At some point in the last decade, naming became an industry. Not a byproduct of branding work, not a creative deliverable that emerged naturally from brand strategy, but an industry. There are nomenclature consultants. There are naming agencies. There are platforms that generate brand name candidates using AI and then charge you for the trademark clearance on the ones the algorithm likes. The process has been systematized, stratified, and — in proportion to the name that typically emerges at the end of it — made extremely expensive.
The name, when it arrives, is usually some variation of what you already had. This is not always bad. Sometimes the old name was actually fine and the organization just needed to feel like they’d given the question serious consideration. Sometimes the process genuinely produces something better. But the ratio of investment to naming improvement is one of the most reliable dark comedies in the marketing industry.
The Architecture of a Naming Process
A proper corporate naming engagement begins with research. Stakeholder interviews that establish what the brand means to different parts of the organization — which is to say, they establish that different parts of the organization have completely different ideas about what the brand means, a revelation that costs roughly $40,000 to document. Then there is competitive analysis: a thorough look at what names exist in the category, which always confirms that the category is full of names that are variations of three archetypes (abstract coined words, founder surnames, and slightly misspelled common nouns).
Then there is naming territory mapping. The naming agency presents a strategic framework that organizes potential approaches into territories like “Aspirational,” “Functional,” “Human,” and “Invented,” with descriptions of what each territory suggests about the brand positioning. The client nods. They like two territories in particular. They want to “explore both directions.”
Then there are naming candidates. Hundreds of them, presented in batches, with short rationales for each. The client reviews them. Legal reviews them. Half are eliminated because they’re already trademarked in the relevant markets. A third of the remainder are eliminated because someone in the room has a personal association with the word. The remaining options go back to the agency for “refinement.”
Why It Takes Six Months
Naming takes six months because everyone has an opinion and nobody has authority. The CEO likes abstract coined words. The Head of Sales wants something that clearly communicates what the company does, because she’s been in enough prospect calls to know that abstract coined words generate the question “what do you do?” seventeen times per conference. Legal wants something defensible. Marketing wants something distinctive. The founder still has feelings about the original name they chose in 2011 and isn’t fully conscious of how those feelings are influencing their feedback.
These constituencies rarely meet simultaneously to resolve their differences. Instead, their feedback arrives in sequence, filtered through whoever organized the meeting, sometimes contradicting the previous round’s direction, sometimes contradicting each other within the same round. The naming agency, to its credit, typically continues to provide options with equanimity, because they have been through this before and they know that the process will eventually converge on something, possibly because the client runs out of time or budget or opinions.
The Name That Emerges
The final name is almost always one of the following: a portmanteau of two relevant concepts (Connectify, Innovabridge, Growthly), a common word with unusual spelling that felt clever in 2018 and now simply has an incorrect vowel (Xelerate, Vyve, Kleer), a single word that was available as a domain name because it is obscure enough that nobody had claimed it (Luma, Arca, Kova), or — in the case of a rebrand — a name that is approximately 15% different from the original name, changed enough to signal intentionality but similar enough that the existing customer base experiences no meaningful disruption.
None of these are wrong. Some of them are genuinely good. The issue is that six months and significant investment in the process does not reliably produce better names than three weeks of focused creative work with a competent strategist and a copywriter with good linguistic instincts. The correlation between process rigor and name quality is, at best, weak.
What Actually Makes a Good Name
A good name is distinctive in its category, pronounceable by its intended audience, available as a trademark, not offensive in the primary markets where the brand will operate, and somehow suggestive of what makes the brand interesting or different. That’s the whole list. Everything else is taste, and taste varies.
Good names tend to come from people with strong opinions making quick decisions with genuine creative conviction — which is exactly the opposite of the six-month multi-stakeholder nomenclature process. This is not an argument against process. It’s an argument for knowing what process is designed to produce. The naming process is often better understood as an alignment mechanism than a creative mechanism: its real function is to give everyone a voice and bring the organization to a shared decision, not to produce the best possible name.
When that’s acknowledged up front, the process becomes more honest and often faster. When it isn’t, you get six months of workshops and a name that’s one letter away from what you started with.
Track the whole ordeal with a KPI Shark notebook — ideal for documenting the moments where everyone agreed the name was perfect and then came back the next day with concerns. And when it’s over, whatever the name is, build the brand well. At No Briefs Club, we’re proof that what you call something matters less than what you do with the name you’ve got.
