How to name a company in a crowded Australian market

Australian naming projects fail in a particular order. The workshop produces a wall of words. The room falls in love with three of them. Someone checks the .com.au on a phone and finds a squatter. Legal sends a memo. The founder has already told a journalist the favourite. The agency is then asked to “explore around it”. Six weeks later the company is called something no one can spell, no one can own, and everyone is tired of.

The country is not short of names. It is short of unencumbered ones. Twenty-five million people, a mature services economy, and a century of firms that already took the obvious words — plus every founder who thought a dropped vowel was originality. You are late to the register. That is the brief.

A name is not a personality. It is a handle the public, the staff, the lawyer and the switchboard can all hold. If it cannot survive those four rooms, it is a mood.

Start with the constraints, not the muse

Before anyone opens a thesaurus, write down what the name must do.

It must be available as a trade mark in the classes you actually trade in, or close enough that you can live with a coexistence you understand. It must be available as a company or business name you are willing to explain to ASIC. It should be available as a domain you will actually use — .com.au first, not a clever TLD that looks like a start-up in 2014. It must be sayable on a bad mobile line. It must not be a slur, a sacred word, or a place name you have no right to. It must not collide with a charity, a government program, or a deceased brand that still lives in a suburb’s mouth.

That list will kill most of the wall. Good. Naming is subtraction. The poetry, if there is any, happens after the graveyard.

Indigenous words deserve their own paragraph. A word from a language that is not yours is not a texture. It is someone else’s property in a sense Australian trade-mark law only partly covers. If you do not have permission from the right people — not a friend who once did a welcome — do not put it on a van. There is a whole literature and a set of protocols for this. Use them, or use English.

Descriptive, coined, or borrowed

Descriptive names tell the customer the job: Australian Super, Officeworks, Flight Centre. They reduce advertising waste. They are hard to monopolise, which is why they live or die on operations. If you pick one, you are choosing to win on the offer, not on the noun.

Coined names — Canva, Atlassian, afterpay in its lowercase era — cost money to teach and repay it if the product is simple enough to carry the invention. In a crowded local category, coined often means “we could not get the real word”. Customers can hear that.

Borrowed names take a person, a place, a myth. They fail when the place is not yours (a Melbourne bar named for a Paris street is fine; a mining services firm named for a desert community is not) or when the person still answers the phone. They fail more quietly when two suburbs already have a café with the same homage.

There is no hierarchy. There is only the job. A superannuation product that wants to be found in a comparison table should not be named like a fragrance. A fragrance that wants to be found in a comparison table has other problems.

The rooms that should hear it first

Say the shortlist out loud to a receptionist, a warehouse, a lawyer and someone over sixty in a regional town. Not a “diverse panel” assembled for theatre. The actual mouths that will have to use it.

Listen for the collapse. Australians collapse words. They will shorten you whether you like it or not. If the inevitable shortening is ugly, or belongs to someone else, you have not finished. Listen for the spelling. If the radio ad needs to spell the name twice, you are paying a tax forever. Listen for the insult. A joke that works on a Richmond terrace may not work on a Darwin wharf, and the internet will not keep them separate.

Then do the search properly. Trade marks, business names, domains, social handles, news archives, the ACCC’s public register, and a day of searching as if you were a hostile journalist. You are looking for the story you do not want to inherit.

What to do when the good names are gone

They are mostly gone. That is not a reason to add a suffix like “Group”, “Labs”, “Collective” or “& Co” and call it strategy. Those suffixes are what exhausted rooms do.

You have three honest options. Change the offer so a more specific descriptive name becomes true. Buy a name from someone who is actually finished with it, at a price that includes the legal clean-up. Or accept a good-enough name and spend the money on the thing customers will remember — the place, the pack, the service, the refusal.

What you should not do is hold another workshop. The wall will not get better. The register will not empty.

After the announcement

A name launch is a legal and operational event pretending to be a party. The ABN, the bank, the signage, the IVR, the email, the invoice, the uniforms, the tender documents, the leftover stock — those are the launch. The film can wait. If the call centre still says the old name on Monday, you have a trivia night, not a rename.

Keep the old name as a redirect and a sentence in the about page for as long as customers search it. Sentimentality about URLs is cheaper than lost work.

And then stop talking about the name. If six months later the only story you have is the naming process, the company is still a process. The market asked for a handle. Give them one, and go do the job it points to.