Use of Product-Naming Techniques for Creating Official City Toponyms: Analysis of Perspectives

The article explores the possibilities of using product-naming techniques to create new urban place names. The author reveals the distinctive nature of this approach among other naming strategies, which consists in the pragmatic focus of the name-creation process, split in a series of successive operations with each step having its specific means and purpose, and ultimately aimed at delivering correct perception. These stages include: consideration of context-driven factors for naming the promotion object; defining the image-building effects of the name (positioning); overview of existing designations used for similar objects; identifying distinctive features of the promotion object to provide for its competitive advantages, both in terms of perception and applications; working out variants of the name, checking if these are consistent with the ongoing image-related tasks and communicative expediency; selection of final variants; perception testing by target audiences; checking the name’s legal cleanliness and compliance with linguistic standards (name evaluation). The research suggests that the use of the product-naming algorithm is not restricted to the commercial sphere but can equally apply for the creation of official city toponyms. The hypothesis builds on a marketing approach to territorial positioning, a modern conception of holistic imaging of space, and the practice of designing individual locations. By extrapolating the marketing methodology, the author evaluates the applicability of the staged approach in the creation of toponyms and explains its peculiarities for the designated realia. Best practices for the creation of a comprehensive and consistent toponymic landscape are listed, based on the activity of the toponymic commissions of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, and Perm. The paper also emphasizes the importance of analytical consideration of extra-linguistic and linguistic information collected at the pre-naming stage and outlines a structure of a creative brief for place naming. Potential strategies for the evaluation of topographic objects names are discussed in the end.