Early stage startups often place little value on branding. They believe branding is only valuable as a scaling lever once they've reached an arbitrary benchmark -- several founders have independently thrown out a $1m ARR number to me, which makes me wonder if this idea has a particular origin.

But they're making a couple of mistakes. First, a full visual brand identity is a totally different beast, and also subject to change periodically in the life of your business no matter what. If founders are thinking of naming only as a subsidiary element of their branding, they are conflating tasks that don't need to co-occur.

More importantly, though, is that the name of your brand is the only non-negotiable brand touchpoint that definitionally exists from your company's inception. If you have a startup, it has a name, even if it has zero other branding. And if you've put zero serious thought into the name, you're missing out on one of the cheapest early levers for building brand identity and equity.

A well-crafted name solves a series of puzzles: uniqueness coupled with interpretability that produces memorability, multiple access triggers so that many semantic pathways in your company's category lead back to your brand.

I offer highly affordable naming sprints for early stage startups with shoestring budgets -- for less than $1k (or a fraction of a fraction of equity), I can take you through a process of examining the language of your competition and market space and translating your core brand identity and USP into a highly distinct name that does what you need it to most: stick in the minds of investors and prospective clients.

If you don't have the budget for the kind of extensive, months long naming processes that enterprise brands often engage in, jumping into a quick naming sprint with me early on is one of the most cost-efficient, effortlessly reproducible ways to grow your brand as you grow your company.

Any naming project, from a single meeting pitch to a months long deliberation, has to start with some kind of reckoning of the linguistic context for the name you're working on.

Very often, that reckoning is entirely intuitive -- you're working in your industry or field of expertise, you feel like you know the vibe, you intuitively have a sense of what is going to be distinct or new or different.

Well, that's probably how your competitors feels as well. And in fact, it may be that high intuitive familiarity with the lingo and language of your industry that leads to the common pattern of multiple innovation: multiple people independently coming up with very similar ideas at the same time. It's not about cheating or copying, it's about creativity working incrementally, not radically. People in the same industry independently make the same creative choices because they are responding to the same cultural inputs.

A good linguistic audit -- a complex look at names and other linguistic patterns among your competitors and compatriots -- is designed to give you insight that offloads information from your intuition into a set of explicit observations that can contribute to more strategically innovative and distinctive choices.

I rely on a decade of award-winning experience in language description and typological analysis to provide top-tier language audits to support naming and other verbal branding choices, identifying deep patterns and cultural change pathways that give you a crystal clear view of the field of play.

The entire creative industry is going through a set of technological growing pains right now -- it happened with the printing press, talking films, Napster, etc., and it's happening now with AI.

Most of the really serious discussion is oriented around AI's ability to much more efficiently produce high-volume text: it very likely could get rid of the majority (not all) of the human labor in low skill copywriting and major-language translation, carve out half the market for technical copywriting labor, and generally mess with the value of various kinds of creative output. None of that is set in stone, the next few years are gonna be destabilizing, and frankly we haven't really dealt with the IP issues at a society-level in earnest.

But here's the thing, naming is really very different from other kinds of verbal creative work.

If you spent as much time and consideration per-word on website copy as some companies do on brand names, it would take you two years to write a blog post.
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Importantly, the greater the ratio of thought and consideration to the size of the creative output, the more likely you are to need human involvement. If you need to pump out a lot of content, AI is gonna make that easier and easier as time goes on. If you need to be highly creative with just a couple of words -- which is what you do in naming -- we're a long way from AI being able to take care of that on its own.

I've helped naming agencies build LLM-based systems for naming, and LLMs play a role in my own work on a day to day basis. There are lots of really valuable use cases for AI in what can be a pretty complex naming process, although frankly they are more centered around providing options for getting around trademark and regulatory issues. But skilled human namers still outperform on ideation for creative names, and are necessary for what is the more important part of naming -- evaluation, deliberation, integration into verbal brand.

Here's some functions critical to the naming process that an LLM is not gonna just do for you any time soon:

* Field-specific metaphors and wordplay that underlie many great, memorable names.

* Come up with a holistic view of your brand's linguistic landscape to let you make sense of decisions.

* Facilitating discussion amongst a team with competing strong beliefs.

* Crafting well-informed arguments in favor of the strategic value of one name over the other.

Any of these can be made a little more efficient with LLMs, but they cannot be automated.

