Saving Money with a Naming Agency

Why a naming agency will save you a lot of money and headaches!

Everything you wanted to know about naming … but didn’t know who to ask.

Every day there are thousands of man hours wasted by executives trying to develop names for their new company, factory, service, facility, sports team or other product family. That is what makes naming so frustrating and so interesting. But really it is like photography. We can all take pictures, yet we hire a professional for our wedding or company function. So too with naming. We can all do it. But how well can you do it and how long does it take you?

Many of you have named your children, but then you usually had nine months and duplicates were allowed. You didn’t have competitors’ lawyers hovering to send you the dreaded “cease and desist” letter if you infringe on their client’s trademark rights. You didn’t run the risk of your product brand being confused on the shelf or eliciting snickers over the name. You didn’t have your child ignored because he had a funny name (we hope).

A brand naming agency like Brighter Naming, that performs company, product, brand and service naming, does a lot more than just act as a creative naming agency. They also do name research, domain name checking and registration, phonetics and linguistics research and other brand consulting. Their professional name generators can beat any computer program because computers do not understand tone or style or marketing, let alone the dreams and aspirations of your management team.

In new fast growing fields like health care or biotech, naming overlaps both business-to-business naming, scientific naming and consumer naming. And there are only so many basic words in the English language and so many descriptors in any segment of the science – and they are all probably taken as names or name roots. How much training and experience do top business executives and biotechnology Ph. D. scientists have in the science of naming? What is their hourly rate?

On top of that, what does your highly qualified (and expensive) intellectual property lawyer charge you to do a proper name check? All these people need to be involved in health care naming projects, in biotech naming, in product naming and in brand naming just like the founders were in naming the business. But let’s pay them to help set the strategic directions and messaging, and make the final decisions. And leave the ‘heavy-lifting” to a naming company that has the appropriate name creation, name change, name search and name registration experience at a very affordable rate.

Such a naming agency will know the naming convention for naming a compound or solution, a product or a service, a family of products, a foreign company or a small sole proprietorship. They will have a systematic creative process that gets results in a short time frame. They will have a good portfolio of reference names in a number of different fields. They will have a team of namers around the country (if not the world) and understand regional naming differences. They will have a very extensive in-house database of names in many different styles. They will have a strong background in languages, phonetics and linguistics. They will be continuous students of naming as styles and trends evolve and they will be structured so as to not have any major biases or influences.

Plus they will have marketing and strategic business backgrounds with knowledge of proper executive decision-making facilitation. For any sort of technical naming, they will have namers with technology backgrounds so they can properly communicate with your team and your target audience. Similarly, they will help you create proper brand naming architectures. Furthermore, they will have the tools, staff and experience to do comprehensive legal name checking, in all its nuances, to produce search results that can stand up to the scrutiny of any top trademark attorney in the country.

And unlike when your lawyer or engineer makes up some awkward construct or a long slogan-like name (two common errors we see), you won’t have to call for more help when your salespeople start using the name a hundred times a day on the phone. A quality name is one that is appropriate for the job it has to do. Many good ones are smooth and musical. But sharp and edgy names can also be cool for many other applications. Your name is not a slogan, tagline or description. It is not a set of initials. It is not an abbreviation that has you lost in the alphabet jungle. And, just like your accounting, it can stand up to a good name audit.

Famous brand names like Acura, Cingular, PowerBook, Pentium, Compaq, Prius and many others have been launch successfully after they were all made up by naming agencies. What are these names worth today? How much easier has their marketing job been because of the uniqueness, hidden values, brevity and trademark clarity they all embody? What are you paying your marketing agency and staff? What are you spending on your launch campaign, packaging, website, product marketing and promotions?

And yet, how much productive time and effort is going into the name? Ries and Trout, in their great work Positioning: The Battle for the Mind, said “your name is your primary weapon in the battle of the mind“. The English language has three times as many words as most other languages, but most common English words are already overused in trademarks. How much easier would it be for your sales and marketing channels to deal with your company and products if your name was clear and unique?

 

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See his industry naming commentary (where he takes a critical look at names) via the blog on this site