BACKGROUND AND CHALLENGE
Rarely does NIKE reach outside of its house precincts to name a product. In the one instance I know of—from direct experience—it did. I was invited to help NIKE Golf name
its latest professional grade golf ball. The beating heart of the product was a proprietary resin material inside the core architecture, that enhanced properties like flight, feel,
distance, and spin—in a word, all those parameters that seem magical and mysterious
to a non-golfer (me).

SOLUTION
The Brief was to develop a name that made a nod in the direction of established NIKE naming precedents, hinted at the ‘secret sauce’/ingredient tech, and met naming best practices—like being short, distinctive, and memorable. The first thought was simply
‘Rezin’ with a phonetic ‘z’ to suggest that while this is ‘resin,’ it’s not ‘your grandmother’s resin.’ Pushing a step further, we compressed it into the acronymic ‘RZN’ in all caps.
This placed the name in the context of other NIKE acronym brands, with some additional ‘virtues’: the pronunciation is virtually indistinguishable from the actual word ‘resin,’ it almost looks like the initials of a chemical compound (giving the suggestion of scientific innovation), and it was short enough to serve as a prefix or root standing for a line to which extensions could attach, e.g.., RZN Tour | Platinum.