Naming

A naming project starts with a brief: who the company is for, what it does differently, how it wants to sound, the markets it will trade in and anything the name must never be confused with. From the brief comes a long list, often running to hundreds of candidates across several routes: descriptive, suggestive, arbitrary, invented, compound, and founder or place names.

The list is then cut. Names people stumble over when they say them, or misspell when they hear them, go first. The survivors are searched on the trade mark registers and the web, the last two or three are tested with people outside the company, and a trade mark attorney gives a clearance opinion on the favourite before identity work begins.

A name is the part of a brand that is hardest to change later. Customers, contracts, domains, app store listings and years of search results sit under it, and renaming after launch costs far more than renaming before. In Australia, registering a business name with ASIC lets you trade under it and gives you no exclusive rights to it. A registered trade mark does that, for the goods and services it covers, so a name picked on taste alone can turn out to belong to someone else.

We name companies as part of brand work, alongside the identity and the voice, because a name chosen on its own tends to be undone by the first identity that cannot carry it. The work usually opens with a positioning sprint, so the long list is written against an agreed position, and the words customers use about the company go into it.

Our published method runs from a written brief to a shortlist a trade mark adviser can check. We cut the long list on whether people can say a name, spell it and find it, then screen what is left for plain conflicts and a usable domain. Formal clearance is a separate step with the client’s own adviser, and we ask for it before the design work starts.

Say a company makes software that schedules maintenance crews for wind farms, and the founders’ favourite name joins the words wind and crew. It is clear on day one. It also describes the service, which makes it hard to register, and the register search turns up two similar marks for related services. The long list moves to suggestive and invented names. Two pass the radio test and the searches, and an attorney clears one of them before the identity is briefed.