Last Wednesday I watched the Nintendo Direct at my kitchen counter with a bowl of cereal, fully expecting a new name. Something with a syllable nobody had heard before. Something a naming agency had defended for six weeks with a mood board and a Latin root.
They called it the Switch 2.
The console looks like the old one, slightly larger. The controllers attach magnetically now. Your old games still work. The entire pitch, stripped down, is this is the thing you already like, improved. Preorders in the States have since slipped, and the price conversation is its own mess, but the naming choice is what the industry has been chewing on all week.
Because it is the move everyone claims to admire and almost nobody makes.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms more times than I want to count. A client says they want consistency, longevity, equity that compounds. Then a new marketing lead arrives, and within two quarters there is a refresh, a new name architecture, and a deck explaining why the thing customers actually recognized was holding them back.
Continuity is not a naming decision. It is a decision to let someone else get credit for the thing you inherited.
That is the real cost, and it is why so few people pay it. Nobody gets promoted for keeping the name. There is no case study in maintaining. The incentive structure inside most marketing organizations rewards visible change, and visible change is the cheapest thing you can manufacture.
Nintendo has the advantage of a long memory and a company that has been wrong before in expensive ways. They named the Wii U badly, and it cost them years of confusion about what the product even was. The lesson they took from that was not be bolder. It was be legible.
Legibility is underrated. Lego does not rename the brick. Levi's does not rename the 501. Toyota has sold you the same four letters for decades and lets the car do the changing. In each case the brand absorbs the improvement instead of announcing it, and the customer never has to relearn anything to stay loyal.
Nobody gets promoted for keeping the name.
If you are heading into a planning cycle where somebody wants to blow up the identity, ask what specifically the current name prevents. Not what it fails to express. What it prevents. If the honest answer is nothing, you are being asked to fund a signature, not a strategy.
I sing the same song at karaoke every time. Same bar in Southeast Portland, same sticky floor, same host who calls everyone baby. I am no better at it than I was two years ago. But everybody in that room knows what is coming when I stand up, and that turns out to be worth more than a surprise.