Brand Name.

When my son was born, my wife and I had to give him a name. Most parents agonize over names for the meaning, the family history, the cultural resonance. My wife thought about all of those things, and we worked through them together. I added one criterion that I do not think most parents think about. I wanted his name to be five letters and five letters. First name. Middle name. Both five letters long.

His name is David Johan. D-A-V-I-D, J-O-H-A-N. Five and five.

There is a reason I did this. Five-letter names are the longest a human brain reliably reads as a single shape, the way you read a logo. Anything longer, the eye breaks it into syllables. Anything shorter, it loses presence. Five and five is balanced, symmetrical, and easy to write, easy to say, easy to remember in any language. We also gave him a Spanish-friendly middle name because he is bilingual at home, he hears both languages from day one. Both names work in both tongues.

I bought his domain the day we settled on the name.

I am telling you this because I want you to understand something about how seriously I take naming. I applied naming-firm discipline to my own kid. If I am willing to do that, you can imagine what I think about the names founders give to companies they spend a decade building. Most founders treat naming as a brainstorm. A weekend exercise. A whiteboard session that ends when they get tired.

It is not that.

A name is the most permanent decision in branding. Logos can be redesigned. Taglines can be rewritten. Websites can be relaunched. Names are the thing that travels with the company through every chapter of its life, and the thing that is hardest, most expensive, and most painful to change.

Today's episode is on naming. The framework I use to evaluate every name. The discovery method. The exercise you can do this week. And four naming projects from my own studio that taught me what I know about this work.

I am John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win, where you can find consistent branding and positioning advice for founders and CMOs.

The most-used word you will ever own

A brand name is the most-used word your company will ever own.

Read that again, because most founders skip past it. The name will appear on every email signature, every invoice, every legal document, every piece of marketing, every product page, every job listing, every press mention, every domain, every search result. If your company succeeds, that name will be said and written billions of times.

The legal layer matters too. A name is a trademark, which means it is a piece of legally-defensible property, but only if it has been chosen with enough distinctiveness to be defensible. The trademark office and the customer's brain are asking the same question: is this name confusable with something else?

Here is the test I use to know if a name is doing its job. Read your name out loud, in a sentence, to a stranger. If they can write it down correctly the first time, and find your website on the first search, the name is working. If they ask you to spell it, repeat it, or clarify what you mean, the name is leaking energy every time someone tries to find you. That leakage compounds.

The Five Tests

Most naming frameworks I have read are checklists of fifteen or twenty criteria. They are too long to remember and too vague to apply. So I built a tighter set at my studio. Five tests. The framework is mine, refined over hundreds of naming candidates across the projects I will name later in this episode. The intellectual lineage runs through Neumeier's SUFP test, Steve Manning's typology of name shapes, and David Placek's work on sound symbolism. But the five tests in the form I use them are the ones I am about to walk you through. Every name we recommend has to pass all five.

Test one. Distinctiveness. Can the name be confused with another name in or near your category? If it can, you are spending your marketing budget building equity that may flow to a competitor.

Test two. Ownability. Can you actually own this name? Domain, social handles, trademark across the categories you care about, and the search-engine results page. A name you cannot own is a name you will spend years apologizing for. "Find us at our-company-the-real-one-dot-co" is not a brand. It is a confession.

Test three. Scalability. Will this name still work when your company is ten times bigger, in three new product lines, on two more continents? Names that overfit your current product trap you. Names that are too generic disappear. Scalability sits between those two failure modes.

Test four. Pronounceability. Can a stranger say it correctly the first time? Can they spell it after hearing it? In your customer's language, and ideally in two or three more? There is a reason most billion-dollar consumer brands have one or two syllables.

Test five. Narrative load. Does the name carry meaning, mood, or implication that helps the brand do its job? Does it set up the story you want to tell, or does it require the story to be told from scratch every time? The strongest names do hidden work, they pre-load the customer with an idea before any marketing has happened.

Five tests. Distinctiveness, ownability, scalability, pronounceability, narrative load. A name that passes four out of five is not a recommendation. A name that passes all five is the work.

Where names come from

Three sources, in priority order.

