Rarely are our client teams teams of one. Naturally, one of the biggest issues they face is consensus-building.

If they’ve tried to develop a name already, one of three things has usually happened:

Point three is the topic of today’s newsletter. Some of the best advice I’ve given recently has been a deep dive on one or more of these, so here’s my top ten list for any naming leads out there struggling to get their own stakeholders to focus, focus, focus.

Maybe you’ve never named before, but you’ve (hopefully!) made decisions together before. What worked? What hurt? How can you bring in the stuff that helped? Do you need to give your naming partner (us) a heads-up about anything, or anyone?

Let me tell you the worst moment to tell your CEO a new name for something: right after you’ve told them that something exists. The naming process should involve far fewer surprises than you think.

Get buy-in on the strategy before you ever show a creative solution. That might mean a five-minute walk-and-talk at the start of the naming process to get their input; that might mean including them in all key meetings. See above: How do the right people like to be included when making other big decisions?

If you have more than five people in a room, you are hosting a naming-debate meeting, not a naming-decision meeting. People love naming, and yes, it’s fun (and sometimes productive) to invite your SEO agency, design team, and HR group to the naming workshop, where we’re being creative and a little iterative.

But it should be clear to everyone who will make the choices about the criteria for a successful name, as well as the final name itself. The final naming presentation, and the discussions that follow, should be pretty disciplined affairs.

Dictatorships masquerading as democracies are one of the biggest dangers in naming-project stall-outs: the true decision-maker (typically someone with a C- in their title, but not always) wants to hear from everyone (nice!) and then disagrees with their priorities (totally fine!), but can’t confidently move forward with their preferred name (oh no...) because they’ve set the wrong expectations about how a decision will be made.

The person with the decision-making authority is still a human being, and it can be confidence-shattering to see a team they respect advocate for a name that is so different from what the decision-maker wants.

Decide, before the naming process starts, who will have veto power, how others on the team will share their perspective on name candidates, and how your naming partners can facilitate that discussion.

Anxieties about the imagined shortcomings of name candidates can ruin your name-candidate pool:

Will they?

Bad guesses kill good names. There is a path to finding out the truth in most of these cases, and it’s not even a high-friction path:

Check in with your decision-maker about their preferences (if they aren’t already in the meeting...).

Run some quick research, or, if you can, just ask a customer: Does their brain produce the word “Globule” when they see the word “Cobble”?

Launch some linguistic research. At Wild Geese Studio, we can do a deep dive with an in-country, native-speaking namer or linguist in most countries in a matter of a few short days.

If you’re wondering about it, it’s worth knowing for sure.

Every naming project should start with a strategic foundation that sets out the job the name should do for the brand, what the name should say, and any guardrails (creative or otherwise) around how it should say it.

Names should be developed against it.

Name lists should be filtered down against it.

And when decision-making gets too subjective, names should be chosen based on their fit with the criteria.

In about 25% of our projects, we land on a name during the development phase that is perfect for reasons we don’t understand yet. It often nothing to do with the criteria, or breaks at least one “rule” outlined in it. But through serendipity, tangential connections to on-strategy ideas, or just unadulterated vibes, it makes sense to proceed with it. And in about 25% of those projects, that’s the final name.

We end up finding the right story to make it work strategically, and balance out what we lost from the criteria in other ways (messaging, campaigns, visual identity).

It’s okay to break the rules if you know which rules you’re breaking and why.

A name lives in the real world. A name lives in YOUR world. And as your naming partner, I know you’re the one who will have to work with this name every single day—not us.

We present names in a sans-serif font, and write them out in an illustrative conversation, which I also read out loud. But there’s more pressure-testing that’s we’re happy to assign as homework: Everybody says the names in a sentence. Everybody writes them down. Maybe they type them out in a serif font to see what that’s like. Maybe your design team mocks up a few illustrations to see whether it fits with the current vibe, or represents a direction the brand should go next. Nothing should be overwrought, as the full brand development happens after a final decision is made. But taking names into the naming fitting room and seeing how they fit is worth a few hours of effort.

Speaking of taking a little time with the names that rise to the top…

The pressure to pick a name you just met is too much.

Last year, we started offering our clients a working-shortlist check-in 24–48 hours after our last meeting to see how things have shifted after the initial shortlist from the presentation. We show up with prioritization exercises and some smart spreadsheet stuff, but usually we’re just there to listen, provide a bit of guidance, and let the team talk itself into a list of three to seven names to share with their legal team. If you’re leading naming on your own, I’d suggest offering the same: Schedule a regroup the next business day after the presentation to re-align on the list for your legal team.

If I had my way, your lawyer or in-house legal team would be at every meeting, from the kickoff to the final working-shortlist decision. Failing that, please, let them know before the process starts what you’ll be naming (and let your naming agency know how they recommend registering it, so we can match the trademark classes and markets in our own preliminary screenings).

(They can also tell you how many names you should target during your working-shortlist meeting.)

Your legal team can give you both definitive go/no-go answers on the names that have survived the journey to date, but they might be able to help you find creative paths to registering, protecting, and using the names you’re most excited about, even if they come with some tricky stuff to navigate.

Their input can help solidify certain name candidates and knock others out of the running, hopefully leaving you with a final name that you feel you’ve considered carefully, and that’s up for the job at hand.

 Ready to make more effective naming decisions?

At Wild Geese Studio, we specialize in helping global brands 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. Email me and we’ll talk: [email protected]

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

wildgeesestudio.com