How to name a consumer brand in India

Founders spend months on formulation and an afternoon on the name. Then they spend the next five years paying for it. If you want one piece of evidence for how expensive that trade is, it comes from a man who has run the experiment more times than almost anyone alive.

The 120-brand dataset

On Episode 11 of WTF is with Nikhil Kamath (7 October 2023), Kishore Biyani — founder of Future Group and Big Bazaar — was asked the single most common reason a new brand fails. His answer came from an unusually large personal sample.

Across his career he says he built close to 120 brands and labels. Around 20 went wrong. When his teams analysed the failures, the recurring causes were:

• The name
• The type style
• The logo
• The brand codes and category codes
• The product
• The pricing

Biyani's sentence trails off as he starts to rank them — and it is Nikhil Kamath who finishes it, at 3:17:40: "sometimes just the name. The name is incredibly valuable." Biyani does not contradict him.

So the ranking is Kamath's reading of Biyani's list, not Biyani's own verdict. We say that plainly because the difference matters: what Biyani states is that the name sits among the recurring causes of failure, alongside type style, logo, brand codes, category codes, product and pricing. That is a weaker claim than "the name is the top reason" — and still a striking one from an operator whose career was built on merchandising and price.

What Biyani means by brand codes

The phrase deserves unpacking, because it is the part founders most often miss. Brand codes are the learned visual conventions of a category — the colours, shapes and type conventions a shopper has been trained by decades of exposure to recognise instantly.

His example: toothpaste is red and white. Move away from the code and it becomes difficult, because you have forced the shopper to think rather than recognise. In a category where a decision takes two seconds on a shelf or six swipes on a phone, thinking is friction.

The nuance that separates good design from bad: you want to be distinctive within the code, not illegible outside it. Break the code deliberately and you may create a category. Break it accidentally and you are simply hard to find.

The SEO rule most founders get backwards

Raj Shamani's contribution is the most immediately practical advice in the episode, and it is a naming rule almost nobody applies: choose a word that has no existing meaning.

If you choose a word which has meaning, then you are fighting against something already.

You are fighting on two fronts at once:

• Semantic. A word with meaning arrives carrying associations you did not choose and now have to overwrite.
• Search. A common word means competing with every existing result for it. Our view: a coined word is far easier to rank for, which matters when most of your early customers will find you by typing your name. It is not a guarantee of page one, and it is worth checking before you commit.

His example is House of X's perfume brand Blanco. His account: the word was picked because a collaborator already used "Blanco" in his own slang for confidence and winning — so the brand launched with a meaning it controlled, rather than one the dictionary had assigned. Not a word that meant nothing, but a word whose meaning was already theirs.

The counter-case: names that carry a story

The panel did not agree that meaninglessness is always right, and the exceptions are instructive. Two examples from the episode, both of which worked precisely because the name did the explaining:

• The Good Bug — a gut-health brand from Biyani's extended family. The whole proposition is that good bacteria should outnumber bad bacteria. Biyani's own assessment: had the brand not been called The Good Bug, the story would have been different.
• My Fitness — Mensa's peanut butter brand. Narayanan's reasoning was specific: the trademark was available, and the name is extendable. It supports a mother buying something healthier for her child and an athlete buying protein, without repositioning.

A third, Creatures of Habit, was cited as an odd name that worked because D2C customers now accept — and reward — a name that is clearly telling a story.

So the rule is not really about meaning. It is about ownership:

Either take a word that means nothing and give it meaning, or take a phrase whose meaning is your proposition. What you must not do is take a common word and hope to outrank everything that already owns it.

The Peter England question

No honest article about naming in India can skip this. Nikhil Kamath raised it directly: many large Indian brands — Peter England, Louis Philippe, John Miller — were built with Western-sounding names and foreign models, for products with no connection to anywhere outside India. And it worked for a long time.

Narayanan described an experiment he dated to roughly seven or eight years before the October 2023 recording — so around 2015–16 — in which click-through rates on performance-marketing creative were higher with fair-skinned models. He gave no figure, and did not say where the test ran.

He offered several readings rather than one: "It's a belief system… maybe people think it's more premium." Asked whether colonial history sits behind it, he said "I think for sure there is", while adding he is "not big into theory". He expected change, but slowly: "it will be slow progression."

Shamani's explanation is the most useful part of the exchange, because it is structural rather than fatalistic. Foreign-sounding names work, he argued, because hundreds of other brands are simultaneously pushing the same association — the collective spend of every brand positioning Western as premium accrues to each of them. An individual Indian-sounding brand is pushing that boulder alone.

But he also argued the lever now exists to change it: with content and community you can build genuine pride in buying an Indian brand. His example — Baba Ramdev as the largest creator-led brand story India has produced. The panel also pointed to Sabyasachi as evidence that owning the culture, rather than borrowing someone else's, can travel globally.

