Give it a name

I’ve been involved in three major naming projects in the past six months, working with three different clients – one new charity, two merging housing associations and one weight-loss brand – collaborating with three partner agencies and AI.

Finding a name in each instance was hard. It’s just getting more and more difficult to tick all the boxes:

• Expressing the core brand purpose in the right tone of voice

• Delivering originality within a sector

• Ensuring an available and affordable domain name

• Not getting tripped up by inappropriate translations and listings in the Urban Dictionary

• Meeting clients’ individual preferences, for no Latinate words for example, no abstract concepts or quirky misspellings

In the end, on every project it was a human who created the solution, with AI producing hundreds of potential names that just didn’t work. AI technically responded to the brief, but the ideas were sterile. Options to be expected rather than anything that took an imaginative and emotive leap.

Plus all the options provided by AI were in that homogenous AI tone of voice we’re getting to know so well. A melding together of 2000s creative agency (think Nathan Barley) +pithy tech start-up speak. A serving up of cookie cutter insights with zero soul.

But AI probably helped us get to the solutions, if only to show us what wasn’t wanted and to give us some stems of words to play with.

Actually, no that isn’t true. By hook or by crook – and via a few trademark enquiries with experts in the field – we landed on real words that connected on a human level. An exhausting process, for sure, but ultimately very satisfying and giving each brand in question a story about their name to tell.