Thoughts Naming

Workshops for naming professionals


December 13, 2023

Workshops for naming professionals – a new product I am offering.

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Name=branding=equity


October 23, 2023

Name=branding=equity. Yet, an oft heard thing over my name creation years: “We’re now starting on the naming and branding”. Why the division between the name and ‘the brand’? A name sits at the heart of...

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Corporate naming – the nutty detail


August 24, 2023

Corporate naming is a devil. For many reasons, some to do with naming just being hard, many to do with the nature of organisational change, or launch deadlines. Sometimes poor decision-making processes or frameworks, or...

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Brand naming greats (episode 1)


July 10, 2023

Standard interview question for brand naming role: Can you tell us about a brand name you admire and why? (Note the gaping trap: not a discussion about ‘successful brands’ – but a requirement to disentangle...

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Corporate renaming….why the devil?


October 31, 2022

Ah, the old rebrand ploy. It’s not unusual to find corporate renaming on a list of ‘make a mark’ options for a new Marketing Director or CEO. Corporate (re)naming requires a very different approach to...

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Three golden rules of corporate name research


August 10, 2022

Consumers and customers aren’t the people to decide what your corporate name should be. They can react, add insight, indicate the communication angles that might need to be the focus – but the brand door-opener...

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Naming – a brief discussion


March 24, 2022

I love a bad naming brief, if only because it provides an opportunity to open the worm can, before we start squeezing out the creative juice. 50% of a naming job is about strategy and...

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Branding bugbears


November 23, 2021

The first in a series of branding bugbears sits firmly in the naming camp. Has the naming industry failed in its key role to explain how a corporate / brand name sits at the heart...

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No pain, no name


September 15, 2021

A couple of weeks ago my snout faced the full wrath of a French lady based in a tent about 280km south west of Paris. It was clearly a mission-driven PCR. In the name of...

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NameGrab episode 1: strongly associative and familiar, yet distinctive and full of personality


May 25, 2021

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That’s not a naming creative brief-dammit, it’s not even a cry for help


April 28, 2021

Is it fair to say that, just very occasionally, a naming creative brief that comes our way is…well… not a very good brief? It may lack objectives, insight, awareness of where branding starts and stops...

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A corporate name story


January 25, 2021

All of us branding types love a corporate name brief. Many don’t actually, as reality hits early and hard that no-one will like the names, the lawyers will be upset to varying degrees about them...

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