Our read for a founder naming something in 2026: a Western-sounding name is a borrowed shortcut. It works because of spending you did not do, it is getting weaker, and it forecloses the more defensible position — a name that is yours, in a story only you can tell.

A naming checklist

Run every candidate name through this before you register anything:

1. Trademark. Is the mark available in your class? Narayanan cited trademark availability as a direct reason My Fitness was chosen. Check before you fall in love.
2. Search. Search the exact word. If page one is already owned by something established, you are choosing a permanent handicap.
3. Domain and handles. Exact-match domain and consistent handles across platforms. A coined word usually gets you all of them.
4. Pronunciation. Say it aloud in at least two Indian languages. If a customer cannot say it, they cannot recommend it — and word of mouth is your strongest channel.
5. Extendability. Can it stretch into the next two categories you might enter? Biyani's Smartsters started in children's study tables and was designed to extend into beds, toys and clothing.
6. Codes. Does the visual identity sit inside your category's codes while remaining distinctive? Distinctive inside the code, not lost outside it.
7. Story. Can you explain the name in one sentence that says something true about the product? People remember stories, not facts — a point Narayanan made explicitly.

Four checks before you register, for ₹0

All four are free and take an evening. Do them before you fall in love with a name.

Say it out loud to ten people, on the phone. Not in writing. If they spell it back wrong, or ask you to repeat it, a customer in a kirana queue will too. Do it with people who speak the languages your buyers speak — a name that reads fine in English can be awkward in Hindi, Tamil or Marathi.

Search it on IP India's public trademark search. The search itself costs nothing. It tells you whether someone already holds the name in your class. Registration has a government fee and usually a lawyer — check the current fees on the IP India site rather than trusting a figure you read somewhere.

Type it into Amazon, Flipkart and Instagram. Is the handle free? Does the marketplace already return twenty products under that word? A name you cannot own on the shelf is a name you will fight for forever.

Check the domain, but check it last. A `.in` or `.co.in` is fine. Founders lose weeks to a `.com` that changes nothing about whether the name works in a shop in Nagpur.

Why the name is a value-equation decision

Through Alex Hormozi's value equation — dream outcome × likelihood of success, over time delay × effort — a name is not branding. It is a likelihood lever. A name that signals credibility raises perceived probability that the product will work before a customer has read a word about it. A name that sounds cheap, or confusing, or borrowed, quietly lowers it on every single impression.

In Cialdini's terms the name is doing authority and liking work at zero marginal cost, on every impression, forever. That is why it is worth more than an afternoon — and why it belongs in the small set of decisions that are genuinely expensive to reverse, alongside category and price architecture. We covered that trade-off in the 0 to 500 crore playbook.

Read next

A name is one decision inside a bigger set. These three cover the ones next to it:

• [Who actually buys in India](/en/blog/india-1-2-3-consumer-classes/) — a name that lands in India 1 can be invisible in India 2. Decide who you are naming for before you name.
• [Greed, fear and signalling](/en/blog/psychology-of-indian-consumer/) — why an Indian shopper trusts one name and hesitates at another, from the same episode.
• [What to sell in India](/en/blog/null-set-product-research-india/) — find the product first. Naming something nobody searches for is an expensive way to be neat.

The one-line test

If you take a single thing from Biyani's 120-brand dataset, make it this: the name is one of the few decisions you cannot cheaply undo. Formulation can improve. Packaging can be redesigned. Campaigns get replaced every quarter.

Our view, not his: a rename spends recall you have already paid for. You can carry it across — plenty of brands have — but you pay for the crossing. That is why the name belongs with the decisions that are expensive to reverse.

If you are still choosing the product itself rather than its name, start with finding what India already searches for instead — the name question can wait until you know what you are naming.

So the test is simple. Will this name still work when you are ten times bigger, in the next category, said aloud by a customer who has never seen it written down? If yes, register it. If you are hesitating, you already have your answer.

Source: [WTF is with Nikhil Kamath, Episode 11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjiZ11lKCrU) — "WTF Goes into Building a Fashion, Beauty, or Home Brand?", published 7 October 2023.

On the episode: [Nikhil Kamath](/en/founders/nikhil-kamath/) with [Ananth Narayanan](/en/founders/ananth-narayanan/) ([Mensa Brands](/en/companies/mensa-brands/), formerly Myntra), [Kishore Biyani](/en/founders/kishore-biyani/) ([Future Group](/en/companies/future-group/), Big Bazaar) and [Raj Shamani](/en/founders/raj-shamani/) ([House of X](/en/companies/house-of-x/)).

Quotes are attributed to the speaker and checked against the recording. Independent figures are sourced and dated separately.