Source one. Your customers' own language. Read your sales transcripts, your reviews, your support tickets, the unfiltered voice of your customers, and pull out the words they use to describe your product to other people. Some of those words, sometimes recombined, become candidate names. The customer is half-naming the brand for you. Most founders never read their own evidence.

Source two. Adjacent vocabulary. What words live next to your category but have not been claimed? If you are in cannabis, the canonical vocabulary is "high," "smoke," "green," "bud", and most of it is taken or trademarked. The interesting names live one step away from the obvious. Knack does not have a single cannabis word in it. Liquid Death, in the water category, does not have a single water word in it. The strongest names borrow from a vocabulary the category has not exhausted.

Source three. Constraints, not freedom. Most naming sessions fail because they are too open. Five hundred candidate names, no filter. The winning approach is to set hard constraints up front, number of syllables, must-be-pronounceable-in-Spanish-and-English, no animal names, no Latin roots, must be a real word or feel like one. Then generate within the constraints. Constraints are how you get from a hundred mediocre names to ten strong ones in less time.

The exercise you can run this week

Block two hours on your calendar. Bring a printed copy of your last fifty customer reviews, support tickets, or sales calls. Read them with a highlighter. Mark every word a customer uses to describe what your company does or how it makes them feel. Do not look for names. Look for words.

After two hours, you will have a vocabulary. Sometimes thirty words. Sometimes a hundred. Cluster them by theme.

Then write down five constraints for the name. How many syllables. What languages must it work in. What rhythm or sound should it have. What it must not be. What it must imply.

With your vocabulary on one side and your constraints on the other, generate candidates for an hour. Aim for fifty. Bad names included. Volume matters at this stage.

Run the fifty against the Five Tests. Most will fail at distinctiveness or ownability. The ones that survive are your candidates. Take three to your team and your customers and watch the reactions before you commit.

This is not a substitute for hiring a naming firm if you are at the scale where one is warranted. But it is a substitute for the version of this work most founders actually do, three people in a Slack channel guessing.

Why a name compounds

A bad name compounds. Wasted SEO. Customers who cannot find you because they spelled it differently. Trademark conflicts you discover three years in, when changing the name would cost you a market position. Sales reps who have to spell the company name on every cold call. Press coverage that misspells you. Investors who Google your name and land on someone else's homepage.

A good name compounds the other direction. Press picks it up correctly. Customers spell it right on the first try. Search-engine results consolidate around your domain. Trademarks file cleanly. Word of mouth travels because people remember it. Each of those small advantages, repeated millions of times, is the difference between a brand that builds and a brand that leaks.

The cost of changing a name later is one of the largest unbudgeted line items in branding. Companies that have to rebrand their name typically spend somewhere between three and twenty times what they would have spent to get it right the first time.

Four names from the studio

Rather than walk you through a single deep case study, I want to give you four naming projects from my own studio, each one teaching a different naming principle.

Knack. Cannabis brand in New York. Four letters, percussive, idiom-loaded, the name carries a built-in sentence ("you've got a knack for this") that does the brand's work before any marketing has happened. The lesson: narrative load. A name that carries an idiom is doing free advertising every time someone says it.

Onspire. Healthcare marketing agency we named after the merger of four separate companies into one. A portmanteau of "on" and "inspire", engineered to sound like a single word that signals momentum and intent, while quietly representing the unification of four legacy brands into a new identity. The lesson: names can be acts of corporate diplomacy. When a merger needs to feel like a future, not a compromise, the name has to do that emotional work.

Melo. Fermented hand soap. Built on the science of fermentation, designed to feel calming and clean. The name reads as "mellow" without spelling it, and is pronounceable in any language a brand might want to enter. The same client also owns Risewell, a hydroxyapatite oral care brand with a similarly suggestive name, "rise" plus "well," vertical aspiration plus wellness, which is what a thoughtful brand portfolio looks like when one operator is naming across multiple categories with consistent logic. The lesson: suggestive names beat descriptive names. "Hand Soap Co." tells you what it is. "Melo" tells you how it makes you feel. And when you build more than one brand, your naming principles should travel across the portfolio.

