* Situation
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In 2025, Elliott Verbal was asked to support product naming for one of the leading American beverage companies. The brand has existed for over a century, and the new product was presenting some interesting challenges for proper fit within the existing brand architecture and in terms of how it reflected the overall brand image.
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* Challenges
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The client was introducing a new RTD product with six long-term variants under the primary brand—two flavor options and three sweetener options. They also had a pattern of launching short-term experimental products with distinct branding that often remained on the market for less than two years.

When I joined the project, the client had not decided whether the new product would become a permanent variant or a short-term experimental launch. Through several discussions, it became clear they wanted the flexibility for it to function as both: debuting as a standalone product, but with the option to fold it into the core lineup if it succeeded, potentially replacing an existing variant over time. In effect, they were planning a soft launch of a long-term replacement while retaining plausible deniability if the product underperformed. The name therefore needed to support this dual positioning.
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* Solutions

Because the brand had been around for so long, there were many internal precedents to study. We found a consistent pattern: short-term experimental launches tended to have more evocative names, while the core variants were named more descriptively. The new product therefore needed a name that could do both—distinctive and evocative at launch, but capable of fitting into the existing variant lineup over time.

We approached this by separating different aspects of the name. Its meaning could be evocative and emotional, tied to a functional property of the product, while its sound structure had to match the existing variants—two syllables, first-syllable stress, and no more than five letters. By assigning different functions to different linguistic components, the name could be evocative in meaning, functional in interpretation, and structurally consistent with the product architecture. We ultimately presented about 40 names that met these criteria.

* Situation

A major American branding agency hired Elliott Verbal to support the development of a portfolio overhaul across a line of lab analyzers for a leading global medical technologies producer. The interrelated line of products had been expanding for decades, and new tech suites had recently been introduced. However, as is often the case, new items had been added in piecemeal fashion to the portfolio. There were some serious problems with the nomenclature that the client knew were causing confusion among customers and prospects, and a broader desire to reshape the brand architecture and naming system to support anticipated further growth in the coming years.

* Challenges

This project was both a naming architecture and brand architecture project, and part of the task at hand was helping the client see where naming architecture ended and true portfolio restructuring and brand architecture work began. There were short term needs to find reasonable fixes to some unintended brand name complications, but the client was open to not just different naming schemes, but actually different configurations of how products were related to one another.
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* Solutions

Working with the team at the contracting agency, Elliott Verbal provided a comprehensive audit of five competitor portfolios in the space---each portfolio had upwards of 100 individual products and hundreds of potentially branded combinations of products. These complex portfolios had to be analyzed for their implicit structure, to understand what the competitor's explicit architecture approach had been, what naming patterns and logics were used and for what purpose, and how those architectures showed up in marketing materials.

We then devised around 20 different architecture and associated nomenclature patterns, and worked with the client to help them understand and assess the strategic implications of each arrangement.

* Situation

Elliott Verbal was contracted to provide strategy and naming support The Naming Group in Fall of 2025 to help with a complicated renaming project for a leading enterprise in the data storage field. We came in as research to support the decision to change the name was yielding to the development of naming criteria and strategic directions. The client was estimating an 8-figure price tag on the actual rollout of the new brand, so despite certainty that change was needed, there was resistance to new directions.

* Challenges

The basic problem with the existing name was that it was too literal---it wasn't too far from "Data Storage Inc.". This was fine when storage hardware was the company's primary offering and the backbone of its success, but they needed to shift their positioning to being a data services leader, not just a data storage leader.

Other issues at play were fairly standard in a rename: we needed to find a new name that retained some connection to the old, thus maintaining some existing brand equity, making the decision easier to swallow for execs, and offering a clear evolution narrative to support the rebrand.
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* Solution

Most of the creative strategy centered around retaining a piece of the original name in the new name in a way that made sense, and also solved a few long-standing complaints that legal had had with the way the previous name was used internally. This engagement involved six different meetings or workshops with the CEO and Founder of the company, which was a degree of involvement we were thrilled to have. Ultimately, the CEO and Founder not only agreed on one of our names to move forward with, but became vocal champions of the rebrand and the new vision for the company the new name represented.

As a global corporation, the client needed linguistic screening in a number of markets, and several leading names raised some potential redflags. After substantial vetting of the linguistic consultant's concerns, we came to the conclusion that risks were minor and unlikely to cause problems in reality. It's a good reminder that when you solicit negative feedback, you will get negative feedback, and as naming consultant's it is our job to help clients assess whether these negative associations are likely to occur in the real, full brand context, and if they are surmountable risks.

* Situation

Monika is an AI-powered naming agency founded in 2023 to bring developments in LLMs to brand naming. They are constantly striving to improve the efficiency of their naming system, which generates names based on client briefs using a complex series of LLM-based models. The agency asked Elliott Verbal to assess the efficacy of the linguistic processes involved in their models, and we continue to provide occasional guidance to the Monika team on implementation of those structural recommendations.

