Choose a Brand Name Like You’re Hiring a CMO


A name has work to do. Create a job description for it.

It’s natural to put together a list of asks for your name that includes things like credibility, trust, reliability, honesty, transparency, quality, yada yada yada.

But a name is a specialist, and these types of foundational brand positioning qualities are common to every business in existence. They need to be established by the other touch points of your brand. “Not my job” should be the response of any name candidate asked to perform these duties. In fact, using such qualities when grading name candidates will result in the best qualified names not even receiving an offer:

Google

Credibility, Trust, Reliability, Honesty, Transparency, Quality

Slack

Credibility, Trust, Reliability, Honesty, Transparency, Quality

Impossible

Credibility, Trust, Reliability, Honesty, Transparency, Quality

Away

Credibility, Trust, Reliability, Honesty, Transparency, Quality

Goop

Credibility, Trust, Reliability, Honesty, Transparency, Quality

None of the over-performing names above can pass the Credibility, Trust, Reliability, Honesty, Transparency, Quality test.

Which is great, because your audience doesn’t look to your name for these sort of reassurances. But more importantly, it leaves the name free to have the kinds of qualities it needs to be exceptionally good at its job : Unexpected, Human, Engaging, Thought Provoking, Memorable, Disruptive, etc.  

Brand Name Job Description:

Responsibilities 

Demonstrate to the world that you’re different, creating clear & wide separation from your competitors.

– Go viral, propelling itself through the world on its own, becoming a no-cost, self-sustaining PR vehicle.

-Redefine and own  your category.

-Reinforce a unique positioning platform.

-Create a positive and lasting engagement with your audience.

-Provide a deep well of marketing and advertising images.

-Be the genesis of a brand that rises above the goods and services you provide, so that you’re not selling a commodity and/or competing on price.

-Be unforgettable.

-Support the positioning of the product/company

And so on.

 Qualifications

Depending on the positioning of the product or company the name will represent, you’ll further screen name candidates for specifics, such as:

Personality – Warm? Fun? Futuristic? Mysterious? Sexy? Scientific? Confident? Superhuman? Quiet?

Communication Skills – What part of the conversation in you industry should the name address, define, redefine, express, demonstrate or dominate?

Personal Appearance – The way a name looks and sounds can communicate volumes, independent of the meaning of the word.  Computer processor name “Trillium” has as a sci-fi look and sound, though it’s a type of flower.  A.I. company name “Megagon” has the attitude of one of Godzilla’s rivals, though it’s a mathematical term that describes vectors, harmony, and a million things coming together as one.

But what if you find the perfect candidate, except they have a criminal past? As long as they can carry out the Responsibilities and have the Qualifications, it’ll be fine: Hotwire, Accomplice, Wheelman, and walking the talk, Igor.

Bad breath and a ghoulish smile? Don’t count them out: Bluetooth.  A complete lack of experience? Sign them up: Virgin.


Sidebar: B2B vs. B2C Brand Naming

And while we’re here, let’s once and for all time bury that old, shriveled chestnut, “That’s fine for B2C, but a B2B name needs to play by more buttoned up rules.” It comes from a core belief that businesses make buying decisions for purely business reasons, and are immune to the emotional branding that captivates the B2C consumer. It’s what lead most experts to wrongly assert that the emotionally branded, impractical, keyboardless, overpriced Apple iPhone could never displace the utilitarian, more secure, cost effective Blackberry’s hold on the B2B market. Even the once ultraconservative B2B cardio surgery device sector, where buying decisions are literally a matter of life and death,  began giving their products memorable, disruptive names decades ago – to great financial and brand equity reward.  Final relief from this old trope may have arrived in the form of Slack, but stoic B2B diehards will cling to the notion that Slack is an aberration, or that their own company is the exception. All the merrier for B2B branders who know the truth – that language, words and names have a universal way of tapping into our collective consciousness, effecting, connecting and inspiring people – B2B and B2C people alike.

Names are market agnostic.

They should never be asked to communicate foundational assurances. It leads to garbage like “Truist“. 

Slack certainly hopes their competitors never learn this lesson. 


More Unsolicited Brand Naming Advice:

Want To Create A Powerful Brand Name? Beware The Literalist.

Igor Brand Naming Guide 

“Vanillacide”: How Radical Concepts Are Destroyed By Too Much Consultation

Performing a Competitive Name Analysis is Essential 

Outwitting Squirrels

Bacronym Buy-in

A bacronym is a reverse engineered acronym. The idea is you find a name for something and to help sell it to the approval committee you create an acronym as an afterthought, buttressing your argument for the name. Nobody ever remembers what the bacronym stands for, but no matter. The audience it is created for is strictly internal and only for buy-in.

An impessively inane example of this is ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”, aka the USA PATRIOT Act.

It’s true. Because Asinine Consultants Rely On Nattering Yes Men.

Beware The Happy Idiot

 The Happy Idiot, as it’s known in professional naming circles, is a process used by naming agencies who view your naming project as a consensus-building exercise only, and not a quest for a powerful name that consensus is then built around.

It’s called The Happy Idiot because an agency deliberately delivers a name that’s a liability to a smiling client who’s happy with the result. It was designed to be the fastest, smoothest route to client buy-in on a name, with the least amount of effort by the agency.

