What's in a name?

The naming of things has taken on greater significance to me in the past few months. My wife is due to give birth to our third child any day, and whilst we're all sorted should we have a little girl, we're less certain if we welcome another Master Oakley into the world.

Without names pinned down, parallels with my day job were made today as I was thumbing through the Sunday Times. Under the ‘Teach yourself to...’ section, there are two very small columns of copy dedicated to picking a brand name.

In it, Mortgage Brokerage Trussle's founder Ishaan Malhi talks about how, in his search for a new company name, he took inspiration from Zoopla “we wanted a name that meant nothing and that we could inject a brand into”. No parallels there in terms of giving my child a name that means nothing(!) but definitely some in terms of how you put meaning into it.

Having also recently returned from a naming expedition in the Middle East, there’s a lot to be said for adopting such an open-minded approach. There is however more than one way to arrive at a new name for a brand.

Be it a naming workshop or a brainstorm amongst fellow wordsmiths, in the quest to find something unique and differentiating, no stone is left unturned; whether that's company history, product, process, people, personality, purpose (and a range of other words that don’t begin with ‘P’). Ultimately the aim of any kind of naming process is to find something that all stakeholders are happy with and resonates with the target audience.

But rather than poking around in the dark to find inspiration – company archives, audience interviews, dictionaries, thesauruses, books of interesting words, nursery rhymes (the name could come from anywhere!) – it’s worth channelling your creative energy in some way.

Ishaan Malhi had the same idea. Have clear success criteria*. 

His were pretty simple; it must have two syllables, have an available dot.com address and not mean anything obscene in a foreign language. The latter being the one I’m always mindful of. There’s nothing worse than arriving at an absolute gem only to find it in the urban dictionary!

Naming is one of the most creative processes you can go through as a brand and will leave a lasting legacy. It’s also incredibly subjective and whilst having success criteria narrows the focus, it should by no means limit thinking in any way.

So, good readers of the Times (and your good self), if you’re thinking of a new name for your existing or start-up brand, you could do a lot worse than finding (or creating by smashing two or more words together) a word that you can build meaning into. But don’t let that be the only avenue you explore. Through careful consideration and creative prose you may arrive at something that’s far more reflective of your brand story, and therefore more ownable. 

*For what it's worth, the naming criteria we currently have boil down to how well it sounds alongside our other two children's names, whether we know children who share our preferred names (and how much we subsequently like them!), and whether it lends itself to any unfortunate initials!

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