The Importance of Being ________________ (or How I Learned to Name and Love Igor International)

In the last couple months I have worked with clients to name 4 different companies. I helped name 10 or 12 before that, including my own (Firefly Creative), but I’ve never been completely happy with any of them. Some of them have gone on to be pretty popular, and people have said they liked them. But at best I think they were serviceable. At worst they were confusing, but sometimes the owners just liked them, and what can you do?

Igor really knows what they are doing. I mean, just look at their name! It’s evocative, hilarious, and still communicates that they are helping you to create your monster.

And they are so generous! They have a great blog called Snark Hunting , and they have a free naming guide on their website. You can just download it! And you can choose the long or the short version. I know—I’ve downloaded them several times. Of course, they are not enough, but they are a good start.

Here are just my favorite of the zillion really delightful names they’ve created:

Boogie Board—Consumer LCD writing tablet product name
Monkey Bar—Hasbro’s online game destination for kids
Zounds—High-performance hearing aid / audio company name

This is from an article in Arrive by Samuel Greengard:

At Igor, the process usually unfolds something like this:

1) Consultants develop an initial set of names that represent different strategic directions for a client. “In many cases, the words that have the greatest initial appeal lose their luster after a few weeks,” Manning explains. “The problem is that they are too mainstream and too comfortable. They sound too similar to existing names and do not create any real sense of differentiation.”

2) Over several weeks, as the consultant and company whittle down the universe of potential names to a handful of finalists, it’s not unusual to develop prototype ad campaigns to make the concept more real.

3) Finally, the company sorts through the list and makes a selection. At some firms, such as NameLab, the process can take weeks as linguistics experts sort through the building blocks of language to create new words that do not exist naturally.

If you find yourself at a standstill, I suggest you try one of Wordlabs handy name generators. My favorite is the Drug-O-Matic, but I’ve been inspired by the Brand Name Generator (Mild Epoxy Sludge! Crog! Swamp Pudding!).