A friend sent me a name shortlist for her company last week, eleven candidates in a spreadsheet, and asked what I thought. So I sat in Ovation with a coffee going cold and read all eleven out loud until the barista looked over. Four of them died in my mouth. I could not tell you why on paper. I could tell you instantly out loud.
That is not intuition. That is linguistics, and it has been studied for ninety years.
Show people a spiky shape and a round shape and ask which one is called bouba and which is kiki, and almost everyone on earth, across languages, gives the same answer. The round one is bouba. Sound carries meaning before words do. Hard stops, the K and T and P sounds, read as sharp, fast, precise. Open vowels and soft continuants read as round, warm, slow.
A brand name is not read, it is heard, and the mouth decides how it feels before the brain gets a vote on what it means.
Once you know this, the winners stop looking like luck. Kodak was invented from nothing by a man who simply liked the letter K and wanted it at both ends. Nike is two syllables with the stress in front, which is the rhythm of almost every name that lasts. Oatly is soft and slightly silly in the mouth, which is exactly the personality of the copy on the carton. Liquid Death is two hard hits in a row and could not possibly be a wellness brand. Glossier ends on a sound that trails, and it sells things that shine.
Three mechanics do most of the work. Sound symbolism, meaning the physical feel of the consonants against the category you are in. Stress pattern, meaning where the emphasis falls, with the front-loaded two-syllable name winning far more often than anything else. And what I would call mouth cost, meaning how much work it takes to say. Names that require the tongue to travel get shortened by customers, and the customers always win that argument.
Here is the part that gets lost in naming meetings. Everyone argues about meaning. Nobody tests sound. The room debates whether a name evokes trust while the actual decision is being made a hundred milliseconds earlier, in the ear, by machinery none of us control. Then somebody puts the shortlist in a deck in twenty-four point type and the whole thing gets settled by kerning.
Everyone argues about meaning. Nobody tests sound.
Read them out loud. In a room with other people, ideally, where you will feel embarrassed by the wrong ones. My friend cut her list to three before the coffee was finished, and none of the survivors were the ones she had bolded.