A brand name is often the first point of contact between a business and its audience. But how do you set the right tone without saying too much?

This is the third article in a series describing Sublimio’s approach to branding projects. In case you haven’t read the previous one about the brand strategy phase, you can find it here.

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Once you have the brand strategy down, it’s time to give the brand a tangible shape, and brand naming is usually the first step, but also one of the most critical.

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What’s in a name? Everything and nothing.

Is “Apple” a good name? That’s debatable. While you probably love the brand itself, if it hadn’t existed you probably wouldn’t pick such a name today. But decades of brand building gave the name all the meaning it has today.

It must be said, though, that the naming landscape is quite more crowded today. A good name is one more chance to stand out and allows your branding efforts to compound over time.

This is how we approach it at Sublimio.

Where to start? Define the mood

You may think that the first step in brand naming is defining what you want to say and mapping the associated concepts. But that’s a very left-brained way to start the process.

Brand names usually communicate on a deeper level, beyond their rational meaning. The sound – and even look – of a name usually conveys the first general impression of a brand.

And that derives directly from the brand strategy. What kind of brand are you? How do you want to be perceived? Wild and punk? Funny and witty? Poshy?

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So we usually enter the brand naming stage by “chasing a feeling”. Knowing how we want the name to feel makes sure we don’t get led astray by purely rational considerations.

Think about it as deciding on a naming “style”.

After all, many beloved brand names don’t necessarily go straight for meaning.

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Mapping the Concepts in Brand Naming

Let’s be clear: there is nothing wrong with left-brain thinking in brand naming. For us, it just comes one step later.

After we have defined the general mood we are looking for, we can start mapping out the ideas and concepts. There are a few ways a brand can be presented, each related to a certain value, or promise.

We may go for something more explanatory when a brand needs to hit the market quick, or something more evocative when we want the brand to grow deeper roots and last longer (it’s usually the latter, but not always).

In this phase, we start drafting possible names. To be honest, not all names are rationally born from thinking in categories. Sometimes, categories emerge while working. This kind of grouping helps us understand whether we are investing too much in one direction since this could be blinding us to other opportunities or points of view.

In the naming process, it’s easy to get stuck on a certain interpretation of the brand, so a certain rationality here is required to bring to our clients a complete view.

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Anteriority Search and Shortlisting

Once we have covered all the most promising angles, we end up with a long list of names that offer different interpretations of the brand.

If we did our work right, most names should fall under the same “mood” we defined in the early phase. This is especially true when the brand naming phase follows the brand strategy work.

If our list of names makes the brand feel alternatively premium, funny or rebellious, that means there’s little alignment. Sure, that feels like a lot of choice, but it’s also of little help to our client. The role of a branding agency should be to point in a certain direction, which is what strategy does. The brand naming phase should be more focused.

Still, the long list will have a lot of sub-par proposals waiting for a fix, or very similar options that can’t coexist.

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‎One decisive step now is the anteriority search. If you are doing brand naming for the first name, this can be quite traumatic: many of the names that felt like pure genius exist already, and our job is to filter them out.

This can be discouraging, but it’s just part of the process.

This is done at a later stage not to hamper creativity: a good non-available name might still be the inspiration for a new one. Anteriority checks need to be pragmatic, though, as many names will exist in one form or the other: is the existing name in our same category? Is it global or local? Is it even a brand?

This makes a lot of difference in deciding whether to keep it or not. It’s not about pride, it’s about rules and clarity.

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One more anteriority check concerns domains and social handles: you may have found an original name and still not find a .com. The same goes for social URLs.

The availability of both decreases by the minute, so the naming phase usually also includes the search for creative workarounds for all the digital properties.

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Real-Life Assessment

One more level of check in brand naming is about real-life usage of the name. When you see brand names being mocked on social for some embarrassing double-meaning, this check was probably skipped.

Real-life assessment means asking ourselves some questions about how it will play out in the real world, when real people will have to handle it, be it your customers or people in the company.

When reading it, can people guess how it’s pronounced? Is that ambiguous? Do people from different backgrounds or cultures read it differently? If heard on the radio, can you guess how it’s written? Is it easy to remember? Does it have a possible double meaning? Will people be comfortable using it on the phone or in a sales pitch?

Names who don’t pass this stage of scrutiny are usually beautiful unicorns: names that work well on page, but not out there in the wild.

Discussion and Evolution

All the work we do on the brand is a shared effort with our clients. But this is especially true for the brand naming. Things get visceral.

A name is harder to change than a logo: a different logo will suggest a change in style, a change of name will make you disappear (or suggest you did something wrong). This means the name you choose will stick with you for a long time.

That’s no easy choice.

So we never expect a brand naming presentation to be like a straightforward choice. We know it will be difficult and excruciating. It might take many rounds of reviews or just a long time of elaboration.

But this is all good: the intensity of the naming phase is how we make the name ours. By investing emotions in its creation, we make that name our name.