A little about how we picked our name

After what seemed like hundreds of name options, including even doing a poll with close friends and family, picking a product name for our upcoming parental control application came down to three choices. It was quite humbling to read about the process used in Jaunt’s product naming. Have you ever thought of how brands you know well picked their name? The article linked above provides a good view into this.

Now back to our approach.

We started off finding a local technology that already had a solid feature set in December 2014. The feature set was adapted from a Mobile Device Management platform and had been “dumbed” down a bit so it is user friendly. Key areas that were obvious opportunities:

1. helping parents in supervising their children’s time spent on smart devices (phones and tablets) without having to look over their children’s shoulders
2. keeping the child’s browsing of the internet in a safe manner and filtering inappropriate content
3. provide parents peace of mind that their child is where they are supposed to be
4. educating parents about good habits and ideas on how to manage device time (this will be done via regular blogging and Medium posts!)

With this high level feature set and benefits in mind, we decided to hire a local branding and marketing firm. We thought of doing this naming process ourselves but felt that though we may come up with a good name, we wouldn’t be able to provide the whole brand experience.

We started off with providing a demo of the product, who our target audience would be, how we would go to market and some ideas on the feel we wanted to achieve. Ideas for names were presented with 3 areas of interest:

1. Direction of the name — what we wanted to feel when we heard the name
2. What did the name mean — in some cases it was simply a dictionary definition
3. Pros and Cons on the name (this was based on feeling, namespace availability, negative references, etc.)

In the end, we had to pick one. We used the example of sending the child with their device out in the wild but always returning home resonated big time for all of us. This is where the verb meaning of Boomerang hit a solid throw on what we are working to accomplish (and it wasn’t even one of the options in our friends/family poll!).

The definition of Boomerang:

noun
a bent or curved piece of tough wood used by the Australian Aborigines as a throwing club, one form of which can be thrown so as to return to the thrower.

verb
to come back or return, as a boomerang.

To wrap up, we are hard at work in launching our app very soon — many items left to check off on our long list of to-dos. Contact us if you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you!

Boomerang’s available on the Play Store.