What’s in a name.
Clients are always surprised at how-in depth creating a new organizational name can be.
It's always a fine balance between process and creativity. Tip it too far one way, and you fail to connect to the brand positioning with a name that falls flat. Or it creates red flags down the road with legal or cultural snafus. If you get it right out the gate, a new name will be an authentic reflection of your brand experience, evoking an emotional feeling and intriguing people to want to learn more.
At the heart of this is first deciding what your naming strategy should be. Think about your audiences and their current opinion of you, who your competition is, your unique positioning, and the aspirational future you want to share with the world. The type of name you create is critical. Is it evocative, descriptive, or invented?
Thinking about the verbal scaffolding that surrounds your name is also a big part of that picture too. No name lives in true isolation, so pairing it with the right descriptor and tagline gives you a strong anchor. We like to think of this as the three-legged stool of messaging. Having this solid platform in place gives room for a much more strategic messaging platform, giving people a better understanding of who you are and what you do in just a few seconds.
Having well-defined brand personality traits and a tone of voice is the only true way to measure whether your name and identity align with your brand DNA. Naming measurement criteria allow you to benchmark possible names for brevity, pronunciation, memorability, cultural and linguistic checks, and can you protect them all the way through to trademarking. And let's not forget, you also need to love it and have the right gut feeling.
The final piece of the puzzle is getting your name and identity to support each other. So as you develop your naming strategy, our design team is already thinking of how to create your logo to reinforce these key pillars and make it memorable.
This is just a little taste of the process we take our clients through on every brand and naming assignment, but we hope it gives you a better understanding of what really goes into a name. The answer is a hell of a lot.
If you're thinking about your current name, ask yourself this:
Does it really reflect who we are?
Do people get it?
Do we sound the same as all of our competitors?
If you want to take stock and chat through your options, give us a shout.