$100,000.
If this number strikes you as having an awful lot of zeros for a brand naming project, trust your instincts.
When we chat with founders and marketers about how to go about naming their company or product, we often find ourselves directing the conversation back to money. Why?
The ugly, unsexy truth of the brand naming industry is that the difference in “quality” between a senior copywriter, a small branding studio, and a global creative agency is smaller than people think. Working with a wide range of agencies and industries, we’ve witnessed firsthand great names sloppily typed into a Slack group by a strategist on their lunch break, just as we’ve seen a leading naming agency spend two weeks generating names without a semblance of originality. Of course, we’ve also seen the opposite.
In our experience, $5,000 USD is the most sensible number for startups and scaleups to invest in their brand name, and for corporations to pay to name a product.
When you toss a talented freelancer $2,000 to come up with 20 names, you may very well receive a strong batch of options to choose from. But this person likely isn’t extracting all relevant information about your business, properly checking names against trademark databases, or getting a second creative opinion. They may also lack an understanding of each name’s commercial viability and the potential impact of each name on the brand identity. In other words, they’re winging it.
On the other end of the spectrum, when you pay a creative agency $20,000 for that same brief, most of what you’re buying is confidence that the names being recommended are tasteful and, for lack of a better term, cool. The names are more or less of the same caliber as the freelancer, but because they’re coming from a physical office of people playing Frank Ocean too loud, there’s an added sense of credibility that some ambitious B2C brands find valuable.
Anything more than $20,000 and what you’re buying is legal certitude and cultural security. You’re paying for the assurance that a recommended name is available to trademark across a range of crowded classes and territories, and that the name isn’t going to accidentally offend a religious minority on the other side of the planet. For some deep pocketed corporations, this is worth the price.
Then again, if you’re reading this article, this probably isn’t you.
You’re in the right place.
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