When prospective clients ask, “What is the hardest part of developing a brand strategy?”, they are often surprised by my answer. It is not the positioning work: finding hidden insights; getting to know an audience at a deep, emotional level; synthesizing that into a meaningful brand promise. While all of that work is not “easy”, it typically goes more smoothly because we base it on deep research and strategic logic that is then translated into a more creative expression. 

What’s most challenging, I tell them (and they are often quite surprised) is naming. One word, highly subjective, that expresses your brand to the world. It is not easy to get right, but it is very easy to get wrong.

There are several reasons why naming efforts can go off track, and I like to call them the “Seven Deadly Sins of Naming”.

Sin #1: Naming before strategy. Clients often make the fatal mistake of locking in on a name idea before the strategy work is even done. I like to say that the name is the icing on the cake—your cake being the strategy. Choose the name before the strategy and you may very well end up with two things that are good on their own, but don’t really work together. (Think: Red velvet cake with peanut butter frosting).

Sin #2: Relying on personal preference. While naming should be rooted in strategy, it often becomes a matter of taste, very subjective and based upon personal preference. Everyone thinks they are an expert, and people often rely on the evaluations of friends, family, and colleagues over sound strategic logic and quantitative testing. 

Sin #3: Not doing your due diligence. Coming up with a winning name is hard. Coming up with a winning name that can be trademarked is even harder. With crowded categories, finding a unique and meaningful name is a challenge. Best advice? It’s essential to do your due diligence before landing on a name.

Sometimes companies select a name that is owned by a well-known brand in another category, yet trademarkable in the category in which they compete. The problem? They spend too much time educating people that they are not the “other brand”. Case in point is the website development company American Eagle. They spend an inordinate amount of time and money in explaining to people that they are not the better-known, youth-oriented fashion brand of the same name.  

The other important part of doing your due diligence is to engage a qualified intellectual property attorney. While clients and their brand consultants can explore Patent & Trademark office databases for conflicts, it is best to rely on a thorough knock-out search by a professional who can also lead your name’s trademark application process. I am often stunned by the number of businesses that do not want to invest a few thousand dollars in this critical brand safeguard.

Sin #4: Leaving it to AI. AI can do a lot of things, but naming isn’t one of them. AI-generated names are often fairly poor options. At best they sound like a million names you’ve heard before. At worst they’re silly, trite, convoluted, and often disconnected from the strategy. You can certainly use AI as a brainstorming tool, but at least for now, I see it as simply another support element.

Sin #5: Choosing a name that fails to reinforce the brand promise. You may have heard the saying, “a name doesn’t mean anything until it means something.” But, unless you have a massive budget to build brand awareness from the start, that’s not true. Your name should convey what your brand is all about. While brands like Marriott may be synonymous with hotels now, it took decades, thousands of hotels, and billions of dollars of marketing spend to reach that point. Most brands don’t have that luxury, so they need to select a name that works hard for it from the start.

Sin #6: Boxing yourself in. Sometimes businesses select names that pigeonhole them into a particular offering, or a channel. Burlington Coat Factory and 1-800-Flowers, for example. When they chose to expand, or times changed, they ended up with names that no longer fit (no pun intended).

Sin #7: Failing to reinforce the name with a strong visual identity. Your brand name says what your brand is and does, but 93% percent of communication is nonverbal. The visual identity needs to help people clearly see what the brand is and does. Fonts, colors, marks, applications of these are critical ways to reinforce what the brand promises. Particularly in a world where consumers are so visually tied to their screens, the visual must reinforce the verbal. It makes your total package so much stronger. Why? The brain processes images much faster than words…60 thousand times faster, in fact, according to researchers at 3M.

With all that said, it’s easy to see why naming is the hardest part of developing a brand. But when you tie it to the strategy, keep it flexible enough to grow with your business, rigorously vet it through competitive assessments and trademark law, then ensure that its visual representation reinforces the meaning, you’ve got a formula for success.