The branded fabric of our lives feature names of every variety. There are long names and short names, descriptive names and evocative names, names in lowercase and names in all caps… the list goes on.
As someone faced with the question of which style is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for their company, you might feel that the question is somehow misplaced. And you’d be right.
Unless your company is operating under particularly strange circumstances, it doesn’t make any sense to dictate that your new name be two words, end with the letter R or be inspired by a Greek god. Such decisions are arbitrary, not strategic, and ultimately shrink the pool of high-potential brand names.
Just as top-tier namers and copywriters explore far and wide when generating brand names for their clients, Monika intentionally casts a wide net. We don’t simply prompt a large language model to come up with names, but rather force it to collaborate with giant lexical databases and far-off corners of the internet to produce hundreds of viable options.
For instance, Monika generates single words, compound names and phrases for every project, character count permitting. Based on a recent brief for a grower of baby potatoes, Monika generated single-word names like Pebble and Fossils, compound names like TaterPossum and Here Always, as well as longer names like Salt of the Earth and Spud in the Mud.
By design, our system also generates a mix of abstract and obviously relevant names. For a recent brief for an investment analysis platform, Monika generated closely relevant names like Bears Versus Bulls and Egg, as well as loosely relevant names like Numbray, a species of ray that happens to have ‘numb’ – from ‘numbers’ – in its name. Another was Satchmo, one of the many nicknames of jazz great Louis Armstrong, which was generated in part from a personality trait listed in the brief: ‘calming.’
Monika goes further – generating compound names, rhymes, brand strategy-inspired object metaphors, emotionally-charged oxymorons, alliterations, snippets of dialogue from classic novels, category-associated terms and much, much more.
Monika even makes up its own words. Taking inspiration from the many coined brand names emerging as of late, we’ve created an algorithm independent of an LLM that writes things that sound like words, but aren’t. This system effectively tries to guess the next letter in a random sequence, and is penalized for spelling real words. Examples from a recent project included names like Vult, Swood, Haynut and Gravison.
By not limiting yourself to tightly defined naming criteria, you keep the door open for high-performing names to find their way in.
It’s why we’ll never ask you to make decisions in our brief that are entirely subjective; there to merely give the illusion of control with no benefit to the final product. This kind of performative gesture is the antithesis of what we’re all about. If you think you need your name to have two Os or include the word ‘well,’ Monika may not be for you.
