You’re Doing it Wrong
“Naming a company or a product isn’t like naming anything else,” writes Eli Altman in his book, Don’t Call it That. What he means is it’s not like naming a child, a pet, an avatar in a video game, a fantasy football league, an Instagram handle, or anything of the like. As a result, most of us are naturally unprepared for such an endeavor. So we develop names using misleading, antiquated conventional wisdom or supposed creativity-enhancing, project-accelerating, consensus-consolidating methods that actually fall flat. I took a survey at A Hundred Monkeys to uncover some true stories about people using questionable and less-than-strategic ways to create a name. Today, I’ll present you with four of them….
ACCIDENTAL SUCCESS WARNING: It might become evident over the course of this list that, in some cases, a flippant method for naming could, hypothetically, precipitate an interesting name. When that happens it is almost always completely accidental. In other cases, the myth behind the name feels mysteriously reverse-engineered to make for an interesting story and I stand suspicious. What usually happens when you name with a cavalier attitude is much more confusing, frustrating, and genuinely off-putting for the customer.
1. The Family Referential
In the early 2000s an open-source software utility was being built by a group of developers from the Apache Software Foundation. One of those programmers had a son, that son had a plush toy elephant, and that plush toy elephant was named Hadoop. So the world was blessed with Apache Hadoop — a uniquely awkward collection of syllables still in use today. Whenever I hear stories like this I wonder, “was this the first name they came up with or was it a last ditch effort when the press came calling?” Did they playfully disregard that at minimum thousands of programmers would have to say, misspeak, and misremember this made up word for nearly 20 years? Was it a challenge to overworked computer scientists? Did they gloat, “This chunk of code is so valuable that it doesn’t matter what we call it, they’ll have to use it?”
When people name something after a family member, or family-related object, it can send one message louder than others: I’m more important than the rest of this team. Were there squabbles about whose family stuffed animal would be referenced or did the name-sake’s owner’s father quickly put down any debate? Even in the archived New York Times article that cites the source of the name, the plush toy in question had “since been banished to a sock drawer.” So much for longevity. By all accounts, the toy and the son had nothing to do with the project and that’s what gets to the heart of the problem. Rather than having a pleasant connection that sends synapses firing and memories being made, users are confronted with a clumsy empty vessel, which is only made more confusing by the sharing of a distracting backstory. Unless the programmer negotiated his child to eat a lifetime of vegetables for having named this software after his toy, then we’ll chalk this one up to a loss.
FRUSTRATING APPENDIX: An ironic footnote to this story is that the name of the Apache Software Foundation has a powerful and clever history. Primarily, it was named out of “respect for the Native American Apache Nation, well known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance.” But the name is also a secondary play on “a patchy web server” — a pun about a server made from a series of patches. That’s funny. That’s great. I’ll never forget that foundation’s name.
2. TI ESREVER DNA TI PILF: Ananyms
Please forgive me for reversing the headline — I suspect that you’ve probably already been annoyed by that premise. Within the English language, turning your name backwards doesn’t tend to result in a pleasant or memorable name. Do you know why phonetics work the way they do? Because for thousands of years sounds and words transformed for clarity, brevity, and poetry so that humans could communicate accurately, efficiently, and beautifully.
When you decide to just reverse the letters — to create what is known as an ananym — you’re taking a fundamentally lazy step towards making a brand name. It’s liable to have unnatural phonetics and frustrating spelling, and, worst of all, the payoff to the question “how did you come up with your name?” is always a let down. This hasn’t stopped many celebrities from going down this path. From a Beatles merchandising company named Seltaeb in 1963, to Oprah’s media production company Harpo Studios, to Serena Williams’ former fashion line turned possible-beauty-brand Aneres, a handful of lucrative franchises and successful celebrities choose to go this route. But when you’re doing that you’re basically wasting a chance to say something new and different — we already know your personal name, we already have some familiarity with who you are, now’s your chance to shine some light on the unique perspective of your creative vision. And yet some of you decide to say: here’s my name, again, backwards.
Note that if you’re not already successful in your field or otherwise famous, then you’re digging yourself an even bigger hole.