At a bare minimum, you have to do the work to figure out the most useful inputs to get what you want out of these systems. That will likely be true for many years to come. LLMs are statistical language machines, not thinking machines. Somebody's still gotta do the thinking -- if you don't want to have to do as much of it yourself, let me do some of it for you.

You might be inclined to think that some of the technical linguistic details around names are superfluous fluff.

You might think -- what's important is that the name is memorable, tells the right story, and fits within my trademark and regulatory constraints.

Right. Exactly. How do you think you do all that at the same time in the space of a word or two? You sweat the small stuff.

If you're trying to meet all your needs through a sheer numbers game -- just pump out a lot of options and then wait til one of them "just pops" or "has the right magic"... you're frankly wasting a lot of time.

Start with the big picture, atomize the big picture into little components, think about the details that we know are going to matter (whether you think about them or not), and that's how you efficiently arrive back at a name that captures your big picture.

You do the dirty work in order to save time and money.

There are already a number of good, up to date descriptions of the value of brand names to the bottom line, and rock solid arguments and data in favor of the positive ROI of getting specialist help with names. Here's a few additional research articles from the last few years that help support this point and do a good job of explaining the actual mechanics of brand name equity.

Arthur, J., & Bejaei, M. (2022). The Process of Creating a New Brand Name for a Fruit Variety: A Review and Suggested Improvements. Horticulturae, 8(11), 990.

Short and entertaining read -- this description of brand name creation of new fruit varieties makes some important points about the role of brand naming in protecting the investment to develop new varieties of a product highly susceptible to commoditization. Short point relevant to many industries -- names protect against commoditization and value reduction of localized or specialized varieties.

Also, some interesting points about the unique set of constraints in fruit brand naming: "Within the fruit industry, there is an additional brand name creation challenge: a TM for a fruit varietal must be different from the varietal (generic) name (or the names of any other closely related fruit varietals). The varietal name is called a plant variety denomination (PVD). This need for a double search (TM search and varietal name search) can make achieving uniqueness highly challenging, even when excluding any domain name and social media account name considerations.
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People's mental vocabulary -- their lexicon -- is split up into different classes. There's nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other common parts of speech, but you can group up the items in your lexicon in lots of different ways.

Importantly, different lexical classes behave differently in the brain.

There is interesting research on the idea that modern people are so inundated with branding that "brand names" are their own part of the lexicon in most folks' heads. Here's some research supporting that idea, and discussing its implications for branding as a business venture.

Dübbert, A. (2021). Brand names as multimodal constructions. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(1), 20200058.

Most regular words have strong textual associations -- we are used to seeing them represented by letters, but those letters could be in a bajillion different fonts. So we learn letters, not very specific shapes. Not true of brand names, which might be most often accessed in the specific proprietary form of a word mark. This paper argues that part of the special processing of brand names in the brain is the product of this "multimodal" construction -- that brand names have associated word shapes in a way that the rest of the mental lexicon does not.

Gontijo, P. F., & Zhang, S. (2007). The mental representation of brand names: Are brand names a class by themselves?. In Psycholinguistic phenomena in marketing communications (pp. 23-38). Psychology Press.

This is one of the earlier pieces I'm aware of that makes the case that brand names constitute a distinct lexical class for most speakers, and that they activate different neural networks as a result. This is a useful point as well: "A brand name's references are narrower than those of common nouns but wider than those of personal names." Good to remember that part of the process of endowing a brand name with meaning often involves strategically narrowing the scope of possible interpretations.
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There are numerous reasons for choosing unconventional spelling of a familiar word in your brand name: from Krispy Kreme to Lyft to Flickr. But this is often a contentious issue with strong opinions and assumptions to unpack.

Avoid over-generalizations like "consumers dislike alternate spellings" -- if that were true then no-one would do them, and yet... look around. Instead, there's plenty of good research and reading to support the main discussion your brand needs to have about naming: what is the strategic goal of my aesthetic choice?

If you want to play it safe, the short answer is don't do unconventional spelling of familiar words. But... there's plenty of data and arguments for why it might be advantageous [aside from trademark defensability which is an obvious motivation].

Wong, A. D. (2013). Brand names and unconventional spelling: A two-pronged analysis of the orthographic construction of brand identity. Written Language & Literacy, 16(2), 115-145.

