further, yielding a shorter list of major candidates refined to improve visibility, comprehension, and multilingual function. (Examples include the q of Compaq and the phonetic spelling of Acura).

Additional analysis and screening yields a shorter list of major candidate names expressing the input statement messages (through relevant morphemes) in a form that is legitimate to the category and positionally accurate.

During the construction process, major candidate names are amended to enhance their linguistic performance. Specifically, we optimize candidates' speechstream visibility, notational visibility, phonetic transparency, and multilingual function.

Speechstream visibility is the probability that a word will be recognized in a normal spoken stream of English speech.

Notational visibility is the probability that a word will be deciphered from typeset text, such as the columns of a newspaper.

A phonetically transparent name is spoken-as-spelled and easily pronounced from alphabetic notation.

Because we learn to speak five years before learning to read, language is sound (or phonetic) in the brain.

We think and remember in sound rather than by abstract alphabetic notation.   Because our brain works this way, phonetic transparency affects the memorability of a name, which, in turn, affects the advertising cost per retained impression.