Naming

The craft of finding a word a company can grow into. The most permanent decision, usually made in the biggest hurry.

A name is the one brand asset that cannot be redesigned casually: it enters contracts, domains, habits and other people's sentences. The craft is finding a word with room in it, evocative enough to carry meaning, open enough to survive the pivots the company cannot yet foresee.

Made in the biggest hurry because naming blocks everything downstream, and rooms full of stakeholders tire quickly. The working advice: generate past the obvious hundred, test the survivors out loud, in a sentence, over a phone line, beside the competitors. A merely adequate name that clears trademark in every market you will ever want beats a perfect one that does not.