I thought all you needed was two.

Thank Goodness for Bad Names

Andrew Sarris, former movie critic for the Village Voice, was definitely onto something when he said “What people don’t fully appreciate about movies is that there are so many bad ones. You have to have some feeling about how bad a movie can be to appreciate the good ones.”

Well, you could say the same thing about greeting cards or politicians or TV commercials. And I’ll go out on a limb and say that this maxim also applies to names. It’s all the bad ones that help us appreciate the good ones.

Just give me my shirts.

No matter what kind of naming assignment we get at A Hundred Monkeys, when we map out the names of the competitors, it’s like, wow thank you for this gift — there are so many bad names here and so much upside for our clients. Designers must feel the same when they do a competitive review.

Makes you wonder what’s going on in the back room.

But bad names are not to be dismissed. We can learn a lot from them by coming up with them ourselves. That’s why in Don’t Call It That, Eli Altman’s naming workbook, one of the first exercises is coming up with bad names for your business or product. Preferably a long list of them.

First you are surprised how many of them there are, and how easy they are to come up with. It’s the path of least resistance, leaning on all the conventions, borrowing from all the other bad names people have put in your brain. But once you get all this junk out of your system, your mind is a little freer to focus on what is unique about your idea. And what’s the singular thing you want to get across to people.

Some names require no explanation.

People learn by example. But sometimes the examples are what not to do, and that’s fine as long as we learn the right lessons.

So here’s to all the off base, juvenile, wildly inappropriate names in the world. They are here for a very good reason. To help us understand what not to do.