Two companies sell water in aluminum instead of plastic. One is called Open Water. The other is called Liquid Death.
Open Water made the safe choice, the one almost any founder would make. The words name the product. The brand leans on purity and sustainability, recyclable cans and water it calls ultra-purified, and nothing about it asks for a second look. Its revenue has doubled every year since 2020 on under $4 million of funding, much of it sold through zoos and aquariums rather than supermarket shelves. The brand has nothing like Liquid Death's cultural footprint, and you may never have heard of it.
Liquid Death made the other choice. Its founder, Mike Cessario, went looking for what he called the dumbest possible name for a healthy drink, and landed on Liquid Death. He put canned water in a heavy-metal costume and ran it under the tagline Murder Your Thirst. Plenty of people found the whole thing ridiculous. The market did not. By March 2024 the brand had reached a $1.4 billion valuation in a funding round, on about $263 million of retail sales the year before.
Both names belong to real businesses. Only one of them became a phenomenon, and loudness is not what got it there. The difference is a precise spot on a curve that most naming advice never mentions, the spot Open Water never went looking for.
Why founders reach for the safe name
Reaching for the safe name is the rational move, and the research explains why it feels right. People trust what they process easily. In a 2004 review in Personality and Social Psychology Review, Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman pulled together the evidence that the easier something is to process, the more people like it and the more they judge it to be true. Ease reads as safety, and the feeling is doing real work. A name a buyer can read and say at a glance carries less friction into every ad and every shelf.
The head start is measurable. Alter and Oppenheimer showed in 2006, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that newly listed shares with easy-to-pronounce names traded a little better than hard-to-pronounce ones in their first days on the market. The edge was small, and it had faded within weeks. At the moment of first contact, though, the easy name won.
A name the mind reads at a glance is also the name it predicts and forgets. The vivid version fades to a ghost of itself.
All of this points toward safe. The trap is that founders hear easy and reach for expected, and those are not the same thing. A name can be effortless to process and still disappear, because the mind that reads it easily also predicts it instantly. Line up ten skincare brands and most make the same soft, clinical promise in the same soft, clinical sounds, every one fluent and every one interchangeable. A name that matches what the category already sounds like inherits the category's invisibility. It passes every check on the founder's list and earns nothing, because the buyer was never once made to look twice.
The curve behind the choice
A name's payoff does not rise in a straight line as it gets stranger. It climbs while the name departs from what the category trains you to expect, reaches a peak, then drops once the departure grows too large to make sense of. Too familiar, and the name is predicted away. Too strange, and it stops being decodable. The reward sits in the middle, at a surprise the buyer can still resolve.
Reward climbs as a name departs from the expected, peaks at a surprise the buyer can still resolve, then falls when it gets too strange.
The evidence for that shape comes out of the consumer-research literature on how people judge things that do not quite fit. In a 1989 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Meyers-Levy and Tybout tested how shoppers evaluated new products that matched their category to different degrees. Across three experiments, the products that were moderately incongruent, different enough to be interesting but still recognizable, were judged more favorably than products that were either perfectly expected or wildly off-category. The pattern follows the schema-congruity theory psychologists trace to George Mandler. The mind enjoys a small puzzle it can solve. A congruent name sets none, a wildly incongruent one sets a puzzle with no answer, and the moderate case asks for a moment of work and then pays it back.
The studies behind this used products, not brand names, so naming applies the principle by extension, and the effect holds only when the buyer can resolve the surprise. Push past resolvable and the advantage flattens or reverses. The winning names are the ones whose surprise lands and clicks into place, and researchers call that sweet spot optimal incongruity.
Surprise the category, not the mouth
Easy-to-process names win, and the best names break the pattern. Both hold because a name can be surprising in one channel and effortless in another. Liquid Death is two ordinary English words. A child can read them, and the mouth runs through them without a stumble. The surprise is not in the letters. It is in the meaning, in pairing death with a health product in a category that has spent decades promising purity and freshness. The shock is semantic, and it resolves the instant you get the joke. The name breaks the category's pattern hard while breaking no rule of pronunciation at all.
