What brand name to use depends what you’re asking the name to carry.

Reader Josie from San Diego wrote after my note on misspellings and asked a fair question.

“With great .com domains being scarce and trademark clearance harder than ever, how do you know when a playful spelling will work, and when it will likely underperform?”

First, context matters.

Krispy Kreme and Kool-Aid were never trying to establish medical credibility or technical authority.

They were offering up indulgence, color … fun!

Would “Cool Ade” and “Crispy Cream” evoke the same energy?

Not even close, right? The silly spelling itself amplifies the emotional tone of the category.

In other words, the name aligns with the promise.

Where founders get into trouble is when they use playful distortion in categories that demand trust.

If you are selling supplements, diagnostics, financial tools, or anything health-adjacent, your name is doing some super-heavy credibility work.

A wink in a face-to-face pitch would rattle people. That’s what a funny name does when you go to market.

That does not mean a distinctive name is a death sentence in health. 

Zyrtec is invented. So is Viagra. Or Ozempic. They work because they sound technical and serious. The phonetics support the category expectation rather than undermine it.

They don’t sound like they’re mimicking (or mocking) a relevant word.

Second, originality is NOT optional.

Made-up words still have to clear trademark in their class. You cannot slide by with “KokaKolah” and expect legal sympathy.

If it creates likelihood of confusion with an existing mark, it will fail fast (and expensively).

The real test is this: does the spelling reinforce the emotional job of the product, or distract from it?

Fun names should pump up the delight.

But in skeptical categories, they can tax belief.

A brand name is not decoration. It has a lot of heavy lifting to do for you.

Getting it right is supposed to be hard!

Have you worked on a brand name project? How did that go?

Want to make your product irresistible? That’s what we do as product marketing consultants at Graphos Product, helping innovators turn need-driven ideas into market-ready successes.