One of the better and more accessible discussions on how to think about unconventional brand name spelling. Wong makes the case that alternate or unconventional spellings of common words have the capacity to index (point to) particular social identities. The paper's examples are a bit dated, like talking about how Göt2b hair gel used spelling to reference German rave culture, but the point very much still holds. You can use alternate spelling or stylization to index certain social or culture affiliations tied to your brand identity and brand strategy. The success of the name isn't based on the choice to use unconventional spelling or not, but rather based on the value of the social identity the spelling is trying to index.

Luna, D., Carnevale, M., & Lerman, D. (2013). Does brand spelling influence memory? The case of auditorily presented brand names. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 23(1), 36-48.

A highly relevant point is made in this paper with regard to unconventional spelling, the use of unfamiliar words as names, and coinages. To quote the article: "Many brands are nonwords (they do not correspond to previously existing words; e.g., Bose). A considerable stream of research has shown that the spelling of a nonword may be enhanced by the spelling of a word heard immediately before that contains the same spelling pattern as the target nonword. For example, in lexical priming a real word that sounds and is spelled like the nonword is presented before the nonword (e.g., “rose” before Bose)."

This is a great reason why you have to consider your naming options in a range of contexts, and think about how your broader verbal branding and verbal identity frameworks can support the success of your name.

Costello, J., Walker, J., & Reczek, R. (2021). When Brands Get Disemvoweled: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom behind Unconventional Brand Names. Advances in Consumer Research, 49, 364-365.

There's lots of reasons to be cautious or skeptical about unconventional spelling in brand names. Some of the research cautioning against it is, to be blunt, lazy -- or people's interpretations of it is oversimplified and lacks nuance. This study, by contrast, is higher quality and has a stronger theoretical motivation. The basic argument here is that consumers who recognize alternate spelling as a sales tactic are likely to be more skeptical and critical of the brand's offer, and may see the brand as less sincere. Of course, other research shows that alt spellings can contribute to sincerity and audience connection, so these things need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

The use of anthroponyms (John, Sally, Desiree, Carlos, etc.) as brand names is generally on the rise, for a whole bunch of reasons. AI products want to seem more human, personal brands can now carry whole corporations, and the cute kind of trustworthiness that dominated the early 21st century is giving way to a more traditional I'm-putting-my-reputation-on-the-line kind of vibe.

It's therefore useful to think about anthroponyms from a number of different angles: how the operate culturally, how they are processed differently in comparison to other kinds of nouns, and how the anthroponym/brand name interface functions. Here's some starting points:

Völkel, S. (2023). Named entities, naming practices, and their meanings–linguistic types and cultural contexts. International Journal of Language and Culture, 10(2), 151-175.

A nice intro to naming practices across cultures, this piece by Völkel shows the frequent overlap of people-naming with other kinds of naming patterns: names for places, animals, groups, and brands. I strongly believe that having some background knowledge of naming patterns in other cultures can be boon to your own naming creativity.

Sound symbolism is the idea that speech sounds carry generalized connotations and meanings separate from the meaning of the words they are found in.

This is often over-interpreted to mean "every sound has a secret real meaning", which leads branders and namers to either over-extend what sound symbolism can do, or to dismiss it as hippy dippy woo-woo BS.

But it really isn't. If you don't lean into a magical-thinking version of sound symbolism, and understand the subtle art of integrating it into the complex of brand positioning components, it can be an effective tool for affecting your brand name's vibe.

Hinton, L., Nichols, J., & Ohala, J. J. (Eds.). (2006). Sound symbolism. Cambridge University Press.

This is, as far as I'm aware, the most cited source on sound symbolism within academic linguistics. I'm very familiar with Hinton and Nichols' work, and they do an excellent job in the intro chapter of clearing up some terminology, but also some important distinctions among ideas which might be related to sound symbolism but should be kept separate. They split the categories into corporeal ("achoo!"), imitative (e.g. onomatopoeia), synaesthetic ("biiiiiig" is bigger than "big"), and conventional (e.g. phonesthemes, like gl- words in English having light-related meanings). Brand namers often conflate these types of sound-symbolic words even though they operate very differently, especially when dealing with cross-linguistic contexts (i.e. international brands).

Klink, R. R., & Wu, L. (2014). The role of position, type, and combination of sound symbolism imbeds in brand names. Marketing letters, 25, 13-24.

