If you can "Press Here for a Name," what is lost?

Taking the time to make a name is often worth more than the name alone

Within weeks of ChatGPT’s release, I started joking about The Naming Button

The fantasy of instantaneous name delivery: A perfectly crafted name with the exact-right risk profile (no trademark conflicts, no linguistic issues, no cultural or common-law roadblocks) that says exactly what you want to say about your brand.

Career-ending for me and people I love with my whole heart, but I won’t deny that it would be an impressive accomplishment.

And it could happen.

Some version of it probably will happen.

Hell, if you have bad taste and a huge appetite for risk, it’s already here:

(Equino. Like a horse. For an ice-cream company. I impacted the groundwater supply of a rural community to produce this example—was it worth it?)

---

Want to become a better namer?

The full Foundations of Naming self-guided class series is finally here—take one class or the complete series, and boost your naming confidence.

---

Most of the visions I’ve seen for how AI will impact creative work leaves out the truth of how creative decisions are made in business environments

One of MANY such visions that I’ve shaken my head at recently is the WPP vision of
“The AI-Empowered Agency.”

Maybe you read that and think, “hell yeah.” You are probably the head of a holding company.

Most of us read this and think, “hell no.” This is a vision in which boundaries don’t exist, scope doesn’t exist, timelines mean nothing.

Beyond the personal impact on the people managing accounts under this vision (which sounds awful), I don’t see this contributing to brilliant work. This positions agencies as a place to hear yes, to anything and everything.

The maddest my clients have ever been at me has been when I have not pushed back on them when they have a bad idea (or, more commonly, when someone on their team is trying to advance a bad idea and they want an outside expert to say to that person, “Hey, hold up, here’s where we’re headed if we say yes to that.”)

The process of developing a name is inherently valuable

Yes, I have a professional stake in saying this, but fight me.

(I know how to fight.)

Have you ever solved a problem? Did you learn anything?

The parts of developing a name that AI is trying to smooth over—the questioning and experimenting and researching and debating—are valuable. They don’t just help you figure out what kind of name you want, but they reveal a lot about who you are, or want to be. The creative-request-to-final-creative-output-in-an-instant pipeline leaves out all discovery that happens there, which means, unfortunately, that you’ll figure things out once you’re in market, which is a far, far more expensive place to learn lessons.

On the client side, naming stress tests the brand’s positioning, its value to audiences, its sense of the future shape it may take. It might feel frustrating at moments, but those I-thought-I’d-like-it-but-now-I-don’t moments are so revealing.

“I know we focused this round of names around our origins in surf culture, but when I see names that express that, I realize that leaves out the story of where we’re headed, which is about how solar energy can make everyday life more affordable for young parents.”

Trying things on. Seeing how they fit. Setting aside the wrong stuff. Watching THE name take form.

Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.

Hell, Doodling. Serendipity. Collaboration.

These are weird things that are hard to account for in your SOPs or the steps you commit to in an SOW. But they are a massive part of what makes this process of exploration and discovery effective.

Losing your mind with frustration when you’re 1,200 names deep into a project has value too

In most global projects that I lead, there is a moment where I think, “There are simply no more names for this” and I close a book and rub my eyes, and when I look up, a word on the spine of another book catches my eye just right and my brain does some beautiful-mind stuff and a whole new path to the name appears.

That’s usually the path from which the best name emerges. The one that says the thing we’ve been trying to say that we want to find a way to say.

You have to know what you want from a name before you can know how to ask for it

I work on dozens of naming projects a year. I’ve done that for nearly 20 years. Many of my client teams do not have much experience naming things, especially if I’m working on naming their business. Maybe they’ve done it once or twice, maybe never. I have had hundreds of conversations with people about what they want their name to do for them, what their name should say, and how it should say it. I know when they’re headed in a bad direction.

Yes, we can use a questionnaire that guides people to uncover their own naming needs. I’ve experimented with a lot of them over the years. I know a lot of you have too. Yes, there are AI naming tools that can guide you through a conversation.

The problem is that better results come from not just a conversation (and def not one that’s as eager to please and validate you as this current generation of AI chat platforms seems to be) but from the questioning and debate and experimenting with the output of that conversation, in the form of a little bit of a test-drive, to really arrive at path to a name that’s going to be successful.

AI will change how names are developed.

There are AI-fueled naming companies, and I expect this will continue. I’m no fool.

I also see the way AI tools are trying to inject themselves into every single facet of how I run my naming studio.

I can imagine a future where there is no path to a sustainable naming business unless you’re propped up by AI in some way.

And I’m not making a case for bloated timelines and massive teams to try to justify costs. You’d be shocked at what three of us (plus a lawyer and a team of in-country native-speaking linguists) can do in two weeks.

But I am making a case for keeping the parts where we talk, think, and sleep on it.

But it won’t change the fact that names are valuable.

They’ll be with you for a long, long time (if you get them right). They’re worth a process that lets you try things on, debate its merits, and learn from experts about the nuances of their individual risk profiles.

When AI becomes the sole source of name development, with its pattern-seeking tendencies and over-simplifications, names are likely to start to share a similar look and feel.

The way we all have a sense now of AI-generated copywriting, I can clock a list of names developed by AI.

Will having an AI-sourced name impact a brand’s perception in the market? Maybe, as anti-AI backlash continues, but most likely not.

The bigger risk, I think, comes from skipping the messy parts of identity-making that make you more sure of who you are. The most successful brands I work with, the ones we admire for being able to respond so effortlessly to the moment, have a rock-solid sense of who they are and why that matters to their audiences.

Caitlin

Want to become a better namer?

The full Foundations of Naming self-guided class series is here—take one class or the complete series, and boost your naming confidence.

Download free booklets from the Truth in Branding series on naming and trademarks.

Check out an episode of Big Names in Naming, the podcast where I interview namers about…naming.