When a Happy Idiot practitioner presents a  name candidate that isn’t immediately met with applause by every member of a client team, they’ll smooth down the edges until there is nothing interesting or effective left in the names they’re presenting. Going forward they’ll only present names of the vanilla variety, because getting buy-in on breakout brand names requires commitment and hard work. It requires the ability to give a client the confidence to make the most powerful choice.

The first step to protecting yourself is learning to spot The Happy Idiot.

To illustrate each, we’ll use actual names and case studies created by a single naming agency.

The Happy Idiot 

In this classic version the agency invents a word with no resemblance to any existing word. Because the name neither means nor implies anything, there are no objections from the client. It’s been sanitized for their protection. But in order to sell the name, the agency needs to convince the client that the invented word has positive, relevant meaning. The agency breaks the name down into morphemes (a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language) and assigns positive meaning to each. They have someone with a master’s degree in linguistics from Berkeley or Stanford certify the meanings – in languages neither the client nor their target audience speaks – to give it weight and to assure the client that this meaningless construction is not only full of meaning, it’s perfect for them.

When an agency rolls out morphemic rationale, you’re being played:

 Mirvie

“Mirvie is a rich coining that draws on several Romance languages: Mira means “objective” in Italian, “purpose” or “look!” in Spanish, and the feminine form of “wonderful” in Latin. Vie is “life” in French and “means” or “paths” in Italian. Mirvie suggests the wonder of pregnancy, a means to your objective, and lifesaving, targeted insights”

Is it possible the naming agency believes, “Mirvie suggests the wonder of pregnancy, a means to your objective, and lifesaving, targeted insights”? Depends on what they’re smoking. What matters is the client believes it. Nobody objects, a positive meaning was established by an expert no one feels qualified to argue with, job done! The client is happy.

When agencies rely heavily on this strategy, it’s referred to as morpheme addiction.

Invented words have their place in naming, but their rationale cannot be morphemic pretzel logic based on multiple languages foreign to the audience. An invented name has to work on its own, without explanation, in the context of the company or product it represents. Neoverse is a solid example. The only exceptions are names of pharmaceuticals and chemicals, where global regulations prohibit rational names.

The Happy Idiot with a Passport

Same basics as the original, but this variation uses real words from foreign languages that neither the client nor the client’s target audience speaks. The Happy Idiot with a Passport produces names the client can’t object to because they don’t mean anything to the client. Foreign language names function as invented names, but the positive meanings the agency claims the name has are based on their meaning in an obscure language.

When an agency tries to sell you on a meaning in a language unfamiliar to your customers, you’re being played:

Ikena

“Ikena, a Hawaiian word meaning “vista, perspective, knowledge.” The name also recalls “I ken” (an older English word for “know”) and “I can” 

The Happy Idiot and Happy Idiot with a Passport both reveal an essential naming truth: Having a meaning doesn’t make a name meaningful. Ikena has a meaning but is meaningless unless you speak Hawaiian. Mirvie’s morphemes may have meaning, but Mirvie is meaningless to everyone. Which is why in our opinion, both naming approaches are scams.  They’re nothing more than a sales pitch to a client to end a project.

Foreign language names can make reasonable brand names, but they have to work based on their look, sound and personality. Their “meaning” is irrelevant to anyone who doesn’t speak the language.

The Happy Idiot with a Wallflower

The Wallflower version employs the one thousand most common words used by brand names, words like Active, Arc, Atlas, Blue, Bridge, Care, Clear, Complete, Core, Curve, Edge, Engage, Ever, Expert, Flex, Flow, Fly, Force, Front, Fusion, Future, Gain, Go, Green, Hill, Hub, Key, Lead, Light, Line, Next, Now, On, One, Path, Plus, Point, Power, Pro, Pulse, River, Sense, Scape, Shift, Sky, Smart, Span, Splash, Star, Stream, Sun, Up, Via, Vista, Wave, Wise and Zip. A single word Wallflower is rarely presented. They are overwhelmingly “Compound Wallflowers,” as a combination of two excruciatingly common words is much easier to trademark than one. These words are so meek they don’t draw any objection from the client, and each contains a slight, one-dimensional positive attribute. And are so generic that their effect on an audience is that of white noise. They’re Wallflowers, forgotten in a heartbeat.

When an agency takes the path of least resistance by presenting pairings of white noise words, you’re being sold a Wallflower.

Combining these wallflower words has gifted six different clients of this one agency with these six names:

Bridgescape

Bridgespan

Everbridge

Flybridge

Gainbridge

PSI Bridge

Takeaways

–  When an agency rolls out morphemic rationale, you’re being played.

– When an agency tries to sell you on a meaning in a language unfamiliar to your customers, you’re being played.

–  When an agency takes the path of least resistance by presenting pairings of white noise words, you’re being sold a Wallflower.

Preventing a H.I. Jacking

If you’re looking for a branding or naming agency to create a brand name, have a quick look at their naming portfolio. Agencies who’ve somehow found a way to ethically rationalize The Happy Idiot don’t just dabble, they’re all in. The vast majority of their portfolio will be chockfull of Compound Wallflowers, Invented Words, and Foreign Language names.

They’re all mindless brand zombies, neither interesting, differentiating nor memorable, and create a marketing money pit that you may never climb out of. If you can spot a Happy Idiot, avoiding the trap is straightforward.