Name Awards

About

Once upon a time I actually ran a national name awards competition. It was rather interesting and well-received on the whole. But it was a lot more work and expense than expected, with little or no return – except some love and support from people fascinated by naming. But other programs have fortunately met with more success.
Fifteen or more years ago I started the concept of ranking a name each week. We started using one or two thumbs up as our scoring system. At least we did until we heard from Ebert & Roper! At the time I was worried we would run out of names to critique, so we prepped 30+ names to start, figuring we were good to go for at least six months. In the end it went on for over six years. That was at the first naming agency I co-founded.

Nowadays I am the president and naming director of Brighter Naming, a full-service professional naming agency. I am also the major author and critic for the name critic column on Brighter Naming’s website, where we have a numeric scoring system, and also dare to comment on the visual presentation of the name or logo. Also, I have many articles on naming, branding and trademarks published there, as well as in my books (see FodenPress.com).

But naming and branding is a living, breathing, moving part of marketing and business. And there are lots of fun little things (and some serious ones too), going on all the time in this world if you are nuts enough to notice them. This blog is for those day-to-day naming stories, events, fun and foibles, that deserve immediate, minor award, treatment.

Call me at 1-866-451-6198 (Toll free USA and Canada) if you are seeking professional naming help. We are based in Silicon Valley California, where Google is busy putting our town (Mountain View) on the international map. Their Googleplex headquarters is walking distance from my office. Yahoo and Intuit are a bike ride away, and H-P, Intel, Apple, AMD, eBay, Oracle, SalesForce.com, Cisco, HDS, Genentech, NetFlix and Stanford University are 15 minutes by car.

PS But we have a big consumer naming practice too, where we specialize in fast turn projects.

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