Naming at Scale Requires Governance

Naming sounds sexy. It carries with it, much to the dismay of all my naming colleagues, an air of magical mystery, frothy creativity, with a dash of christening power.

And I think back in the day, before brand naming was (or rather, needed to be) established as a practice area, there’s a lot of it that was all those things. Decades ago, trademarks were easier to get, the pace of business wasn’t quite so breakneck, and the digital tidal wave hadn’t fully washed over us as it has now. Things were s l o o o w e r.

But then in the 80s some of the first few pioneering naming agencies were founded, gliding along with the rise of corporate branding and fueled by dot com money into the nineties.

During this time, naming was viewed largely as a creative project, a one-off exercise to be outsourced or handled by a small, siloed team. On the agency side, naming projects were common, naming accounts were not. And if a client did have ongoing naming work, they almost certainly weren’t looking at it from a strategic, infrastructural standpoint. It was more like a naming faucet and the agency was the bucket catching the flow of things that had to be named.

But as the pace of business accelerates, product portfolios explode, and digital experiences become the primary brand touchpoint, this project-by-project approach is failing within many corporate environments. The demands of this new reality have fundamentally reshaped the naming industry itself.

Fast forward to today and there are hundreds of naming agencies, thousands of individual practitioners with naming in their skillset, an ever-rising number of in-house naming positions, and sometimes entire naming teams at major brands.

This proliferation has ushered in a new era of specialization. When an industry matures and the stakes rise, the focus inevitably shifts from pure creativity to infrastructure. The new breed of naming practitioner is one who understands that the challenge is no longer just about the name, but about the system that supports it.

Naming at scale is no longer about finding a “good name”; it’s about building a system and, more importantly, building the organizational structure to support that system.

In a word: governance.

Perhaps one of the most unsexy words. And certainly not what most people think about when they think about naming. But this is what modern naming practitioners and forward-looking brand marketers think about when they think about naming. Governance is a key aspect of naming at scale.

As I’ve begun to document this tectonic shift in naming, there’s no better person I could have talked with than Jake Hancock. Currently Senior Partner, Brand/Naming at Lippincott, Jake has the very unique perspective not only of being a wildly accomplished long-time namer who has wrangled the naming portfolios of some of the largest corporations out there, but one of my first employees at The Naming Group back in the mid 2000’s. Together, Jake and I observed, reacted to, built offerings around, and co-shaped thought leadership on the earliest bits of movement in this direction toward naming at scale. Many of the whitepapers we co-wrote on the subject still live on The Naming Group’s website.

My 18 years of experience and conversations with practitioners across the industry have repeatedly pointed to a single, critical insight: the biggest challenge in naming is not creative, but organizational.

Jake underscored this:

“It’s often less about the names, or what name is right, or the strategy of how the names work together, and it’s more: how are decisions made and owned... all of those questions about how the decision ownership is structured often feels very opaque.”

This is it. Again and again. Six ways from Sunday.

In my experience clients so often come to us pure of heart with the best intentions around creating good names and solid strategy, but when we start to peel back the layers of their naming machine, we realize that the part that needs the most attention is the organizational inner-workings of it. Those good names and solid strategy don’t have a fighting chance if the right people aren’t in the room at the right time.

Jake stated it quite simply:

“It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that it’s getting people to agree, more than what is the name.”

I have always thought that because the very word “naming” is used to mean so many disparate things that the word itself sets orgs up for failure—or certainly promotes unhelpful preconceived ideas. “Naming” is the word we use to refer to the action we perform when we need to put a label on a computer file. It’s also the very same word we use to refer to the specialized expertise at the intersection of legal, linguistic and organizational knowledge used to get Fortune 50 teams aligned on a single word that will ultimately be the entry point to marketing millions of dollars worth of goods or services.

The fact that the name for naming isn’t serving us is… Alanis should have written a line about it.

The loose use of the word “naming” to refer to such a vast array of things creates an unhelpful psycholinguistic expectation—it suggests they should require similar rigor and skill. Even when we consciously know better, this linguistic framing still shapes how we think. It leads people to expect that brand naming (the high-stakes strategic process described above) should feel as simple and straightforward as file-naming.