The same surprise can resolve into a clean whole or snarl into a tangle. The win is the reading that clicks.
The surprise is cognitive, not political. Liquid Death broke a naming convention, not a values taboo. Splitting an audience over what a brand believes is a different and riskier bet, one where plenty of agreeable brands quietly do well, and it is not the move this argument is about. The case here is only ever the sound and the stance of a name.
The move is not specific to canned water or to a heavy-metal act either. Toilet paper is about as expected a category as naming gets, a shelf of soft and reassuring words. Who Gives A Crap broke that with a name that is faintly rude and instantly readable, and that points at something real underneath, since the company gives half its profits to building toilets where they are scarce. The surprise sits in the meaning, the words stay easy, and the joke resolves into a mission rather than a stunt.
Move the surprise into the other channel and watch it fail. Put the strangeness in the spelling, an invented word studded with silent letters and unlikely clusters, and the buyer reads the difficulty itself as a warning. Song and Schwarz demonstrated this in 2009 in Psychological Science. They gave people ostensible food additives and amusement-park rides with names that were either easy or hard to pronounce, and rated the hard ones more harmful and more risky, an effect driven by how unfamiliar the names felt. A sound profile nobody can say does not read as daring. It reads as a hazard, and the buyer steps back without knowing why.
Be bold is too blunt an instruction. The useful version is to spend the incongruity on the category, not on the tongue. Say the thing the category has been avoiding, and keep every syllable easy to pronounce while you do it. Liquid Death's name was still only the spark, not the whole engine. The breakout also rode the heavy-metal styling, viral comedy, celebrity money, and years of fighting for shelf space. What the name did was give all of that a banner worth looking at twice, instead of a label that slid past the eye unread. Whether a name is easy to say in the first place runs on its own mechanics, covered in the companion piece on sound symbolism.
How far is too far
A surprise can miss the peak on the far side too, where it stops resolving. When Tribune Publishing renamed itself tronc in 2016, the word landed as a joke rather than a stance. It was built to stand for tribune online content, but no reader got there alone, and the ridicule held until the company went back to Tribune two years later. That is the off-category tail the shoppers in the Meyers-Levy and Tybout experiments marked down, a surprise with friction and no payoff. When a stranger reads your name and only looks confused, the name has gone too far, not too timid.
Push the surprise past the peak and it stops resolving. The line crests, then breaks apart into pieces a reader cannot reassemble.
A subtler failure is the name that works as a surprise and still falls apart. The shock lands, the buyer gets it, and underneath there is nothing. A name that breaks the pattern only to break it is a gimmick, and a gimmick has a short half-life. The jolt comes once and never returns, because the surprise was never standing in for anything true about the brand. Liquid Death's stance connects to a real argument about how the drinks industry sells to people. The death is carrying a point. Take the meaning out and a costume is all that is left. A quieter version traps the cautious founder, whose name unsettles people without being bold enough to mean anything, paying the cost of strangeness for none of the reward of conviction. A polarizing name only works if the brand commits all the way.
Placing your shortlist on the curve
Start with the shelf, not the shortlist. Before any name can be judged you have to know what expected sounds like, so pull up the ten brands a buyer would really compare you against and read their names in a row. The pattern surfaces fast, and once you can hear the expected you can set your own candidates against it.
Most candidates land in one of two failed spots. Some sound like a competent member of the category and nothing more. Those are not finished, they are raw material, and the work is to push each toward a sharper stance until it earns a second look. Others go the opposite way and draw a shrug or a furrowed brow instead of a click, and those you cut without mourning the wordplay, however much it pleases you. What you are hunting for sits in between. A stranger stops on it and gets the joke, and the name stays easy to say while doing it.
That last check is the one to run before any money goes to trademarks or focus groups. Show the name cold, with no story attached, and watch the stranger's face. If the surprise lands and they can pronounce it on the first try, the name is sitting near the peak. If they squint, it has gone over the edge. The fuller method behind this, and the other tests worth running on a finalist, lives in the companion guide on naming a brand.
BrandNames runs sound-symbolism and incongruity research against a founder's real shortlist, the names you are actually choosing between. The doors open soon. Drop your email to get one note when they do.