Mortality Index. A data project my studio built that maps what we are afraid of versus what actually kills us. The name is the proposition, it sounds like a Bloomberg terminal for death, and the product delivers exactly that. The lesson: sometimes the most powerful name is the one that states the category so directly the customer cannot look away. Mortality Index does not whisper.

Four projects. Four naming principles, narrative load, corporate diplomacy, suggestive over descriptive, and naming the truth. Distinct enough that you should be able to apply the right one to your own naming work.

The four voices behind the framework

The Five Tests are mine. The thinking they sit on top of comes from four specific voices.

Marty Neumeier, in The Brand Gap and Zag, gave us the simplest test for a name. He calls it the SUFP test, Short, Unique, Future-friendly, Pronounceable. Plus a fifth, the C, connectable to the brand's positioning. My Five Tests are a reorganization of his thinking, with distinctiveness and narrative load promoted to first-class criteria because, in my experience, they are the two most often skipped.

Steve Manning at Igor International, one of the great commercial naming firms, distinguishes between real-word names (Apple, Amazon, Caterpillar), suggestive names (Greyhound, Twitter), invented names (Kodak, Häagen-Dazs, Sony), and descriptive names (American Airlines, General Motors). His argument: descriptive names are the weakest, because they fight commodification at every turn. Suggestive and invented names build equity faster because they have somewhere to grow into.

David Placek at Lexicon, the firm that named Pentium, BlackBerry, Swiffer, Subaru's Outback, and Dasani, has built an entire methodology around what he calls sound symbolism. Hard consonants signal strength. Soft consonants signal warmth. Vowels carry mood. Lexicon's process is more linguistic than most agencies' work. If you ever get the chance to read Placek's interviews on Pentium and BlackBerry, do, they are masterclasses in why naming is a science as much as an art.

And Al Ries and Jack Trout in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. Their core naming insight: a name should communicate or suggest the category the brand is competing in, while differentiating from every other name in that category. Fit the category, stand out within it.

The synthesis. Neumeier gave us the test. Manning gave us the typology. Placek gave us the linguistics. Ries and Trout gave us the strategic frame. All four agree that naming is not a creative exercise. It is a strategic one. The names that win are the names that do strategic work in disguise, while the customer thinks they are just remembering a word.

Three ways naming fails

Three naming failures I see repeatedly.

Failure one. Founder vanity. The founder names the company after themselves, their kids, their hometown, or an inside joke. These names occasionally work, Ford, Disney, Bloomberg, but only when the founder's name itself becomes the equity. For most founders, vanity naming traps the company inside the founder's biography.

Failure two. Description-as-name. "Acme Construction Solutions." "Premier Marketing Group." Descriptive names commodify the brand on day one. They cannot become a story, cannot become a verb, cannot become the kind of name a customer says with affection.

Failure three. The unpronounceable made-up word. Founders confuse "I made this word up" with "this word is good." A made-up word that requires explanation, fails at first sight, or cannot be spelled after hearing it is worse than a generic word that at least communicates something. Made-up names work, Kodak, Xerox, Häagen-Dazs, but only when they are short, sound-symbolically rich, and easy to say.

The common thread: all three failures come from forgetting that the name has to do work in the world. It cannot just please you. It has to please everyone who has to say it, type it, find it, and remember it for the next twenty years.

Choose it like you would name a child

A name is the most permanent decision in branding. Choose it the way you would choose what to call your child, because the implications are similar.

Run the Five Tests. Do the customer-language exercise. Generate within constraints, not in freedom. And if you are tempted to skip this work because you have a name you sort of like, take this seriously: the cost of changing a name later, when the company has grown, is between three and twenty times the cost of getting it right now. Every founder I have ever worked with on a rebrand has said some version of "I wish I had taken naming seriously the first time."

I named my son David Johan because I wanted his name to be easy to say, easy to remember, easy to write, balanced in two languages, and ownable as a domain. Five letters and five letters. The same discipline I would bring to naming a billion-dollar company. He is one and a half years old as I record this. He will use that name for the rest of his life, and I am glad I took it seriously the first time.

Next episode, we move from name to identity. The visual layer of the brand. Why most identity work fails not at the logo but at the system around the logo. And the four-layer Identity Stack that explains why the logos you remember stay in your head, and the ones you do not, do not.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.