The Art (and Numbers) of Naming

Naming (or re-naming) a company, product or service is often overwhelming. In our careers, we’ve worked on many successful naming projects for a wide range of entities, including a spa, non-profits, meat processing facility, restaurant, power plant, and, yes, advertising agencies.

Regardless of the client, we follow the same proven naming process. This post explains the numbers game of naming and the steps we take to get to a winner.

STEP 1: Name Generation - Following a kickoff meeting with the client to understand their motivations and goals for the name, we begin name generation. In this step we concept many, many names – typically 100-200. It’s the classic quantity yields quality approach. Some will be terrible. Many will be solid. And, a select few will be exciting.

STEP 2: Vetted Short List - The biggest challenge in naming a company or product is not coming up with a good name. It’s coming up with a good name that is available! When vetting our list of 100+ names, we’re looking to eliminate potential conflicts. The last thing we want is our client to get sued over their new (but already taken) name. So we use a combination of URL searches, Google searches, and trademark searches. That typically whittles our list down to 10-20 clean names worthy of consideration.

STEP 3: Top Choices - At this stage, we ask our clients to pick their favorite name(s) for final legal vetting. This is where we turn to a trusted Intellectual Property attorney to take the top 1-3 names and do a full legal vetting and risk assessment.

STEP 4: Final Name Selection - With a risk assessment in hand, the client can then choose their winning name with full confidence that their new name is not only the perfect fit, but that it is also clean and available for trademark.

And that’s naming…by the numbers!