To kill an original thought

Being original is not for the feint-hearted and in my profession it’s positively draining.

After a fine stroll along the Weston-super-Mare promenade this weekend I dropped into the Waterstone’s cafe in the Sovereign shopping centre. Then proceeded to order my standard Americano with a side order of Caramel wafer biscuit. Haven’t had one of them for a long time - lush!

I sit down. Across from me is a rotating display stand with a variety of mini-sized books, trinkets and boxes. You know the ones…’the pocket book of yoga for lamas’. One in particular caught my.

"Tequila Mockingbird"

I love wordplay, it’s part of my job, I hadn’t seen this particular pun previously and was amused.

As suspected it was a mini book on making cocktails BUT with a literary twist with many more book/drink pun combos inside. ’The Pitcher of Dorian Grey Goose’, ‘The Last of the Mojitos’, ‘Vermouth the Bell Tolls’. Very clever.

Nothing hinting a racial injustice though and I wondered if Atticus ‘Finch’ might make the follow up book based on bird/drink puns!!

Any who!!

I came back home and looked up the book online to see if I could track it down and then BAM!! The picture that accompanies this post tells the story of my daily ‘struggle’.

Original thoughts and ideas or even puns are only original if you keep them to yourself, don’t do research or test the market in anyway, shape or form.

A big part of my job is to come up with names for companies that really require to be original. Not rare, not used by a couple of others, but names or words that have never existed until they’ve been fermented by my particular collection of neurons and synapses.

On average I will come up with about 200 names for a company when tasked. 80% of them will get dismissed within about 90-120 seconds. The rapid pace at which my so called fantastic original thoughts are squashed and diminished to uselessness, takes a few steps.

1. Type name into a domain supplier, usually search under .co.uk and .com.

2. Type name into companies house, it may not exist, but it might have been dissolved.

3. Type name into Google and click on Images.

4. Type name into Facebook and Instagram search boxes for businesses who operate but don’t have a website.

5. Research name and similar homonyms/homophones within UK and Global trademark directories

6. Just make sure the name doesn’t mean something else in a different language.

It’s a lengthy process, it’s soul destroying and most people don’t bother but I’m very much used to it. The reward at the end is quite exhilarating when a name I have thought of gets through those six steps.

You can’t be 100% sure it’s original, but with that level of research I can assure my client that they can trademark the name and protect themselves for when someone else comes up with the same name and tries to trade with it. I can also be confident that if someone else types in the name, they won’t find 18 other companies that already use it.

I don’t know if Tim Federle came up with 'Tequila Mockingbird' first but if you’re reading this Tim, I feel your pain! Sorry.