* Situation

The client was an Austin-based upstart consulting firm helping non-profits fund and evaluate their educational programs. After preliminarily using the name of the founder, the firm sought my help for developing a brand name as it expands operations.

* Challenges

The firm’s business plan involved a program for providing pre-funding evaluation for non-profit education programs that could then be used to ensure access to grants and eventually support a sustainable evaluation and funding cycle. The client therefore needed a name that conveyed the idea of “working with limited resources” in order to “get where you want to go”.

* Solution

After a round of competitor review and initial name proposals, we recognized that the client was gravitating towards names built around an identity concept of “scrappiness”, as opposed to names that were suggestive of the core service and its evaluation-to-funding pipeline mechanism.

Discussion also revealed two new core goals not included in the original brief -- first, that the client wanted to be able to communicate a “wilderness guide” archetype, and second, that they wanted the name to assert affinity with environmental groups (the primary clientele for the firm) without limiting the potential clientele to just that market.

From this discussion, the client pulled on the saying “half the paddle, twice the paddler”, a joking expression used by canoe enthusiasts to express superiority of expertise over kayakers. This image fit the “working with limited resources” and “wilderness guide” concepts, and ultimately, the name HalfPaddle emerged as the winning choice.

The name was a knockout for trademark and domain purposes, while also meeting the needs for setting a vibe without limiting potential affiliations.

* Situation

Monika is an AI-powered naming agency founded in 2023 to bring developments in LLMs to brand naming. They are constantly striving to improve the efficiency of their naming system, which generates names based on client briefs using a complex series of LLM-based models. The agency asked me to assess the efficacy of the linguistic processes involved in their models, and I continue to provide guidance to the Monika team on implementation of my structural recommendations.

* Challenges

The basic premise of my work with Monika has been to take the intuitions and tastes of the agency’s human namers, and turn them into explicit instructions that would lead an LLM to produce viable brand names. Even experienced brand naming specialists often work on vibes and intuitions, and aren’t really used to spelling out the creative process to the degree of detail necessary for an LLM to repeat the process.

Monika's primary challenge is efficiency. If you get an AI to pump out enough names, you'll eventually get some contenders, but you don't want to have to wade through thousands of options to find a diamond in the rough.

Therefore, my insights and recommendations for Monika were largely intended to teach the system to recognize clearly bad candidates and repeat processes that were producing good candidates. Ultimately, this would lead to a higher hit-to-bomb ratio.

* Solutions

I took a typological and descriptive approach to Monika’s naming data -- looking at all the successful viable names from their previous projects and categorizing them based on structural and semantic properties.

With a more explicit reckoning of the types of metaphor, wordplay, vibes, and alternation processes that were implicit in the choices the human namers were pulling out of the LLM-generated lists, I was able to make recommendations for new processes and protocols that would produce the kinds of names the Monika team wanted -- but intentionally and more regularly, rather than by chance.

The technical team have been able to take these linguistic recommendations for new models and explicit instructions and turn them into working elements of the agency's AI, bringing the team closer to their goal of a high quality, reliable, and creative AI namer.

* Situation

A Nashville-based civil Engineer is founding a new engineering solutions company. The company contracts with established civil engineering firms across the country to provide evaluation and training for new software, technical approaches, and workflows to improve the efficiency and competitive advantage of their clientele.

* Challenges

The client was initially adamant that they wanted a creative, expressive name, but the Civil Engineering landscape is dominated by a fairly conservative aesthetic. Most firms just carry the founders' surnames, and outside the box thinking is not necessarily desirable in a field which is often oriented around designing to safety and environmental regulations. A "fun" name could easily be interpreted as unserious.

* Solutions

Discussions with the client centered around three core goals for the new startup's name: 1) suggest technical prowess and the tech solutions orientation of the business, 2) show in-group familiarity among civil engineers without resorting to the blandest naming tendencies within the field, and 3) represent the notion of "getting you to completion".

From this discussion arose a basic question: what do you do when you finish a project within AutoCAD or related software tools used by civil engineers? The answer -- once designs have been approved by contributors, you might say "go ahead and hit plot". PLOT being the command within AutoCAD to print a final design. Amongst engineers, "hit plot" would clearly be recognized as an indication of completion. Especially with the stylization of HitPLOT to mimic that of AutoCAD, the name works as a shibboleth -- clearly interpretable only to clientele within the field.

