Top Ten

Top Ten is one of those product names that tells almost nothing and yet tries to sound definitive, which makes it more branding than information. By our assessment, that can work if the item underneath is already obvious from context, because the name is short, easy to repeat, and hard to forget. The downside is the obvious one: on its own it does not say what kind of product this is, so it leaves the buyer to decode the package or listing. In use, the name behaves like a label stub, a place-holder that can sit on anything from food to media to household goods. It sits well below names that describe the function outright, and that is the whole trade-off. Top Ten is memorable, but memory is not the same thing as clarity.