BOSTON

617-532-0943

CHARLOTTE

704-248-8090

RALEIGH

919-386-2335

WASHINGTON, DC

202-558-7460

Brand Naming

Corporate Naming, Product & Service Naming, Taglines

There are as many approaches to brand naming as there are imaginations… And none of them are necessarily wrong – or right.

Whether a firm takes a linguistic approach, uses romance languages or word parts, looks to literature or geography, or otherwise generates name candidates, the key issue is the end result, as it resonates with your target audiences. It’s not about you, and it’s certainly not about your naming firm, but it is all about your customer: how they speak, how they use representational systems, how they respond to various name candidates.

Which approach is the best?

There isn’t one, and believe us, we’ve been exposed to lots of them, worked for top firms in our industry using theirs, and even invented a few ourselves.

You’ll find many branding firms are what we call Brand Forward – immediately touting their past work as if the entire success of the product accrues to their brilliance. Do you think they’d ever put failed products and bankrupt companies on their website? If it’s all in the naming, you’d think that would do it.

Our Approach

We start with you, not us, as well as something much more interesting than both of us:

Your Constituent Audiences
  • Customers
  • Investors
  • Wall Street
  • Vendors
  • Employees
  • Competitors
  • Alternative Products in the Marketplace
  • Future employees you are trying to recruit
  • Possible acquisition targets, joint ventures, takeovers

We’re infinitely concerned with how they speak, use language, communicate in their trade groups and associations. We want to know the lay of the land before we assume we’re going to radically alter it.

We love language and how it’s represented, stored, and retrieved in the mind. We use Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) as one technique, Neuroassociative Conditioning (NAC) as another. We are constantly researching social anthropology, trends, technology, science of the mind, psychology, and the sciences.