We thought this would be easy. I mean, we’re professional namers - this is what we do, all day every day. But no. It was far more difficult than we expected.
Here’s the behind-the-scenes play-by-play version of our renaming experience. We stuck to our typical process, except for the obvious fact that we were both the creative team and also the client.
First, we decided what story we wanted to be able to tell.
This went beyond just “what do we do” and “what makes us special” - it was really about choosing the ONE story that we felt would be most compelling to our target audiences.
We were also thinking about how we wanted to set a good example - i.e. we wanted to choose a name that might be the kind of name that clients sometimes struggle more to swim up to (for example, perhaps a coined name, and definitely not a descriptive name).
After the first round of names, we began trademark pre-screening and discovered that the agency space is very full of very creative people who gave their agencies very creative names. We couldn’t believe some of the names that failed - One Trick Ponies, Proper Noun, Syzygy, Renouned, Rabbit Hole (just a few from the oh so long list ) - and since we were using “confusing similarity” as our filter, we had to let go of names even if the conflict was a design firm that did “branding” and “strategy.” There were definitely some moments of denial when names we really loved didn’t survive the screening (“we could coexist, couldn’t we…?”). But we held ourselves to the same standards we’d use for client projects, believing that we could do better.
Eventually, we had a pretty decent short list of pre-screened names, and we each independently chose our top six names. There were four names we had both chosen, but we both also liked the other two names chosen by the other person. We hopped on a Slack huddle, and 37 minutes later we had our top three names: Prologue, Prequel, and WordSearch.
At that point, we each immediately went to share this short list of names with our respective spouses, which is 100% something we used to tell clients not to do. Now we know that it is pretty much impossible to resist this temptation. Ben and Kim are both better trained than the average person, though, and both had the same negative sentiment about WordSearch… so then our list was down to two names: Prologue and Prequel.
In retrospect, we realized that we were probably swayed by the “creative possibilities” of WordSearch – which is itself a learning / watch-out. (If you’ve ever been on a video call with Mark and seen the giant real-life word search on the wall behind him, you’ll understand our very nerdy, wordy definition of fun.)
Over the next few days, we both asked a few more people for their thoughts and reactions to Prologue vs. Prequel - being careful to provide appropriate background and framing. This exercise further informed our opinions. We both ended up deciding that Prologue was “it” – Prologue was “the” name we HAD to have - which is of course yet another naming no-no, falling in love with a single name. We were proving to be horrible clients!
We had the lawyers do a full trademark and common law screening, and that turned up a Prologue Branding agency that we’d missed in our search. This led to lots of denial and lots of cyber-stalking. It appeared to be a possibly defunct one-man operation out of Texas. We sent an email and called the number on their website - no answer.
We learned that it feels pretty terrible to rule a name out when it feels like there’s a chance that the name isn’t actually in use or is in use by a piddly entity who would likely never know or come after us. But our primary consideration was risk related to client perception and/or client confusion – even though we knew that if a potential client emailed or called the other Prologue, they probably wouldn’t get an answer. The biggest hurdle was the existence of prologuebranding.com. We considered trying to offer to buy it, and we also spent some time thinking about what we could do to rank more highly on Google so that if people searched for “prologue branding agency” they’d find us, not him. Ultimately, though, we determined that we needed to walk away and keep trying.
So… we started generating a new bunch of names, because all of the other names on our short list (which previously we’d thought were so great) no longer felt like good possibilities. We explored even more coined names and more word-specific names because of the crowdedness of the category. Our energy and motivation flagged a bit, and we realized that we were doing what we’ve seen happen time and again with our clients: we weren’t actually moving things forward because renaming is HARD, especially if your current name isn’t completely broken.
Finally we had a new short list, and we repeated the process we’d gone through previously. Again we narrowed it down to three names: Allusive, Prelude, and Prequel. This time we sent all three to the lawyer for a full trademark screening. While we awaited results, we socialized all three names and solicited feedback. There was no clear winner - different people liked and disliked different things - but just hearing people talk about the names helped inform our decision.
We officially selected Prequel as our new name, sent off a brief to the designer creating our logo, snagged a domain, and started working through the rest of our rebranding checklist.
Mark noted feeling an immediate, very slight buyer's remorse once we committed to the name, despite feeling 100% sure that it was the right decision. (He also noted that that kind of math only works for a namer.)
You may have noticed that Prequel had been on our first short list. Hilariously, we ALSO were “typical clients” in that we ended up choosing a name from the first list even after we did several additional rounds of names. (Most of our projects require just one round of names; in projects where we are asked to do more than one round of names, 90+% of the time the name that gets chosen is from the first list.)
Now Prequel is a few months old. We have a logo; we have a website; we’re building our brand. And it’s happened just like we tell our clients it will: now we look back at that long list of names we were choosing from and it just feels so obvious: of COURSE our name is Prequel - what else could it be?