* Challenges

The basic premise of our work with Monika has been to take the intuitions and tastes of the agency’s human namers, and turn them into explicit instructions that would lead an LLM to produce viable brand names. Even experienced brand naming specialists often work on vibes and intuitions, and aren’t really used to spelling out the creative process to the degree of detail necessary for an LLM to repeat the process.

Monika's primary challenge is efficiency. If you get an AI to pump out enough names, you'll eventually get some contenders, but you don't want to have to wade through thousands of options to find a diamond in the rough.

Therefore, my insights and recommendations for Monika were largely intended to teach the system to recognize clearly bad candidates and repeat processes that were producing good candidates. Ultimately, this would lead to a higher hit-to-bomb ratio.
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* Solutions

I took a typological and descriptive approach to Monika’s naming data--looking at all the successful viable names from their previous projects and categorizing them based on structural and semantic properties.

With a more explicit reckoning of the types of metaphor, wordplay, vibes, and alternation processes that were implicit in the choices the human namers were pulling out of the LLM-generated lists, I was able to make recommendations for new processes and protocols that would produce the kinds of names the Monika team wanted--but intentionally and more regularly, rather than by chance.

The technical team have been able to take these linguistic recommendations for new models and explicit instructions and turn them into working elements of the agency's AI, bringing the team closer to their goal of a high quality, reliable, and creative AI namer.

* Situation

A VC-funded entrepreneur developing a new approach to home and auto bundling for not-quite-short-term renters came to Elliott Verbal for help with both company naming and descriptor development for how to explain their service in less than way-too-many words. The company is preparing for launch, but not quite out of the gates yet.

* Challenges

The client was essentially attempting not just to find a unique market position in online home and auto rental service, but instead to create a new service category all together--one targeted at younger, highly mobile professionals who have a tendency to relocate to new urban areas for work opportunities every couple of years. The service aimed to make home and car rental for 6-month to 3-year periods seamless and one-stop, so that busy professionals felt free to explore professional mobility between major cities without extra friction from logistical necessities.
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* Solutions

Elliott Verbal led the client through a naming sprint, rather than full name development, to help them meet a filing deadline, and to allow for more time to consider the category descriptors that could be used. After a full audit of terminology used across numerous adjacent categories, we landed on 10 feasible options for category descriptors that met our criteria: no associations with low quality or commoditized goods (i.e. words like "bundling"), phrasally constructed to be both a standalone noun or a modifying adjective, and able to be transparently understood after a single explanation of the service. We helped the client understand that the descriptor cannot automatically or immediately describe a new category, but that unlike the long term work to build equity in a brand name, walking your audience to the meaning of a descriptive term is a relatively easy lift, and then the descriptor can do the work for you once established.

Put simply, the meaning of words doesn't come from the dictionary. Meaning is made through a collection of passive and intentional choices over time by everyone who speaks your language -- the dictionary just comes in and makes a useful generalization and common reference.

This idea is really, really important in understanding 1) how your verbal branding choices are going to be interpreted by your audience, and 2) how to effectively manage the decision making process among stakeholders and decision makers within your own team.

You cannot tell people what something is supposed to mean -- you have to work within the context of what a word does and could mean for whoever you want to use it with. You can reframe the context, you can negotiate the meaning a bit, but you can't just decide what a word is going to mean or represent for other people by fiat or because you think you're "right".

That attitude only works if you can force people into submission, and if you could do that... you wouldn't be trying to sell to them, would you?

Naming, unlike other kinds of verbal output like marketing copy or sales pitches, is inherently more contentious and difficult because you can't just try something new every time you feel like it's not working. Naming decisions carry more weight because they have to last longer, and they bring more conflict when teams are trying to make decisions.

Great! If you can come up with a name that half your team hates and half the team loves... that's a lot of useful info.

Every point of conflict is an opportunity to ask "why", to iterate new options that could meet your teams conflicting perspectives, and to improve and clarify communication.

Some namers call naming "corporate therapy", since it's often so tied in to the core goals, desires, and dynamics of an organization. In that context, conflict is gonna happen -- I believe if you embrace it as an act of creation, you don't avoid having hard conversations and you get where you wanna go quicker.

Lots of folks who work in "creative" industries -- designers, artists, writers, brand creatives -- assume a distinction between "creative" work and other kinds of more "rational" work. Scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats often feel the same. Many see art and science as two opposing forces. That distinction might be useful sometimes, but we don't subscribe to that world view, not at all.

Artistic creativity can be very methodical, precise, and technical.
Science can be very emotive, metaphorical, and symbolic.
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The methodical, technical approach Elliott Verbal takes for working with and describing branded language is expressly for the purpose of enabling creativity, innovation, and intuitive recognition. Brands need their names and other verbal assets to store and reproduce meaning (i.e. brand equity), and we can affect and make use of that meaning-making process using both the tools of intuitive art and explicated science.

Don't look for one or the other--get someone who can do both.