Naming is a strategy problem
Every naming exercise that goes badly went badly at the strategy stage, not the wordplay stage.
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Dev Okafor
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When a naming project stalls, the diagnosis is almost always presented as a creative one. It is not. The list is bad because the brief underneath it has not resolved.
Names cannot hold undecided positioning
If the company has not settled what it is, who it is for, and what it is deliberately not, then every candidate will feel arbitrary, because it is. You are asking a word to make a decision the leadership team has avoided.
The symptom is recognisable: rounds of names, no consensus, a growing preference for the safest option in the room. The fix is upstream. Resolve the position, and the shortlist gets short quickly.
Test against the position, not against taste
Once there is a position, judge candidates against it rather than against preference. Does it claim the right territory? Does it survive being said aloud in a sales call? Will it still fit in three years? Taste is the tiebreaker, not the criterion.
