Naming without the workshop

Strategy

27 Feb 2026

5 min read

Sticky notes generate volume, not names. A smaller, slower method that survives legal, and the objection that always arrives last.

A naming workshop produces four hundred candidates in a morning and a room full of people who now have favourites. Both of those are problems.

Volume is not the constraint. Almost every name that gets rejected is rejected for a reason no amount of ideation addresses.

We went back through nine naming projects and sorted the rejections. Availability accounted for most of it, but not in the way people assume — the clean trademark was usually there. What killed candidates was quieter.

In order:

The fourth is undefeatable and always arrives last. We now go looking for it in week one.

Names are not chosen. They are the last one standing after everything else has been objected to.

Naming notes

Twenty candidates, not four hundred. Each one written up on a single page: what it means, how it sounds in the three languages that matter, what it looks like set in the brand’s type, and where it fails. Every candidate is presented with its own weakness attached.

Legal screening happens at twenty, not at three. It costs more and it avoids the specific pain of falling in love with something unavailable, which is the failure mode that has cost us the most weeks.

The client meets the shortlist in a room with the senior objector present. Every time we have skipped that, the objection has arrived two weeks later by email with a different reason attached.

Pl. 02  Candidate sheets, set in the brand’s type

We test by phone. Someone calls the client’s reception and asks for a person at the company by name, and we listen to whether it survives being spoken by a stranger on a bad line. Three candidates have died in that test and all three looked excellent on paper.

We also write the sentence people will actually say — I work at, and then the name — and read it back. Names that need a preposition or an explanation lose there, quietly and permanently.

Ask for the list of names already rejected internally before we start. Every company has one, nobody offers it, and roughly a fifth of our early candidates are usually already on it.