History

International Naming Consultancy

Brighter Naming (#NamingAgency), founded in 2002 in Silicon Valley, is an independent full-service professional naming agency formed by a great team of experienced worldwide namers, headed by Athol Foden. Please see Athol’s Bio for full details.

He has had extensive success and coverage in the media over the past few years (see Naming News), but the most important success story will be about your new name. Athol heads a creative and process driven team that speaks your language and not that of some linguistic doctoral thesis. He is perhaps the only head of a naming service in the world who has two computer science degrees to his credit.

But once he worked for Sony, the real lure of his hobby and passion rose to the top, even though he had to hold many other senior sales and marketing positions before moving into naming full time. Athol has worked in large and small companies, and worked or traveled on five continents before finally finding geek nirvana and settling down in Silicon Valley, California, in the early ’80’s. He picked up the namiac moniker after being featured in a Business 2.0 article written by a Fortune magazine correspondent.

Other naming consultants include Ben in Oregon, Rosie (in the U.K. & Spain with an international finance, property management and medical equip background), Gareth in U.K, and Kyra (Copy writing at  www.BrighterScribe.com) in Canada, as well as a worldwide team of proven namers who live in real business environments. Most of the brighter team are strong in one or two foreign languages, unlike Athol who speaks a little bit of many different languages. This variety means we can serve clients worldwide without having a strong bias in the names just to one region. We guarantee male and female namers, young and old, on all projects.

Don’t be surprised if we understand many of your business issues as well as your marketing, branding and positioning issues. Do expect that we will be diligent listeners, as this is what differentiates good namers from the rest of the world. While we grew up on high tech and very scientific naming projects, our expertise has been embraced by the financial, real estate, consumer, retail and clothing industries as well. No more do they need to deal with slow moving, high priced New York agencies.

On all full service projects we will ensure you have input from young and old namers based across the US and Canada, as well as in Europe. Different people are exposed to different names and ideas in different places. Different creative backgrounds and education lead to different marketing, language and image ideas. So that is why you need the input from at least 4 or 5 professionals on your naming assignment. Every human has a personality style that will be reflected in his or her work. If you were to only engage a “one man band” namer, you would only be offered names of one style.

Brighter Naming ensures you see multiple styles, and facilitates the process until you have a name that suits the personality of you management team and target audience. The final name may not have even been on the original master list, which is why we never just e-mail in name lists and leave it up to you to work through them. Great results happen when we work together to present and discuss, prune and persevere, polish and search, across a wide variety of names and themes.

Naming agency fees tend to be based on how old the agency is and how famous are the names they have created in the past. Brighter Naming is now over ten years old, and the principles ran another agency for ten years before that, but we are still able to offer superb creative services at very, very competitive consultant prices.

Download a full Corporate Backgrounder (requires Acrobat Reader).

Ask about our fast turnaround name checking research services and name audits too.
For clients in India, Pakistan and the Middle East we have a partnership with AndTherefore, a Mumbai based brand naming agency.

The 4P’s of marketing: Passion, Perfection, Presentation, Performance

Recent Naming Articles

Brand insider articles from an experienced marketing team.

Mar 2023: Pricing your naming project

Oct 2021: The devil is in the trademark details

Mar 2019:The Power and Value of a Trademark

Jan 2019:4 common branding mistakes

Oct 2018: You named it What?

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