In 2021, one of my clients, HERO, was acquired by Klarna. As part of the acquisition, HERO needed a new umbrella name for its suite of products, in addition to new names for each platform and feature, in order to fit in with the broader product offering at Klarna. The challenge was that Klarna had no central naming process or unified approach to naming.
I lead a cross-functional leap working on naming consisting of designers and product marketers, designing and executing a strategic approach, managing 24 senior stakeholders, and planning the rollout of our chosen names.
Our goals included:
(a) Rename our suite of products to position them among Klarna's broader portfolio of B2B solutions.
(b) Design a process that can be templated for use by other teams for product naming.
For this renaming project, we had stakeholders both on the HERO side and the Klarna side, comprising 24 senior managers, directors, and c-levels who from across design, product, and marketing who were directly invested in the success of our acquisition. (They affectionately became known as the Council of Elrond.) To make things more complex, we had 3 weeks to finalise the naming and roll out plan, ready for press releases about the acquisition.
As you might expect, with so many stakeholders, we received a ton of feedback. I knew it wouldn't be helpful to take opinions on suggested names directly, as the focus then would be on the names themselves and not on the reasons why certain names worked or not, making it harder to get alignment.
Instead, I wanted agreement on how we'd judge whether a name was right or not, so I designed a process to focus more on naming requirements initially. At each stage, I worked with a Senior Design Lead and a Product Marketing Director to carry out extensive research. We then had a standing meeting with all stakeholders every 2 days to show them the output from each stage, and get sign off before continuing.
The process looked like this:
(1) Context mapping. We noticed in abstract discussions about potential names, whether or not the name worked at a certain touch point would be used as an argument frequently. So, we proactively gathered all touch points a user might encounter the new product name, ranging from press releases and landing pages to Tweets and in-app notifications.
(2) Benchmarking. We knew which competitors' names our stakeholders thought were successful, and which were less successful. We evaluated these, and invited stakeholders to share their thoughts too on our central FigJam board.
(3) Good naming criteria. Based on our research on contexts and benchmarking with our stakeholders' requirements, we put together a list of what we considered to be essential for a good name. We wrote these as acceptance criteria, and introduced a concrete scoring rubric. This meant when evaluating naming candidates, stakeholders were able to say "X name scores a 2 on "Existing mental model alignment", so it's not as strong as Y, which scores a 3." The purpose of this was to remove subjectivity from the process as far as possible. Our stakeholders agreed on our final list of criteria.
(4) Long-listing names. Finally, we got to work brainstorming names. Here, stakeholders contributed ideas to our board, and we scored all candidates against our criteria. We used the criteria to narrow down our long-list to 5 candidates.
(5) User testing. Of course, up until now, we had been focused on internal alignment. We had dozens of existing customers who would be impacted by the name change, especially in light of their contracts changing in the course of the acquisition already. We set up interviews with 5 of our biggest merchant partners, and showed them mock-ups of our 5 naming candidates in various contexts, gathering their feedback and carrying out sentiment analysis. This allowed us to proceed with two naming options. In particular, our international merchant partners provided extremely useful feedback on the localisability of our suggested naming.
(6) The final decision. As this had been a long and intense process involving so many people in such a short period of time, I wanted to create a sense of occasion for our final name recommendation. I held a secret ballot, and presented it, with the Domain Lead and CEO having final say.
And thus, HERO became Virtual Shopping.
I mentioned that Klarna didn't have a unified naming process. After gathering feedback on what worked well and what we could improve, I refined my FigJam board to make a template, which other teams across Klarna have since used for naming.
I also re-used it when I lead the naming of a new domain and product – Shoppable Video within Klarna's Social Shopping domain.
In particular, teams who have followed the process have found the user testing element effective and enlightening. In combination wth the focus being on what makes a good name over the names themselves, gathering insights and sentiment from users helps make a very strong case for suggested name, and cuts down on the likelihood of a decision being made based on opinion only.
During the process, each stakeholder sent me a list of touch points from their respective areas. I wrote up guidelines for how Virtual Shopping (and the associated product/feature names) should be used in each context. The teams used these to implement the new naming and messaging, and I then reviewed it to ensure consistency.
During the process, the marketing team already had to build a landing page for Virtual Shopping, which was done before my messaging guidelines – which you can see below, with the blue landing page.
With my guidelines, I was keen to emphasise that we shouldn't rely just on the name to communicate meaning, but lead with the value proposition first, using the name as an anchor. I suggested the second landing page shown below, following this guidance, which resulted in a 57% increase in click-throughs to the Virtual Shopping demo.
