The Business Is Not Your Product

How to get there depends on where you’re coming from There’s no single right answer to “who should I hire?” It depends on where you are today. If you are a startup, you are not going to hire a large Naming Agency. You need a lot of bang for your buck, or an agency or one-person shop that takes monthly payments. Some think of it this way: “Which parts of the work are you buying, and which are you keeping?” It lays out four routes: A naming agency gives you a team, a process, and usually a trademark function. The risk is paying for a process you never see. (However, a Purpose Naming Process lays out a collaborative naming method where you are involved and help guide the project to its final destination.) A freelance namer is one experienced person. The screening is thinner, so ask what’s subcontracted or left to you. A contest platform gives you volume on a deadline. It “buys candidates and ideas, not judgment.” DIY plus a lawyer leaves blind spots, especially in languages you don’t know. A side project or local business can go DIY or use a contest, then spend on screening the winner. A startup that will raise money or sell nationally needs a strategic freelancer or a boutique firm. A company rename or a product family needs a naming agency. At any tier, use a trademark lawyer for the finalists. A freelancer works best for smaller, lower-risk names when you have people in-house to handle positioning and trademark work. It recommends an agency when the name is core to the business. Here’s my take: I can meet you where you are and get you where you need to go. Whether you’re a founder with a napkin sketch or a hundred-year-old company, we can build the car while driving down the highway. That’s why my work comes in four sizes, from a one-week coaching session to a full eight-week naming and branding engagement. Rebrands of established companies are their own animal. I’ve worked with two companies more than a hundred years old on a rebrand, and it can be a challenge. A change of that magnitude may take time and finesse to get everyone on board and moving in the same direction. Define Success Before You Hire Anyone Before you hire anyone, or even start the naming process yourself, determine the parameters of the name and define what success looks like. Ask yourself: Is it for a product, business, or brand? Does it need to fit into a family of brands? Does it have a parent company? Will the product develop into an ecosystem of products (iPhone, iPad, iMac, etc.)? What is the audience’s demographics? If a trademark is needed, will it be national or international? Is a separate product or business URL needed? One agency, Lexicon Branding, says projects stall when “right” is never defined, so the best partners set the standard before the work begins. The Creative Brief and Brand Discovery A good agency will either ask you to do discovery work up front or tell you they’ll do it with you. If they jump straight to brainstorming, that’s a warning sign. I use the purpose statement as the measuring stick to see whether we’re close to the target, rather than relying on anyone’s personal preferences. Working through brand exercises with the CEO and business leaders gets everyone on the same page. Based on the group’s input, we rewrite all the core business messaging before we start: Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values. [Purpose Naming Process, “Brand Discovery”] A significant amount of work needs to be done before the naming ideation phase can begin. Everyone needs to know what they’re aiming at, and they need background on what competitors have already taken. [22 Immutable Laws of Naming, Law 10: Need a Process] Collecting overused terms and names is one of those preparatory tasks. If you hire a naming agency or professional, they should do this as part of a discovery phase. Discovery questions your agency should cover: What is the purpose of the business? What’s the vision and the mission? [Purpose Naming Process, “Define: Ethos”] What are the 5 to 7 positive qualities you want the name associated with? (the Brand Vocabulary List) What overused names, competitors, jargon, and buzzwords should we avoid? What do customers say? What are their pain points? What’s their psyche? (the Customer Connection role) How will the name translate visually? (the Creative role, “the verbal-to-visual gap”) Who will make the final call? (the Visionary) [Purpose Naming Process, “Ideal Roles”] Example: In discovery for JADD BBQ, we found the name needed to change because “JADD was forgettable and wasn’t gaining any brand equity. They were seen as average and just one of many.” They were expanding from grills to everything for outdoor cooking. We came up with Grillscapes as their new name—it reflected who they had become. Sometimes discovery changes the whole project. Donet concluded it needed a new name during the Discovery Process. Its CEO, Dave Mezera, said, “It is like we are considering renaming my sixteen-year-old son, but we were losing projects because large corporate accounts were not taking Donet seriously. DataYard [their new name] had that Midwestern, hard-working, reliable personality that was who we were and allowed us to land much larger accounts.” AI and DIY Naming: The Positives and Negatives Can’t you just ask ChatGPT? Sort of. I now get a lot of clients that say