To bridge the gap between the perceived simplicity of ‘naming’ and the reality of ‘brand naming,’ we must first establish a shared, sophisticated understanding across all relevant teams. A lot of the work we end up doing as naming practitioners working at scale is resetting expectations around the true challenge of brand naming and what is required to make it work. This means co-establishing with the client a core naming philosophy across the organization and educating everyone touched by naming—product teams, innovation, brand, legal, and more. Anyone who’s done this work knows that list is long. Brand naming can only flourish at scale when this web of teams aligns on what naming can and should do, and abandons the default view of how it’s been treated before.

I have long said that naming is—and must be embraced across an organization as—a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. In talking with Jake about his experience shaping naming systems at large companies he articulated something I hadn’t been able to before on this point:

“Naming is closer to the experience than it is the brand in a lot of cases because it’s architecture and it’s features and it’s treated much more like the digital side of the business than the old school marketing side of the business.”

Yet another misunderstood facet of naming that must be set right in order for it to flourish at scale.

He further underscored the importance of this change in perspective:

It’s increasingly the digital experience that’s shaping the understanding of the brand. So I think that’s the friction. Marketing is more about ‘how do we sell it now that it’s built?’, not ‘how do we design it and shape it?’”

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve entered a client relationship through the door of an RFP that is asking for “improved names.” And once we get inside that door, we realize that what’s needed is “improved naming systems.” This can mean a lot of different things but it often is:

• Creating much longer naming timelines so names can actually tie to a larger brand strategy and naming architecture

• Involving higher-level decision-makers more frequently (but for less time overall than they’ve been spending on naming previously)

• Distributing naming decision-making power (see #3)

• Creating better “listening systems” where cross-functional expertise from different departments can be folded into naming briefs (without giving every cook in the kitchen the ability to veto a name)

• Writing naming guidelines (see #4)

• More education on how naming actually works

• Analysis of name testing methodology
  

I believe that the rise of in-house naming positions is a direct response to all of this. Here’s a quick, non-exhaustive list of brands that have someone with “naming” in their title at their org:

• Google

• Amazon

• Ford

• CVS

• SAP

Someone (or some team) to manage naming is not a luxury at this point; it is a necessity for enterprise corporations, driven by the sheer volume of names needed and the strategic management of the portfolio.

While an agency can come in and make a real dent in things, the tried and true way to effect real naming change at the corporate level is to have an in-house naming director or small naming team at the helm. Or if your budget won’t allow for a naming-specific person on the org chart, then at least coronate someone as a Brand AND Naming Manager, rather than asking your Brand Manager to just handle naming. Putting “naming” in the title matters. Again, meta, but true.

The naming expert(s) in your org can work in concert with an external naming agency, or manage freelancers or consultants, or even tightly manage in-house brand and creative folks on naming practices and initiatives.

The most important thing is that someone has been deemed an expert and given some meaningful bit of power in influencing naming decisions, which, given the matrix of hoops that brand names have to jump through, end up being some of the most contentious, costly, and misunderstood brand decisions there are.

As mentioned before, brand naming requires a very specialized set of interlocking skills and expertise. It’s important to understand which words are more likely to pass trademark but also to be diplomatic enough to break it to the engineering team that Z-45i probably won’t be approved by the brand team to name the version they’ve been pouring their heart and soul into over the past 8 months.

The in-house naming professional is not just a name generator; they are the portfolio manager and the governance enforcer. They are the ones who can “speak the language” and prevent the common pitfalls. They are the corporate politicians and lobbyists brokering peace deals between departments.

Once brands give up the ghost that “naming should be easy” and relax into giving power and responsibility to a subject matter expert in managing the portfolio, that’s when naming really starts to support the brand and greater organizational efficiency.

In the past year I’ve had two marketing directors come to me telling me stories about realizing the limitations of their naming knowledge and actively in their own spare time going out and educating themselves about it. One mentioned reading Rob Meyerson’s book Brand Naming. The other described feverishly googling things, collecting articles, and taking a class. But still, this all points to how specialized and complex the role of managing naming has gotten to be - and how we have to stop adding naming as a line item on these poor peoples’ job descriptions.

