“Our naming is a mess”

That quote has started nearly every naming operations or naming systems engagement across my entire career.

A mess.

And the way most people diagnose the mess? They point to where they see the mess: in the names themselves. They have a problem with the style in which names are being developed, or they have a problem with how many names are created. So, naturally, the request is for new/better/different naming strategies or guidelines.

Sometimes that’s the right answer. Sometimes, we just need to clean up a couple of rules about what needs a name, and how it should be named.

Nice!

But waaaaay more often, if we take both the diagnosis and the prescription at face value, we end up seeing the Real Problem a few days or weeks into the engagement. And it’s usually something that starts earlier in the process than when someone cracks open the naming guidelines.

Through a lot of client experience, along with our own research conducted with naming leads at some of the world’s leading brands, we have found that there are typically nine areas that can make the biggest difference in how effective naming can be. (And you can define effective in any number of ways: names that make it to market are aligned with the business, brand, and naming strategy; naming decisions are made efficiently; the internal resources that support naming are adopted and well understood, etc.)

Where is naming “owned” in your organization? Is it centralized, federated, distributed, or externalized? Something else? If it’s not clear to you, it might not be clear to the rest of the organization. Establishing where naming decisions happen, and where the center of naming excellence lives, is one of the most foundational steps to getting naming back on the rails.

Do you have a clear set of naming principles, brand architecture, and guidelines? Are they enough? Are they too much? (There can be a tendency to over-engineer guidance in order to anticipate every possible naming need—to the point that it ends up being too rigid for reality.)

Is there a set of standard operating procedures for common types of naming requests? How well do those align with other well-adopted processes (product lifecycle management, etc.)? Creating a routine approach, and the materials and tools that support that approach, frees everyone up to focus more on addressing actual naming questions without wondering how anything is going to get done.

Where does your legal team come in? Right at the end, huh? After everyone’s in love with a single name, or maybe a single name with a backup? Two decades of working with in-house legal teams has taught me that the earlier your legal team knows what’s up, the better. Loop them in when a naming need arises, and understand available strategies and your organization’s risk tolerances—it’ll help you make better names, and it will help them partner with you to find one you can build a brand around.

Even if all of your actual name development happens via external agencies, it’s incredibly helpful to have a few team members who know the ins and outs of naming, from strategy to name development to due diligence to evaluation. While we often advocate for some dedicated in-house naming roles, including at least one senior role, having a naming-trained marketing, brand, or comms team helps the whole organization make better naming decisions on the fly.

Many, many naming projects fail at key approval points. Leaders weren’t brought in early enough and don’t see their vision in the names. Decision makers don’t have the tools to make a decision together, so they decide different things. Improve internal socialization flows and agreements about how to make agreements, and improve naming.

Wild Geese Studio: Where does naming happen in your organization?

Naming lead at large org: Our team handles it.

WGS: How does naming start?

NL@LO: Someone comes to us with a naming request.

WGS: How do they know to come to you with a request?

NL@LO: … … …Most…most don’t.

This is a really tough one. Sometimes, teams take it for granted that product or business teams even know they should engage someone outside of their own teams to make naming decisions.

Raise your team’s profile through engagement and education. The strategies and tactics here need to be dialed into your company’s culture, whether that’s a lot of proactive 1:1 outreach (highest touch but most effective), an un-ignorable internal campaign, or educational materials that are so practical, useful, and memorable that everyone knows your team is going to help them succeed more than if they tried it on their own.

Speaking of educational materials, where do they live? What form do they take? Are they easy to find? Easy to use? Are they aligned with other tools, workflows, and software systems? Start by working with what already exists; invest in a layer on top of that only when it’s necessary.

“Wait, why did you call it that?” Formalizing the process of documenting naming decisions, approvals, and proper usage, along with other names considered in each project, will create a wealth of institutional naming knowledge that will serve the whole organization for years to come. Think “living repository” over “historical archives.”

If you need help figuring out where your naming problems stem from, and stopping the flow of downstream consequences, we’d love to partner.

At Wild Geese Studio, we specialize in helping global organizations build smoother naming engines. Whether you need help building a better operation for managing naming decisions, developing future-ready names, or managing potential risks through linguistic and cultural research, we’d love to show you how we can make you more effective.

 – Caitlin Barrett
Founder and naming expert, Wild Geese Studio
Your strategic naming partner for development, operations, and evaluation

wildgeesestudio.com