The Hidden Costs of Naming

A cross-post from The Naming Playbook

Hi folks!

Thanks for listening to season 3 of Big Names in Naming! Final episode dropped last week; catch them all here if you missed them. Tons and tons and TONS of insight into how naming works, inside and out. New season coming this summer!

I’m working on a cute little series about naming warmups and daily creative practices but it’s not quite ready yet, so I’m sharing a cross-post from my OTHER newsletter, The Naming Playbook (it’s more focused on naming decision makers in large enterprises—but maybe that’s you!). Enjoy!

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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.

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You're probably naming more than you should be. What's it costing you?

Naming is an investment.

Like any investment, it comes with costs.

Not just financial ones, but also a lot of time, effort, and attention that organizations underestimate.

If you name one or two things a year, this might not be a big deal.

But a lot of our clients name dozens (typical of most large organizations), hundreds (way more common than you’d thing), or THOUSANDS (we had one client in this situation, but it wouldn’t surprise me to know there are more) of things every year.

So what does naming actually cost you? Let’s break it down.

1. Time for internal consensus building

Getting alignment on what a name needs to communicate—and how—is often one of the biggest hidden costs of naming. Different stakeholders bring different perspectives, and getting everyone on the same page can take weeks, if not months.

The more voices in the mix, the longer this takes. And while consensus is valuable, the real cost comes when alignment drags on and delays progress elsewhere.

The cost: This depends on the salary bands of the people involved, but I’ve seen entire C-suites get sucked into months of back and forth, at a combined rate of many thousands of dollars an hour. And that’s before name development had even begun…

2. Time and resources to create a name

Whether you’re generating names in-house or working with an agency, the effort behind developing names, filtering them for issues, and securing buy-in for a final set of candidates adds up.

A single name might pass through:

• Marketers

• Copywriters

• Program managers

• Senior decision-makers

• Legal teams

• Regional teams (for language and cultural screening)

The cost: The most common response to our question about how much total time is spent on a single naming project is hundreds of hours.

Multiply that by the number of names a company develops annually, and the cost balloons fast. (Plus, what is everyone NOT able to do because they’re juggling naming requests that aren’t aligned with company priorities?)

3. Dedicated project leadership

Someone has to hold the whole dang thing together. That means:

• Managing intake and requests

• Keeping track of stakeholder feedback

• Documenting agreements and rationales

• Shepherding the decision through leadership

The cost: At least one person’s bandwidth, if not more. Naming is often tacked onto the existing responsibilities of a marketing lead—along with all of the other roles a marketer has to play. A common results of a lot of our naming guidelines, naming process, or naming engagement work is the realization that there needs to be a dedicated hire to manage naming.

4. Trademark clearance, registration, monitoring, and enforcement

Even once you’ve landed on a name internally, the work isn’t done (I wish!). Every name should be screened for legal risks, potential conflicts, and availability in key markets (along with linguistic and cultural issues), EVEN if it’s descriptive, EVEN if you don’t plan to register it.

Some of the costs that add up quickly when an organization names a lot:

• Preliminary legal screenings (to weed out obvious conflicts)

• Full trademark searches (which can require external legal counsel if you don’t have an in-house team)

• Registration efforts (filing applications, paying fees, monitoring—either by an external firm or service, or via software which, you guessed it, costs money)

• Monitoring efforts (keeping an eye out for potentially infringing new registrations, as well as non-registered uses of names that are too similar to yours)

• Potential enforcement (if competitors or other businesses use similar names)

The cost: A few thousand dollars for the first four bullets above (if all goes well), but the resulting battle to protect a name from an infringer (or to defend yourself or rebuild your brand if you’re accused of infringement) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

5. Effort to launch and educate

Not every name is instantly meaningful. A lot of organizations that handle a high volume of names also tend to be the ones that let a lot of rogue names slip out into the world (a random data sorting feature being called The Conquistador might be a fun internal code name, but it raises more questions than it answers if it just shows up in your customers’ interface).

It takes internal and external education to make sure the name resonates. That could mean:

• Internal training (so employees understand how and when to use the name)

• External marketing (to introduce the name to customers in a way that sticks)

• Sales training (to ensure sales teams understand how to talk about it)

If a name is introduced without clear messaging, customers might ignore it—or worse, misinterpret it.

The cost: This depends on your typical go-to-market approach, but it might mean hours of your creative team’s work to develop messages, copy, and design to make sure the name stands out, and then potentially external vendors to help execute a campaign. Internally, your sales team will at least need a cheat sheet for the name’s story if it’s not completely intuitive and aligned with how your customers’ drivers or how they’ll experience the brand.

6. Investment in building equity in the name

A name’s value isn’t always its inherent meaning—it’s in what it comes to stand for.

That can be worth a lot.

To build brand equity in a name, companies invest in:

• Long term marketing and advertising campaigns

• Consistent usage and reinforcement across touchpoints

• Thought leadership or storytelling to shape perception

The cost: Without sustained investment, even the best name can lose steam—and meaning. But it takes a lot of talent, time, and energy to continually support established brand names in the market. How many can you really communicate successfully at once?

(Ask a 22-year-old if they know what a Hemi is—they won’t. But Chrysler is still renewing their trademark registration for “HEMI.”)

7. Risks to brand clarity and understanding

One of the biggest hidden costs of (over)naming is potential for dilution.

• If a new name feels too distinct from its parent brand, customers might not realize it’s part of the same company.

• If a name feels like the wrong fit, it could weaken trust or create confusion

• If an organization over-names—creating too many standalone names—the overall brand story can become fragmented and harder to follow.

To make my point (and thank you to all-time-great client Carla for bringing this to my attention), let’s look at Nespresso’s naming system as a “what not to do” example.

The tiers are all over the map without a sense of hierarchy (Next, Plus, Pop+). They’re applied both as separate words (Vertuo Next), and locked up with the subbrand name (VertuoPlus). There are also more evocative modifiers paired with the Vertuo name (Creatista and Latissima).

This type of over-naming (if I may remove any sense of objectivity here for a moment) is so disrespectful to the people you need to respect the most: the people who are trying to give you money.

The cost: What are your customer acquisition costs? How willing are you to lose customers in order to satisfy internal demands to name something? Is it worth investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars more than you’d need to otherwise to overcome the friction than this type of over-naming can create?

So, what is your current approach to naming costing you?

Maybe you’ve been doing some back-of-the-napkin per-name math as you read and you don’t like what you see. Most organizations can quickly find themselves close to seven figures. Some, even higher. Again, I am talking per name.

That’s a totally valid investment for the name of a flagship brand that will drive years of sustained value: Think iPhone, Big Mac, Windows, Air Jordan, Kindle.

But if you’re making that investment over and over every year, for names your customers barely end up seeing, knowing, or caring about, you’re potentially wasting millions of dollars.

The big questions to ask yourself

1. How often can your organization successfully support these efforts?

2. How often are these names developed with your customers’ best interests in mind?

What can you do?

A lot.

Especially if you’re willing to be brave.

Getting more precise with your naming efforts can happen through:

• Adjustments to your naming strategy and criteria for what gets named

• Better tracking and monitoring of the names you own, and how you use them

• Optimizing your naming process

• Introducing new naming engagement and education efforts

• Leveling up the naming skills of the folks on your team

If you’re not sure whether your organization is over-naming—or naming the wrong things—let’s talk.

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

P.S. If you manage naming in a large organization (1,000+ employees with a robust portfolio of names or frequent naming requests), I’d love to interview you or share our naming operations benchmarking survey. Reply to this email, and I’ll send you the details.

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.

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.

All typos are left in to humanize me 🤪