How to Build a Powerful Naming Strategy

Through this class, you’ll:

• Understand what naming strategies are, and why they’re critical to naming projects

• Learn the essential (and less essential) components of a naming strategy

• Understand the anatomy of a naming workshop

• See how a well-designed workshop leads to buy-in of your naming strategy, and helps everyone feel more involved in defining what a successful name looks like

• Find out how to use your naming strategy to do more than develop names

It transforms the question of "What do we call it?" into a slew of naming ideas—and then continues to support the project's progress until we have a final name.

In this lesson, we cover:
What is a naming strategy?
Why have a naming strategy?
Who does a naming strategy protect?
What goes into a naming strategy?
How might you customize it to your needs?

In this chapter, we'll cover four key steps to developing your naming strategy.

Learn to gather the right inputs at the start of every project and your naming strategies will be easier to build.

Like people, names can have lots of different jobs.
But they can typically only do one really well.

In this chapter, we look at some of the jobs you (or your client) might be able to hire a name to do for them.

You’ve probably been told what the name needs to say—you just need to find it.

We develop our initial jumping-off points into more expansive creative territories.

Now it's your turn to develop a naming strategy.

How you might have turned the CornCo positioning work into naming territories.

“Wait, but how do I get my clients to agree it’s right?”

Embrace the workshop.

Build the strategy together—in a productive, creative, and constructive environment—to build consensus faster.

It can be anything from a formal presentation to a set of bullets in an email.

What matters is that it outlines:

1. The job of the name

2. What it should say

3. How it should say it

And that those points reflect the feedback from the naming workshop—you'll re-introduce them at the naming presentation to remind everyone of your shared agreements.

If done right, your naming strategy will:

1. Translate the strategy, audience drivers, and other context into a creative tool

2. Build initial consensus around the job of the name, what the name should say, and how

3. Tell your namers how to build names

4. Give you criteria to evaluate names

5. Give your client team/ stakeholders criteria to evaluate names

6. Serve as the foundation for building naming research that evaluates how well the names do the job they were designed to do
   

Imagine you had a great workshop with CornCo

They picked three of your creative territories…

Let’s watch the process play out from workshop to strategy to namer briefing to this assignment’s task: Shortlisting the best names your namers developed.

A well-designed naming strategy can help design naming research

Question:

"Can you talk about best practices for defining a strategy with a client who’s not always sure what to achieve through naming, or thinks about a name for name’s sake only [rather than the name’s impact on the overall brand or customer experience]?" 

Don't forget to download your workbook!