Naming is hard. Really, really hard.
First off, it’s super subjective. Getting all of the decision-makers and influencers to love something can be nearly impossible. Second, doing a trademark search will almost always yield conflicts, so you need to either include a lawyer in the discussion or pretend to be one yourself. Finally, usable domain names are more difficult to find every day.
I’ve done quite a bit of naming in the last decade using various methods and it has always been a struggle. Some of them I’m proud of to this day and some of them are more than a little embarrassing.
A number of years ago I was tasked with leading a naming effort for a high-growth software company. Their corporate identity was tied to their first successful product, but they had since added additional products and it was time to create corporate brand identity broad enough to handle everything existing and coming in the future.
We were really confident we knew where the company was headed, so defining the umbrella themes for the corporate identity wasn’t difficult. We were big and profitable enough to fund the project well enough to hire the best talent available. I spoke to a number of agencies including Igor, which has an incredible track record and is a really fun follow on Twitter.
While we were evaluating our options I reached out to a number of friends for advice. One of them, Sara, had worked for a number of agencies over the years and happened to remember a naming expert from a previous company. She passed on his name, Anthony, and I was able to chase down his blog. Oddly, I never connect with him, but one of his blog posts, on using cloaked briefs, ended up inspiring our approach.
My goal isn’t to reproduce his awesome blog post on this site, rather to tell the story about how we put his approach to work, delivering incredible results.
How is a Cloaked Brief Used for Naming?
The Cloaked Brief
You start by defining the most important attributes of the company you’re naming. I don’t remember what we came up with, but they likely included things like fast, powerful and modern. It’s important to get these right, because each step in the process can lead you away from target you’re trying to hit if you’re not careful.
Next brainstorm categories of other things that embody those same attributes. Really think out of the box here, like baseball teams or race cars or restaurants. Something that has absolutely nothing do with your product.
From your list, choose the category that’s the most interesting and “out there” versus what you have to sell. The more distance between them the better.
Based on the attributes we came up with we chose a new high-tech spaceship.
With that we wrote up a brief for the spaceship we wanted to name. We included a lot of detail about what made the spaceship special, especially how it was different from other spaceships in the market.
All-Hands Brainstorming
We decided to leverage the entire company in the exercise. Quite literally no one on the team was a brand person or marketer. There were a few Swiss Army Knife types in the group who could make a weak claim to competence, but definitely no pros. Additionally, the team was super technical. Awesome, smart, funny people, but not a lot of right brain talent. Here’s a photo from one of our offsites:
If you don’t get the joke check out the original Star Wars trilogy. You won’t be disappointed.
After that we had a meeting where we shared the brief and walked the team through a quick deck explaining the process. We created a dedicated Slack channel and gave them a week or 10 days to add their ideas.
The first few hours was very intense, with ideas pouring in like rain at a Seattle baseball game in April. And then things kind of dried up. I started a spreadsheet and started ranking the ideas. Nothing really popped for me, but I started chasing down Trademark conflicts and domain options for the top handful.
Over the next week a lot of magic happened in bursts. Someone would come up with an idea, post it, and draw in a new mini avalanche of other new ideas. That happened many times throughout the week. Among those follow-on bursts of creativity was where the winners emerged. I don’t know a lot about how the brain works, but it seems like your best ideas are the product of background processing. You need to give your mind time to grind on the problem, but you also need to give it reminders along the way.
As new ideas emerged they were quickly prioritized, Trademark checked and evaluated for domain availability. By the end of the week a solid top 3 had emerged.
The Final Decision
Making a decision is the hardest part of the naming process. Ranking the names based on whatever criteria you have for what makes a good or bad name is incredibly subjective. And names generally take a while to get used to, especially if they’re provocative or edgy in any way. In this case the clear winner felt a little too edgy and one of the main deciders wasn’t sure.
Trademark law is complicated. The leading options each had a handful of potential conflicts that need to be explored with expensive lawyers. Nothing makes a creative process more fun than inviting a lawyer to join. However, legal risk es no bueno, so it’s worth the pain to include them.
Finally, domain names are really, really hard these days. Clean .com domains are generally expensive unless you get super duper creative. Other TLDs can be awkward or feel startuppy. Adding a prefix or suffix to a name can work, but it’s the kind of thing you can learn to hate over the years. There’s no right answer, and you usually end up picking the least awful option.
We ended up going with one of the three and it was a really awesome choice. It fit the brand perfectly and was a little edgy. The trademark work came back clean enough that we felt we could move forward. Most importantly, we got the clean .com domain name for a price we could afford. Boom, success!
The person who came up with the idea was a senior developer. Based on his personality he might be the last person you’d ever approach with this project.
I’m not going to share the name of the company behind this story for various reasons, but they’re still in business and I think quite successful. They have a name that will stand the test of time and still fits their identity very well.
Wrapping Up
If you’re tasked with naming a company or product, hiring a naming agency is your surest bet if you can afford it. If you can’t, I strongly recommend you give Anthony’s blog a read and give the cloaking brief approach a go. It will cost you some internal resource time, but it’s a fun and engaging exercise, especially if they pick a winner and can talk about it for the rest of their lives.
