Naming Fairness

A great brand can have a bad name, and a great name can’t save a bad brand

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The popular story says that if you just land on the right quirky, Greek god adjacent, vowel starved name, the market will lean in, margins will expand, and your NPS will soar. All of your problems will be solved. It is contorted into this magic spell that can manufacture relevance and trust where none exists. In practice, buyers behave like adults. They may smile at a clever name, but they stay (or leave) for product quality, pricing, reliability, and support, not syllables.

Before going too far, let’s try a couple of exercises of what happens when we isolate a word, from a name, from a brand. And how little power a string of letters has on its own.

Example 1: You have cancer

Your doctor walks in and calmly informs you that you have stage four colon cancer. You freak out. He suggests that you see a specialist at the Detroit Clinic. You freak out more. Hold that thought. Now swap Detroit Clinic with Cleveland Clinic. The names Cleveland and Clinic, on their own, hold no equity. Combine them, give them over 100 years of clinical leadership, and you have a brand. And a powerful name. But the letters and phonics have little to do with it.

Example 2: You’re going on vacation

Your friend walks in and declares that the two of you are going on vacation. She says the two of you booked flights to Cod City. You think of the speckled brown fish they use to make fish sticks, and are concerned about your friend’s sanity. Hold that thought. Change Cod City to Cape Cod, and what just happened in your mind? There is no magic behind the letter combinations of “cod” on its own. The name itself holds no magical power.

Now, if you were to open a new vacation destination today, you would not use the word “cod” in it. And that would be a wise choice. Also, if you had ambitions of building a world-class hospital, you wouldn’t immediately restrict it by assigning a regional moniker to it, using a descriptor that is most often associated with urgent care clinics in strip malls. (Try it: Codtown, Codville, Coddington, Tulsa Clinic, Boston Clinic)

Let’s beat this dead horse some more. You might not be excited to buy anything from a retailer called Mississippi or Mekong, but you probably buy from Amazon every day. You might hesitate to trust technology from a company called Banana or Peach, but you may well be a loyal Apple customer. One of the largest healthcare companies in the world at over $400 Billion (with a B) is called Consumer Value Store, or CVS Health.

Once you separate words from names, names from brands, and brands from experiences, you realize how little power combinations of consonants and vowels actually hold.

You want them to fit. Feel intuitive. Not be a barrier or obstacle. They are like a great new set of tires on your car. You’ll notice them immediately, but they wouldn’t change the overall performance.

The Myth That Ran Away With Itself

Inside branding conversations, that myth hardens into two more specific claims:

• If a name is short enough, weird enough, or “ownable” enough, it will punch through any competitive clutter.

• If a name is boring, descriptive, or sounds like a real company, it will never stand out and therefore cannot win.

That story is tidy and emotionally satisfying, which is why it spreads. It flatters the creative team, justifies endless rounds of wordplay, and promises transformation without the pain of fixing fundamentals. But the evidence tells a more accurate story. Studies of new brand names show that extreme novelty can actually hurt evaluation when people have no other information to rely on; in those situations, buyers lean on familiar patterns and clear category cues to reduce risk.

You can see this disconnect in markets full of tortured neologisms. There is no shortage of fanciful, vowel less, mythology inspired names attached to startups that never found traction, not because the name doomed them, but because the naming brief tried to do the positioning and the product work by itself. Overwrought names become symptoms of strategy avoidance: all the energy goes into the label, not the thing being labeled.

What People Actually Do With Names

Watch how people actually navigate a crowded category, and the job of a name looks more mundane, and more interesting. Names do three things:

1. Help people spot and recall a brand in a sea of lookalikes, the way a distinctive color helps shoppers find their package on a shelf.

2. Signal category and seriousness at a glance, so a buyer can sanity-check whether this sounds like a real firm in the space.

3. Hold meaning that builds over time: the more consistent the product and communications, the more the name becomes shorthand for the experience.

What Strategic Naming Is Actually For

Serious naming work looks less like poetry and more like operations. At its best, it does three things:

• Clarify positioning, not invent it: a good name lines up with the story the business already has reason to tell, instead of reverse-engineering one from a clever word.

• Reduce friction, not add it: names that are easy to say, spell, and search waste less media spend and fewer sales calls fixing confusion.

• Fit the architecture: in a portfolio, names have to make sense together so people can navigate the lineup instead of guessing at every launch.

Systems, Not Syllables, Build Brands

The clearer the research gets, the plainer the pattern: brands come from systems, not isolated parts. A name works when it fits a system tied to a real experience, which happens when:

• The offer is compelling. Without a real product and delivery model behind it, the best name in the world is a shiny handle on an empty suitcase.

• Positioning, architecture, and naming line up, so people form accurate expectations and meet fewer surprises.

• Execution stays consistent, so recognition and meaning accrue as people meet the name in reliable contexts.

This is not to say a name is unimportant. But its importance is relative and marginal. It helps people notice, sort, and remember offerings in a world they already understand; it does not rewrite their priorities or absolve strategy sins. One instrument in the orchestra, worth tuning, but never the whole symphony.

In closing, and to put it bluntly, it is unfair to ask a name to do the work of an entire company. A name cannot drive awareness, tell your story, or convey a value proposition. It cannot inspire a team, compel a customer to act, or deliver an experience worth returning for. And it certainly cannot run a profitable business or shape a healthy culture. Those are the jobs of product, marketing, sales, and the people behind them. A good name can’t open the door, much less make anyone walk through it. All it can do is make sure the address is clearly understood, and it’s nice if there’s a ring to it.

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References and Further Reading

• John Hoeppner, “The Perception of Quality and the Impact on Brand Performance,” GreenBook (2025).

• Chris Kontes, “The Key Difference Between Brand and Customer Experience,” Balto (2025).

• “How Brand Names Influence Buying Behavior,” Frozen Lemons (2025).

• A Journal of Business Research study on brand names and buyer perception (via ScienceDirect).

• “The Optimal Brand Naming Process,” Branding Strategy Insider.

• Martin Roll, “Brand Naming Techniques.”

• Ben Stanbury, “12 Naming Criteria Your Brand Name Should Meet,” The Identity Bureau (2024).

• The Naming Group, “Brandwide Naming Guidelines: The Missing Section of Every Brand Handbook.”

• Charles Taylor, “Developing Effective Brand Names: Lessons From a Naming Guru,” Forbes (2023).

• Chris Way, “Brand Building with Trademark Distinctiveness,” Way Law.

• American Marketing Association, “What’s in a Brand Name?”

• Scott Baradell, “Naming Agency Tips for Effective Brand Naming,” (2024).

• Darpan Munjal, “Why Brand Building and Name Selection Matter for Your Bottom Line,” Forbes (2024).

• “Why Your Company, Product, or Service Name Doesn’t Really Matter,” Strat Communications.