Thursday morning at Ovation a man at the next table read a headline out loud to nobody in particular. A company that makes Long Island iced tea had renamed itself Long Blockchain Corp. Same beverage. Same cans. Same warehouse in Hicksville. The stock was up several hundred percent before I finished my cortado.
It did not announce a product. It announced a noun.
Bitcoin touched nineteen thousand dollars four days ago, so the timing is not subtle, and I expect the regulators will eventually have opinions. But I keep thinking about it as a naming problem, because that is the part of my job people treat as the fun cosmetic bit at the end of the engagement.
Every client I have worked with has, at some point, called naming the easy part. We will figure out the name later. Let's nail the strategy first. And then a beverage company changes one word on its incorporation papers and the market revalues the entire enterprise in an afternoon.
A name is not decoration. It is the fastest claim a company can make about what it is, and the market reads it faster than it reads anything else.
This is not new and it is well documented. During the dot-com run, finance researchers found that firms adding dot com to their names earned enormous abnormal returns in the days around the announcement, regardless of whether they had any internet business. The funnier finding came after the crash, when companies quietly dropped dot com from their names and got a second bump for that. The name was doing all the work in both directions.
Compare the real ones. Apple dropped Computer from its name in 2007 because it had stopped being a computer company and everyone could see the evidence in their pocket. Google became a subsidiary of Alphabet in 2015 because the thing it had become no longer fit inside a search verb. Both of those names ratified something that had already happened. The tea company's name is a forecast, and forecasts are cheap.
A name is not decoration. It is the fastest claim a company can make about what it is, and the market reads it faster than it reads anything else.
So the lesson is not that naming is powerful and therefore you should grab the hot noun. The lesson is that naming is powerful and therefore it is the least reversible decision on the whole project. You will change your logo. You will change your palette twice. You will not change your name without spending two years and a great deal of goodwill.
I walked to Powell's afterward and stood in the business section, where roughly a third of the spines had a word on them that will look embarrassing in four years. Names date. Arguments do not. Pick accordingly, and then go get ice cream.