There is an amazing book on naming called “
Don’t Call it That” by Ninety Nine Monkeys (itself a great name). It starts off with a fun exercise: write down ten or twenty trite names for your company — as many as you can think of.
What makes them so terrible? They say
exactly what you do in the
most literal way and they don’t let through any of your core values or larger mission, those things that create an emotional connection with people.
Now write down how you want people to
feel when they hear your name. You’ll start to make connections with places and people and remember bits of history and words you once heard. These are going to reflect who you are and what you’re about on an emotional and not literal level.
My favorite branding in the agri-tech space includes
Granular,
Descartes Labs, and
Premise. If you look at a sea of green and blue logos with “farm”, “aqua”, “crop”, “ag” etc, Granular sticks out in red and black. Descartes Labs’ logo is for sure logical and rational (cf Cartesian world view) and just as for sure nerds (cartesian being a coordinate system used for mapping, which is what they do). Premise has an open-ended (but positive sounding) name that appeals to NGO wonks, and a logo that suggests the part as it relates to the whole: just like sampling itself.