Brand naming has changed very little in the past twenty years.
Founders, creative agencies and professional namers are going through the same motions as their predecessors, with the exception of a few new tricks enabled by technology. The naming exercise – for which companies spend vast sums of money, time and emotional attention – has failed to progress beyond loosely brainstorming name ideas then checking if they’re available to trademark.
But market conditions are evolving, and naming will soon be forced to evolve with it.
Today, the supply of legally defendable names in major markets is diminishing fast, with real words being few and far between. The risk (real and perceived) of a powerful corporation issuing a cease a desist letter for infringement has never been higher. And trademark attorneys seem increasingly uncertain in their judgment of availability, often responding to pre-screening requests with a shrug and a “maybe.”
After decades of stagnation, we believe brand naming is approaching a fundamental, inevitable shift that will see trademark pre-screening move from the end of the process to the beginning. Soon, the romance of hiring someone to dream up names on a blank page will no longer be viable. There simply aren’t enough available names to allow for this kind of fortuity, and if trademark requirements stretch across a handful of markets and classes, fuhgeddaboudit.
We anticipate a near future where brand names are generated and pre-screened before entering the consideration set – not after – shifting the role of the creative from generator to judge.
Names will no longer be generated manually over the course of days or weeks, shortlisted, then sent to an expensive trademark attorney (often just to send teams back to the drawing board), but rather generated by tools such as Monika that replicate human creativity and pre-screen automatically. The finite number of pathways for coming up with brand names will be effectively codified and run at scale.
Creatives and founders will, of course, continue to be a critical part of the naming process. There is no removing that human piece of the puzzle, nor the subjectivity of deciding what’s right or wrong for a particular company or product. But their contribution will change from crafting names entirely from scratch – an exercise that’s fun, but usually doomed – to identifying and iterating names using tools with integrated trademark pre-screening.
For clients big and small, Monika has been able to leverage this technology to generate thousands of names for consideration in hours, rather than mere dozens of names in days. It’s a process that we not only invented, but continue to evolve and improve.
Only time will tell if Monika is able to own this movement. But if we know one thing for sure, it’s that the next generation of naming won’t look like the last.
