POV: Is the ‘brand namer’ the new graphic designer?

In May, word spread that an “AI-infused platform” would accept a flat fee of $5,000 in return for 20 brand names, delivered to you in five days. Monika – that’s the name of the platform; unclear whether the bot helped name itself – guarantees 20 trademark-ready names of high creative calibre. “It’s one of the hardest parts of the branding process,” Monika co-founder Mark Liney wrote on X to announce the launch of the service. “Few agencies do it well. And when the price tag is often north of £30,000, fewer still can promise value for money.”

£30,000. It seems an incredible amount to pay for a name like Lyft. This price tag makes Monika, with its lower charge of $5,000, an attractive competitor. While the mere mention of machine learning in similar practices has put people off in the past, Monika has already seen success. According to Monika’s founders, some of the world’s top branding agencies have begun white-labelling Monika’s names as part of their existing naming process. The fact that agencies are turning to an AI-powered platform that guarantees ease shows not only how tantalising the promise of a ‘good name’ is, but also how fraught with stress the process has become.

“We’ve seen it time and time again: well-meaning leaders spending precious time and money chasing an objectively perfect name that doesn’t exist,” says Jack Wimmer, co-founder of Monika. “Brand naming has more exceptions than rules, which makes it difficult to judge and debate the merit of any given name.” Jack says new brand ventures can be put into an emotional tailspin over naming. This is exacerbated by the popular perception that a name is the linchpin that can make or break a project.

“If your brand name is forgettable, you will lose,” says Lexicon, the brand naming agency that came up with names like Sonos and Blackberry. The Lexicon website goes further still: “Gatorade”, it says, “is a brand name that requires you to think about what is in the bottle that inspires a reference to gators. By contrast, Powerade makes a 100 per cent predictable claim and one that’s impossible for either the consumer or the manufacturer to substantiate. More than 30 years after its launch, Gatorade is still the market leader.”

It is, as far as we know, impossible to verify whether Gatorade’s success is down to its name, but the modern-day commotion over names is founded on something real. “We have never seen this many brands on this many platforms trying to connect with this many people,” says Zosia Swidlicka, founder of the strategy and copy studio Opening Line. Today brands have to think at length about what words might work to stoke that connection. The result is a branding industry that seems to be focusing more on copy.

“In branding, design is king. It’s revered, romanced, reviewed and rewarded. But great writing is an essential – yet often overlooked – ingredient in building brands.” This was the reason The Subtext, an online platform dedicated entirely to copywriting, says it launched last year. On the site, you can find interviews, case studies and resources helping with topics like how to nail brand humour. This year, Opening Line also published the first issue of their very own annual publication dedicated to the topic, Between The Lines.

Not only is copywriting suddenly being reviewed and talked about publicly, but the business is healthy behind the scenes. According to Zosia, “brand writing (a more all-encompassing term than copy, which relates more to advertising than branding) is being sought out more and more.” The team at Opening Line are seeing “an increase in enquiries not just from brands, but from branding, design and creative agencies too”.

No two brand writing agencies work exactly alike. Some, like Lexicon for example, focus on brand names, “brand names that help our clients build billion-dollar brands”, it says. Opening Line takes a holistic approach, viewing naming as just one part of “the glue that sticks a brand together”, says Zosia. But they all spend time thinking about names.

So, how do you do it? How do you come up with the ‘right’ brand name? Jack from Monika says the process usually doesn’t vary hugely between agencies. “The client provides a brief, the agency asks some questions, then names are generated in a loose creative process and presented back to the agency. At their best, agencies will enlist in-house namers, copywriters or strategists to collaborate on a long list of names which are born of the brief and prescreened by a trademark attorney [...] At their worst, agencies will just post a spreadsheet on Slack for anyone who has time to contribute ideas, with the onus of trademarking left for the client to figure out.”

Though Monika is driven by AI, its process actually provides some clues on how to name a brand. The models for name generation are guided by information extracted from the client brief, but Jack and Mark also keep some models “intentionally unconstrained”. This ensures surprising results are also generated – so you don’t rule out a name like Lime for an unrelated industry, like e-bikes. Then the humans step in, judging the merits of each name and handing the final selection over to the client. Unexpectedness seems to be such an important ingredient that Monika has had to account for it with its AI models.

Many branding design agencies say a good visual identity relies on originality too. Here, we can begin to see the similarities between the two practices: “Our job is to seek out that nugget [of brand differentiation], name it, then use that name as a building block for identity and narrative development,” says Zosia.

Copywriting has not historically been perceived as a flashy practice. While the graphic designer and creative director are celebrated, and brand identities are regularly broken down – on X and on platforms like our own – brand writers have not enjoyed the same level of fame. But, this is changing. Copywriting trends, for example, are discussed more by advertising and design publications – these days, most people know what you mean if you say “the Oatly effect”.

Just like in graphic design, the importance of brand writing can occasionally be amplified to sell a service. (“Don’t get me wrong; naming matters. It just doesn’t matter as much as the person sending you a quote for $30,000 wants you to believe,” says Jack.) Still, it is good to see brand namers receive a little of the glory that is normally reserved for the graphic designer or creative director. This newfound interest in brand writing might also positively impact the kinds of billboard copy we’re used to seeing too. Zosia has noticed more branding agencies investing in their own writers, “where previously they would’ve tried to tackle the writing themselves. So that can only be a good thing, in my opinion.”