I went back through eleven years of calendars this weekend and counted. Forty-seven naming sessions. Forty-seven times I have sat in a room, or lately a grid of rectangles, while a group of intelligent well-paid adults tried to produce a proper noun by consensus. It has never once gone well, and this year the sticky notes are digital, which somehow made it worse.
The arc is identical every time. First hour, everyone is delighted, because naming is the only part of branding that feels like play. Second hour, someone opens a Latin roots page. Third hour, a person who has been quiet suggests dropping a vowel. Fourth hour, legal joins and kills the four good ones, and everybody agrees to reconvene, which means doing this again next month with a different quiet person.
Then a name gets picked in a hallway, or a Slack thread, by two people, in eight minutes.
Naming does not fail because naming is hard. It fails because we run a research task with a legal constraint as if it were a group improv exercise.
Three things go wrong, reliably. One, the group generates together, which guarantees regression to the safest option, because the odd name that would actually work sounds ridiculous the first time anyone says it and no one wants to be the person who said it. Two, nobody wrote the strategy down first, so the session becomes an argument about positioning conducted entirely through nouns. Three, trademark and domain screening happens at the end, after everyone has fallen in love, instead of on day one when it is a filter rather than a funeral.
The fix is unglamorous. Write the strategy, one page, agreed and signed, before anyone generates a single candidate. Generate alone, in volume, hundreds not dozens, because quantity is the only reliable path to the strange one. Screen early and brutally. Then bring a group together to kill, not to create, because groups are excellent at killing.
And accept the thing nobody in the room wants to hear: the name is maybe ten percent of it. Trader Joe's is a made-up guy. Oatly is oats with a suffix. What made them work was everything that came after, applied consistently for years by people who did not relitigate it every quarter.
Bring a group together to kill, not to create, because groups are excellent at killing.
The karaoke bar in Southeast has been dark since March and I think about it constantly. Karaoke works because one person is at the microphone and everyone else has the decency to be quiet and clap. A naming session is eleven people at the microphone at once, in different keys. I miss the host who called everyone baby. I do not miss the whiteboard.