Somewhere right now, a brand consultancy is charging a client €180,000 to name their new fintech. They will conduct stakeholder interviews, competitive audits, linguistic screening in 14 markets, and a workshop called something like “Ideation Sprint: Beyond the Known.” They will deliver 47 name candidates. The client will choose a variation of the name they mentioned in the briefing call in February.
This is not a tragedy. This is the naming industry.
Why Naming Takes So Long (And Why That’s Partly Justified)
Good naming is genuinely hard. A brand name needs to work phonetically in multiple languages, survive trademark clearance, avoid unfortunate translations (the graveyard of automotive naming is full of European cars that mean something unfortunate in Portuguese), and be available as a domain name in a world where every short .com was registered in 2003.
The linguistic and legal work alone is expensive. Trademark clearance across multiple classes in 40 countries costs real money. Domain acquisition, if the obvious one is squatted, costs more. These are legitimate costs.
The rest is theater.
The Theater: Documented
The naming workshop is the centerpiece of the theatrical experience. Fifty people spend two days doing word association exercises and building “semantic territories” on post-it notes. The output — if you squint at it sideways — looks like every other naming workshop output ever created, because naming workshops follow a script as rigid as a mass.
The word territories are always the same: “Clarity,” “Movement,” “Precision,” “Human.” The name candidates that emerge from them sound like they were generated by the same AI model that writes airline safety cards: Vela, Noura, Nexly, Prism, Kova. When you screen them legally and phonetically, half fall away. The client picks the one that sounds most like their competitor’s name, which is fine because their competitor’s name also sounds like everyone else’s name.
Why Clients Pay For It Anyway
The rational explanation is risk management. If a €5M rebrand goes wrong because the name is bad, the CMO can point to the process as evidence of due diligence. “We hired the best people. We ran the full process.” The name becomes defensible precisely because it was expensive.
The deeper explanation is that naming feels personal in a way that other brand decisions don’t. The name is the first thing you say out loud. It’s what your parents will struggle to remember. It needs to feel right, and “feeling right” is hard to achieve without an elaborate ritual that makes the choice feel earned.
Our Spreadsheet Sloth was nearly called something else entirely. We ran zero workshops. We also aren’t charging €180,000 for the privilege of knowing that.
What Actually Works
Start with constraints, not creativity. What can’t it be? (Trademarked, taken, unpronounceable, offensive, too similar to a competitor.) Everything that survives those filters is a candidate. Make a short list. Say them out loud in different accents. Sleep on them. Pick the one that you won’t be embarrassed to say at a dinner party in three years.
The name that works is usually already in the room on day one. The process is just an expensive way to get comfortable with it.
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