they used AI and the names were “meh!” The positives. AI is a great way to eliminate “the blank page creative block” and get started quickly. [Purpose Naming Process, “Guide”] You can feed all your ideas into an AI language model to see what it generates. One word may not be exciting by itself, but combined with another it can create a compound or invented word that’s cool. [22 Laws, Law 15/16] AI is also handy for pulling together the overused, top-of-mind names in your industry. I use AI-generated ideas in my own packages. DIY costs little. The negatives. Garbage in, garbage out. Vague prompts give you overused results and names that aren't eligible for trademark protection. Just because a name shows up on an AI-generated list doesn’t mean it isn’t already being used. Frozen Lemons warns that AI names have a “very high overlap with existing brands” and don’t understand legal risk, cultural nuance, or positioning. And trademark strength matters. In the US Patent and Trademark Office’s own words, “Strong trademarks are suggestive, fanciful, or arbitrary. Weak trademarks are descriptive or generic.” (uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/strong-trademarks) AI drifts toward the descriptive. My take. Use AI as a tool, not the namer. Feed it your Brand Vocabulary List, not a vague prompt. [Purpose Naming Process, “Explore & Ideate”] Then have a professional vet the results. The Must-Haves in a Naming and Rebranding Agency These are the fundamentals. The baseline. Three Signs of a Good Naming Agency First sign: Does the naming agency have an exceptional name for its own company? If not, why not? That’s a fair requirement of a naming agency. Second sign: Ask about their philosophy guiding the naming process. If they have one, does it resonate with you? Third sign: What is their process? Is it collaborative? Will you be able to participate, or is it a black box with a surprise at the end? A Real Process The naming company must have a process in place. Not the typical oversimplified “Discovery, Develop, and tada… Delivery,” where some magic happens behind closed doors. I’ve heard stories of creative agencies taking on a naming project, thinking they’d schedule a Friday pizza party with the creative staff and come up with a fantastic name in one afternoon. That’s highly unlikely. The ideation phase takes weeks, not hours. Dedicated Naming Experience Can any advertising agency or design firm handle a naming project? Short answer: yes, or at least they say they can. Be careful when you hire a company that doesn’t regularly practice naming. Verify that it has a dedicated naming professional on staff (not a writer or messaging person who can jump in and help) and that it has done this many times. Trademark attorneys have shared horror stories of clients hiring their agency of record (well-known and considered prestigious) to develop a name. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on a few pages of names. None passed the trademark search. Others told of clients spending $100K at a high-profile ad agency on a name that couldn’t be trademarked. Questions to Ask One agency, Lexicon Branding (lexiconbranding.com), suggests asking every agency on your shortlist. FYI: With Lexicon, it’s not whether they will do an amazing job; it's whether you can afford it. They recommend you ask: Which of your names are still driving business years later? What have you named recently? How do you go from thousands of options to the right few? How do you handle trademark, linguistic, and cultural risk? How do you know the name will work before launch? How do you think about naming systems and brand architecture? How will we know we’ve found the right name? Beyond the Name: Start with the end in mind. This is the must-have most buyers miss. A name isn’t the finish line. It’s the foundation for everything people will see and hear about you. The Name Doesn’t Live in a Vacuum Remember two things. One, a single name will never communicate everything you want about your product or business. Two, the name doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A tagline, photos, and headlines will eventually surround it. Some call it a brand ecosystem. Others call it a brand image. Perhaps you’ve heard it said, “They have a look” or a “style.” The Brand Universe encompasses everything the public sees or reads that represents the company and its symbol, including icons, logos, or brandmarks. It extends to colors, typography, textures, illustrations, and other visual elements, as well as how they’re displayed. Apple is an excellent example. Every product has an Apple look, every advertisement has a similar voice and tone, and every package has the Apple touch. Why Wordsmiths Alone Fall Short Naming agencies that specialize only in naming can be at a disadvantage. If the agency focuses only on a unique name, it may be hard to visually brand or creatively market. It’s a game-changer to have someone on your naming team who thinks ahead in those disciplines. A great name that’s hard to represent visually won’t be a good long-term choice. I’ve seen companies pay a lot of money for a name that can’t be trademarked or has very little to work with, both verbally and visually. That’s mainly because the naming agency was proficient in verbal communication but not strong in implementation, branding, visuals, or marketing. They had