3. The Ol’ Vote and Switch: Internet Crowdsourcing
Repeat after me: I will not crowdsource important creative work for my company, not the least of which will be the actual name of said company. The branding, design, and marketing landscapes are littered with the remains of failed attempts at crowdsourcing everything from product names to research vessels to municipal waste departments.
The denizens of the web have taken to “hijacking” crowdsourced naming in so many ways that Vox wrote an explainer that eloquently summed up the Law of Boaty McBoatface as follows, “when presented with an open naming poll, there is a certain subset of internet users who will hijack the vote in favor of an awesome, if possibly embarrassing, option the poll makers didn’t anticipate.” Who’s Boaty McBoatface? If you haven’t heard, it was the winning name from a poll that was put on by the UK’s science ministry to name a polar research vessel. But the ministry inevitably shied away from the “whimsical naming option” for the more safe RRS Sir David Attenborough.
Mountain Dew held a “Dub the Dew” (points for alliteration) contest to name a new flavor and was left with such vulgar options in the top ten that I can only repeat the name that the corporate team presumably planted in the running: “Tempest.” Most of the other names were sexual references to grandmothers, auto-erotic word play, and a bizarre, dark political joke (hopefully). Finally, since you’re seeing where this trend can end up, let’s wrap things up in the waste department. When aiming to rename its Solid Waste Services Department, the city of Austin, Texas polled its residents for a solution. Amongst the expected “playful puns pertaining to waste removal” sat the clear winner: the Fred Durst Society of the Humanities and Arts. Of course the city didn’t allow this winner to stand — opting for Austin Resource Recovery, yawn — proving that even a self-proclaimed “weird city” couldn’t save itself from doing the boring thing when faced with a mirthful name that had captured the internet’s imagination.
So what’s the lesson? Internet crowdsourcing doesn’t work for naming. Humor can be a powerful tool for branding your company or product, but it seems like when it’s wielded by the faceless masses of an online poll things tend to go awry. Some voters might realize there isn’t any vetting for vulgarity and flood the pool with crap. On the other hand, the poll can arrive at a relatively-P.C. winner, but the proprietors of the poll tend to get cold feet and disappoint their audience having basically wasted everyone’s time for some tepid and vacillating P.R.
4. Great Grandpa Brainstorm
The book that launched the concept of the “brainstorm” was published in 1948 — the man who wrote it was born in 1888. In a scathing article in 2012, The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer pointed out that the text of the book is basically an “amalgam of pop science and business anecdote” that has since been refuted or surpassed. So if the company brass gathers you in a conference room and tells you to warm up your creative engine for a brainstorm, be sure to also strap on your skepticism cap for what comes next.
The original brainstorm demanded a “no-judgments approach to holding a meeting,” which is now recognized as not usually possible, nor frankly even desirable. People’s varying opinions and (hopefully diverse) cultural backgrounds are what make for strong solutions to creative problems. Everyone beaming smiles around the boardroom like overly enthusiastic summer interns and encouraging any whiff of a concept typically doesn’t lead to durable output.
Studies cited in that same New Yorker article have also shown that people tend to come up with more solutions to complex problems when working solo as opposed to in a group brainstorm — and that their solo solutions are generally more “feasible” and “effective.” When it comes to naming, we know many creative firms work in different ways and some brand agencies have been known to do everything from the traditional brainstorm to emailing their whole company requesting that all copywriters submit a few ideas and then kick-off a brainstorm at cocktail hour. But no matter how you try to massage the brainstorm, if you have people spouting off every idea that comes into their head, without deep thought, without critical assessment, and with a goal of quantity over quality, you’re going to wind up with a less potent result. Groupthink (great grandpa brainstorm’s most troublesome progeny) is a dangerous thing and can lead to the breakdown of a creative process at many points along the way. So despite the flashy “commando fashion” that brainstorming advertises to clients — as though your whole team is attacking an objective — it’s best to steer clear of true old-school brainstorming that dilutes or inhibits your project.
There are other creative structures and processes that can put you in a good place to guide your team to a successful end. Or you could, ya know, do a brainstorm and do the thing that “decades of research have consistently shown” produces fewer ideas. Your time, your effort, and your call.