Here's what I liked about this project -- the name was based on the client's own field specific language knowledge. I, as a namer who works in many different industries, am not going to know specialized terminology as well as a client, especially not in a highly technical field like civil engineering. But what I can do is direct you to look at the field-specific terms you use for very general conceptual frames -- what do you say when something is done, what do you say when something is improved, etc. And I can take the words out of the context and fit them into a name.

This one was highly collaborative and produced -- sorry for the pun -- a real hit.

Here’s a secret -- I don’t really like the name of my own website.

Well... I don't love it.

Which is kind of funny for someone who works on names.

But it was actually the best option for my needs and goals. I would have liked to use something more niche, evocative, rich... I’m inclined to something Neo-Germanic and vaguely techy, like Apace or Feric. Were I to open my own "studio" I might name it something like Mage Nomenclature or Chant Naming. Such a name, however, would really just be for me, personally not professionally.

It wouldn’t help me with what I most need out of this professional website, which is to help build personal ID and a personal brand. I work with other naming agencies, with visual design and general branding agencies, and directly with corporate and startup clients -- what I'm selling to all of them is ME. John Elliott.

So, if there's a lesson here, it's this: sometimes the best name option is not the most exciting. Creativity has to fit within the container of strategy, not the other way around.

Put simply, the meaning of words doesn't come from the dictionary. Meaning is made through a collection of passive and intentional choices over time by everyone who speaks your language -- the dictionary just comes in and makes a useful generalization and common reference.

This idea is really, really important in understanding 1) how your verbal branding choices are going to be interpreted by your audience, and 2) how to effectively manage the decision making process among stakeholders and decision makers within your own team.

You cannot tell people what something is supposed to mean -- you have to work within the context of what a word does and could mean for whoever you want to use it with. You can reframe the context, you can negotiate the meaning a bit, but you can't just decide what a word is going to mean or represent for other people by fiat or because you think you're "right".

That attitude only works if you can force people into submission, and if you could do that... you wouldn't be trying to sell to them, would you?

Brand names and brand architectures are strategic assets that organizations use to motivate behavior and thus meet their goals. Producing strategically effective brand names requires a variety of creative and analytic tools, but divorcing the creative from the strategic is a common pitfall of sub-par naming strategies.

Direct, descriptive names still benefit greatly from aesthetic considerations. Wild, fun, and imaginative names are successful only within the context of a strategy that makes them so.

True innovation and successful strategic choices come when we recognize the value of certain categorical distinctions -- creative vs. strategic, descriptive vs. evocative -- but are willing to think beyond them.

Naming, unlike other kinds of verbal output like marketing copy or sales pitches, is inherently more contentious and difficult because you can't just try something new every time you feel like it's not working. Naming decisions carry more weight because they have to last longer, and they bring more conflict when teams are trying to make decisions.

Great! If you can come up with a name that half your team hates and half the team loves... that's a lot of useful info.

Every point of conflict is an opportunity to ask "why", to iterate new options that could meet your teams conflicting perspectives, and to improve and clarify communication.

Some namers call naming "corporate therapy", since it's often so tied in to the core goals, desires, and dynamics of an organization. In that context, conflict is gonna happen -- I believe if you embrace it as an act of creation, you don't avoid having hard conversations and you get where you wanna go quicker.

Lots of folks who work in "creative" industries -- designers, artists, writers, brand creatives -- assume a distinction between "creative" work and other kinds of more "rational" work. Scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats often feel the same. Many see art and science as two opposing forces. That distinction might be useful sometimes, but I don't subscribe to that world view, not at all.

Artistic creativity can be very methodical, precise, and technical.
Science can be very emotive, metaphorical, and symbolic.
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The methodical, technical approach I use for working with and describing names, copy, and language style is expressly for the purpose of enabling creativity, innovation, and intuitive recognition. Brands need their names and other verbal assets to store and reproduce meaning (i.e. brand equity), and we can affect and make use of that meaning-making process using both the tools of intuitive art and explicated science.

Don't look for one or the other -- get you someone who can do both.