丁峰的博客 Free is a matter of liberty, not price.

大约半年前，2006年的8月上旬，我写过一篇关于给产品取名的帖子《起个名字真不容易》，讲述了当时我们给产品取名过程的艰难。

今天在 PragmaticMarketing.com 的 Blog 上看到这样一篇题目是 Naming (and renaming) products 帖子，Steve Johnson 写的，从CA公司最近宣布要给它的产品大规模改名讲起。

这篇文章里面几个观点值得注意：

Renaming is expensive（给产品改名是代价高昂的）:

Steve Johnson said:
A few years ago, one of my collegues at CA told me that they estimated the cost of renaming a product at $1,000,000.

Renaming is hard（给产品改名是很难做的）:

Steve Johnson said:
As those of us who have worked closely with code know, as much as we might plan to put the product name in a constant so it can be easily changed, the product name is usually hard-coded in plenty of places. A name change isn’t as trivial as it appears to marketing and management. Nothing seems difficult to those who don’t actually have to do it.

Invest in promotion for the suites rather than the individual products（市场推广费用应该更多的花在产品族/系列上，而不是单独的个别产品上）:

Steve Johnson said:
Even Microsoft, with all of their marketing money, tends to invest in promotion for the suites rather than the products. That is, MS Office tends to get the lion’s share of promotional spending rather than individual products like Word or Visio.

Different strategies for naming on B2C or B2B products（对B2C或B2B的产品的命名策略是不一样的）:

Steve Johnson said:
There are two strategies for naming: descriptive or unique. Names that are unique like iPod, Nuvi, and RAZR work best for B2C products. For B2B products, the descriptive approach, such as that CA is following, is best.

我个人理解这里的B2C就是消费级产品（目标客户是个人消费者），而B2B是指企业级产品（目标客户是企业级用户）。

延伸阅读：

• Naming (and renaming) products , February 04, 2007, from PragmaticMarketing.com
• CA begins renaming products, February 02, 2007, from computerworld.com
• ca.com/productnames, Official website of CA Product Naming Strategy
• 《起个名字真不容易》, August 11th, 2006, Ding Feng’s Blog