One of the better cited studies on sound symbolism specific to brand names, Klink and Wu make some general claims about the importance of placement of sound symbolic elements within the word and the greater symbolic import of vowels over consonants. I'm not sure that I agree with the value of their findings, but it's a valuable piece of research nonetheless.

Doyle, J. R., & Bottomley, P. A. (2011). Mixed messages in brand names: Separating the impacts of letter shape from sound symbolism. Psychology & Marketing, 28(7), 749-762.

The basic point of this Doyle & Bottomley piece is that you have to think about letter shape and its potential symbolic meaning as something separate from the symbolic value of the speech sound it represents. As a basic example, the "spiky" associations with a /k/ sound, like the first sound in kook, might be from the shape of the letter and not from the sound itself. That's important because you don't want to assume that a /k/ sound indicates "spikyness" even if you represent it with a <c>, as in cook.

Grammatical metaphor refers to a process whereby grammatical categories and operators confer metaphorical meaning to a word by way of their prototypical semantic associations. For example, nominalizing a verb can suggest a kind of agency -- i.e. "smoking kills". Here's some good pieces on specific kinds of grammatical metaphor most relevant to brand naming: 

Khamitov, M., & Puzakova, M. (2022). Possessive brand names in brand preferences and choice: the role of inferred control. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 50(5), 1032-1051.

Through a series of eight studies, Khamitov and Puzakova show that consumers view brands with a possessive in their name (like "Mrs. Smith's", as opposed to "Mrs. Smith") as having a greater degree of control, or attempting to take control over them. Depending on the consumer profile and the nature of the business, this controlling affect might be perceived positively or negatively. This is a good example of how grammatical metaphor in names has implied meanings for consumers -- meanings whose positive or negative connotations are highly context-dependent.  

Pathak, A., Velasco, C., Petit, O., & Calvert, G. A. (2019). Going to great lengths in the pursuit of luxury: How longer brand names can enhance the luxury perception of a brand. Psychology & Marketing, 36(10), 951-963.

Not exactly grammatical metaphor but in the same vein -- this study shows that consumers associate longer brand names with a higher degree of luxury or sophistication, but only in the context that the brand generally is successfully viewed as a luxury brand aside from the name.

Phonesthemes are strings of letters or sounds in a language that have loose but fairly consistent meaning associations. For example, most words that start with "sl-" in English refer to formlessness, decomposition, and a lack of friction: slip, slide, slop, sludge, slime, slough, slack, slug, etc...

These phonesthemes are somewhat similar to sound symbolism, but phonesthemes are specific to a particular language or language family, and therefore are often more consistent in their meanings or "vibes". They often play a big part in words "just sounding right" even when you can't put your finger on why. There's lots of good research on phonesthemes, especially within English, and even a fair amount of solid theorizing and experimental evidence regarding their value in brand name development.

Brennan, S., Ilicic, J., & Danziger, S. (2024). Snyre for your nasal congestion: Using phonesthemes to imbue non‐word brand names with meaning. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 34(4), 601-619.

A great overview and argument for using phonesthemes to aid in brand name development and selection processes. Brennan et al. focus on the value of phonesthemes in the "processing fluency" of novel brand names. Consumers coming across a new brand name are running a background mental map to interpret what the name could mean or what it could be connected to. Phonesthemes are one way to actively affect this process, by taking advantage of existing sub-lexical sound-meaning connections, like using the "sn-" associated with noses (sniff, snot, sneeze, etc.) in a coined nasal congestion brand name "Snyre".

Corpus linguistics involves a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches based around amassing a large amount of texts (linguistic information) relevant to your questions or problems, and assessing trends through a rigorous and empirical process. Any really good naming project should involve a serious linguistic audit, and in most cases, that audit should employ both typological and corpus methods. This approach is an important part of avoiding biased and limited impressionistic assessments of the linguistic landscape that your verbal assets are entering into.

The following are some instructive examples of interesting insights about names from high quality corpus linguistic studies:

MacAulay, L., Siddiqi, D., & Toivonen, I. (2019). The age of aidans: Cognitive underpinnings of a new trend in english boys’ names. Names, 67(3), 160-174.

This study of English baby names shows provides corpus analysis and experimental evidence that the trend for Anglophone boys' names ending in -an or -en has moved from being a temporary "fad" to being a functional indicator of "boys name". This kind of analysis applied to brand names could help guide decisions about whether a particular linguistic trend is passing through or moving to having an established meaning among speakers.