A lot of naming is decentralized—living in little corners of the organization or it’s owned by marketing and brand. Unlike a corporate rebrand, which is typically owned by executive leadership, product and feature names are often, as Jake put it perfectly, a “jump ball”.

The “jump ball” is a symptom of a power vacuum, and while a naming leader or council is often the cure, introducing a new authority into an existing, albeit informal, system is a delicate act. Said plainly, electing a naming leader or council can really upset the ole apple cart.

Most of the time, organizations are used to brand and marketing teams getting naming slapped onto their responsibilities list, and then taking a few options up the flagpole to executive leadership. *** Executive leadership often has the most power but the least requisite specialized knowledge when it comes to naming. *** So much of naming at scale is about artfully rebalancing this power dynamic.

A naming system is only as strong as the people who own and enforce it. The organizational investment here is in clarity and consistency—making it absolutely clear who is responsible for what and not swaying from those role for a “special project.” Whether you use a RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) or RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) framework, the goal is the same: make it clear and be consistent with it. A documented process that clarifies who needs to be briefed, who decides, and when they decide.

The key to a clear decision-making process is establishing a high bar for exceptions. As Jake notes, if you can break rules in a decentralized way, “then you might as well not have the rules”. A clear, difficult-to-meet requirement for breaking the naming guidelines (e.g., “to break a rule you need CMO approval”) ensures that exceptions are strategic, not convenient.

And yet, sometimes it is the VP or CMO who’s naming power needs to be checked. In cases like this, we often recommend multi-lateralizing—creating a small naming council where that formerly unilateral decision maker is balanced out with a small focused group of carefully selected leaders who have to make group decisions on names. There’s many different ways to do this: majority rules, assent-based naming reports, the list goes on. Maybe I’ll write another post about that.

The number of brands that still do not have a naming guidelines section within their brand handbooks is astounding. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot better than when I started back in 2007 but, damn.

When I say guidelines, I mean truly useful ones. The right balance of flexibility and tensile strength. Jake talked about when this clicked for him:

“A breakthrough for me was realizing that a naming system isn’t a rigid convention. Not every name needs to follow this very specific theme or structure, but it has to generally work as a system.”

The speed of modern business, particularly in the digital realm, means that naming decisions are constantly being made by product teams, engineers, and marketers operating in an agile environment. This pace necessitates a shift from rigid, easily-broken “rules” to flexible, resilient “tools”. Naming architect, James Mueller writes about this so elegantly on his site: “If you give a carpenter a hammer, you don’t have to forbid her from driving nails with a wrench.”

Truly useful naming guidelines allow for necessary exceptions while maintaining the overall integrity and coherence of the naming system. What we don’t want is one that breaks immediately when an exception is needed, leading to chaos and a loss of faith in the system or the naming manager or team.

Jake summed this up well:

“It’s freeing the system from having to be too prescriptive and creating rules that do not break rules that never will be broken because they’re broad and flexible enough that you can live by it.”

In addition to introducing guardrails for the words and strategy the brand should use, I believe that what makes an organization’s naming guidelines truly useful is when they:

• Clearly show how naming decisions support specific business objectives (eg: by maintaining descriptive names we are reducing our marketing budgets)

• Document, index, and categorize the names created (you’d be amazed how few brands track this) and how these decisions were made, which is important to audit and examine regularly

• Establish a schedule for ongoing naming planning meetings and retrospectives

Ultimately, the utility of these guidelines, and of all four pillars, rests on a single, non-negotiable requirement: organizational investment.

The challenge of naming at scale is fundamentally a governance challenge. It requires a willingness to look past the immediate, gratifying work of creative brainstorming and invest in the difficult, long-term work of organizational change. It means giving up the illusion that naming is a simple task to be delegated to the least busy person.

For any brand serious about its digital future and its expanding product portfolio, the question is no longer if you need naming governance (you do…), but when you will commit to building the four pillars that will finally allow your naming to flourish at scale (and your teams to relax).