strong language skills but nothing beyond that. If your brand professional doesn’t have experience in design, messaging, and marketing, find someone who does and bring them into the process. If the naming agency emphasizes language and English only, have someone on your team (a visual creative professional) think about how the name will translate when you start the visual branding phase. [Purpose Naming Process, “Ideal Roles: The Naming Professional”] That’s the Creative’s job on the team: to watch how the name will cross the verbal-to-visual gap. Choose Names That Have “Legs” Some words or names naturally work with messaging and visuals—they have legs. The tagline is part of the brand—more specifically, the verbal brand. Use it to balance what you want to communicate. If the name literally describes what you do, the tagline has more freedom to be a clever twist of words, a fun phrase, or ironic. If it’s an invented word, the tagline should be more descriptive so potential customers understand what you provide. How People See a Brand How people see a brand matters as much as how they hear it. The Gestalt Visual Laws were created in the 1920s to explain how we visually receive information and make sense of it. They include proximity, similarity, closure, continuity, figure/ground, and symmetry and order. The human eye sees objects as a whole before perceiving their individual parts. When information makes sense, we accept it more readily. When it doesn’t, it’s either discarded or creates confusion. It’s important that the creative professional on your team can start to see it while you get close to determining the finalists. As Apple’s Jony Ive put it: “We are absolutely consumed by trying to develop a solution that is very simple, because as human beings we understand clarity.” A name that’s chosen with the visuals in mind makes that clarity much easier to achieve. What You’re Paying For: The Cost Drivers One agency lists what drives the depth and price of a good naming: Strategic groundwork. Does it start with who you are, your promise, and your competitors? Often a positioning statement is the first deliverable. Directions and rounds. More rounds cost more hours, but they “catch the names that sound great on day one and tired on day ten.” Legal and digital checks. Trademark, trade name, domain, and social handles. “A free domain doesn’t mean a free trademark.” WIPO’s Global Brand Database holds more than 28 million records. Strength of the name. Descriptive names are easy to think up but hard to defend. Languages and markets. Every extra market needs extra checking. Add one more driver to that list: the visual and marketing side. Can the same team carry the name into mood boards, identity concepts, a logo, a brand board, and headlines? In my Naming & Branding package, the same team that names you also delivers the verbal brand, three brand direction mood boards, two identity concepts, a brand board, and a final art package. During filtering, I flag names with promise—the ones I think have visual or verbal branding “legs” — in green on the shared spreadsheet. Questions to Ask About the Visual Side Who on your team designs, and will they be in the naming sessions? Can you show a name you developed along with the identity and marketing that followed? Do you present names with headline and tagline ideas, not just a list? Direct Access to the Creative Professionals Who will you actually work with? At many agencies, the senior people pitch you, then hand you to an account manager, who passes notes to a junior creative. Every layer of bureaucracy and management adds misunderstanding. It’s like the game Telephone: the message gets lost as it passes from one person to another. One agency says to ask for the named team members, not just an account manager. The senior creative who pitched should work on your project, not hand it to a junior team after you sign. My process is collaborative. You work directly with the creative professional who does the work. Direct access. Direct collaboration. The creative industry is notorious for excluding clients from its creative process, to the point that it becomes an adversarial relationship. Naming someone’s company is too personal to do without the visionary and strategic leaders of the company. It’s internalized by the people who work there. You need a process that encourages collaboration and adaptability, which are critical for ownership and acceptance of the new identity. That’s why I build a team on your side too: the Visionary, the Creative, the Customer Connection, and the Naming Professional. The smallest workable team is two people: the CEO and a naming professional with visual brand experience. Typical teams are four to eight. [see “Purpose Naming Process”, “Ideal Roles” and “Typical Team Size and Makeup”] All of my packages include live group brainstorming sessions with your team, from one in the Naming Coach package to six in the larger ones. Deliverables: What You Should Get At the end, what do you actually walk away with? Your final deliverable should include the recommended name, the full strategic rationale, runner-up candidates with the reasons they were rejected, trademark and domain documentation, and initial implementation guidance. A good agency generates 500+ raw candidates and filters them to a shortlist of 3–5. Timelines usually run 4–6 weeks.