Naming in an AI Age

AI and the Future of Naming: How Personalization and Expertise Drive Success

• The NameStormers • Season 3 • Episode 2

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In this episode, Mike Carr dives into AI’s growing role in branding and naming, emphasizing how personalized prompts lead to better results. Inspired by Dana Malstaff of Boss Moms, he highlights the power of building an AI history—providing brand context, competitors, budget, and trademark needs—to generate more relevant names, taglines, and rationale. While AI tools like Gemini 1.5 Pro and Claude are game-changers, they can’t replace human expertise in trademark clearance and strategy. 

Mike Carr (00:12):

Well, hello again. I'm back this week to talk about some of the newest developments in ai, and one of the things that's been so unsettling is out of China with deep seek. So I'm recording this on January 29th, 2025. And maybe by the time you watch this or listen to this, things will settle down. But tremendous implications for AI in general, if it now becomes a lot less expensive, it's open source, so it's easier to get in there and do things the way you want to, especially from a naming standpoint. And so that's exciting. And I wanted to talk a little bit about some things that we've learned and some people that we respect and what they're talking about, how they're using AI and how that impacts naming. So one of the most interesting insights comes from a episode of Marketing Companion, which is a podcast that Mark Schafer puts together every couple of weeks.

(01:10):

And he was talking to Dana Malstaff, and Dana is the founder of Boss Moms, which I think is a brilliant name. I mean, she did this years ago. And you think about Boss Moms and who she was trying to target with that name as an example. These are moms at home with the kids, with the little infant and maybe feeling a little bit out of control. And it was about empowering mothers, new mothers, right? You're in control, you can take charge. And she has some interesting insights on this podcast with Mark, not about Boss Mom, but about AI and how she thinks about AI and how she uses ai. And I thought this was fascinating because it applies to naming Season 12, episode two on Marketing Companion. It's titled The Most Human Company Wins. Well, let me recap what Dana said and why I think it's very insightful from a naming standpoint.

(02:10):

She was talking about how if you just use ai, it makes no difference, right? It can be chat, GBT, it can be clawed, it can be meta, llama, whatever. You enter in some query, and let's pretend this was a naming query, right? So let's say you're trying to name a new cosmetic product and it has some amazing natural ingredients that make your skin glow and soft and everything else. So you just enter in some prompt like, Hey, chat, GPT, you're a professional namer with decades of experience. You're a brand guru. I want you to come up with 20 short, fun, exciting, engaging names for a genzer or young millennial that relates to this new cosmetic with these properties, right? So you think about that prompt. Well, what it identifies the role that you want the AI engine to play. It identifies the product, it identifies the target, it identifies the kind of name you're after, and then you maybe give it some attributes like softer skin and a beautiful looking face makes you look 10 years younger in the case of a Gen Z or maybe a few years older, who knows?

(03:17):

But it's this idea that you're prompting it like we all know how to do, and maybe it's a series of prompts. And that's pretty basic, right? Here's where it got interesting with Dana, and she was saying, okay, if you're a mom and you're giving it queries like that, but for your kid or for childcare, whatever the situation is, you get some fairly generic responses, right? And likewise with the name, you enter that kind of query for a cosmetics name and you get 20 names, and they sound like all the other names are already out there. What you need to give AI and what you can now do with some of the better l LMS that are out there, these large language models, is you can build a profile. And her point was, look, share with the AI conversation like you might have with your best friend that, Hey, I'm frazzled today.

(04:08):

It's just not been a good week. The kids have been sick. I haven't been feeling that. Well, my husband's off traveling. He hasn't been around the house at all for three days to help out. And you build this history over time with AI so that it understands your specific situation and all the challenges and stresses you're dealing with, and if you do it right, it will come back with a suggestion that's much more tailored and specific to your environment. And Mark found this fascinating, and I did too. I had never thought about AI that way, which maybe means I'm way behind the times, but nevertheless, Dana provided something that I thought was pretty cool. So let's think about this from a naming standpoint. Spend some time and build a complete profile, a complete history. Here's our company, here are our competitors. Here are links to our competitors' websites that I'd like you to go check out here are links to some of our competitors' advertisements.

(05:09):

I would like you to go out and search the last hundred ads you can find from these companies and save them in this profile that you're building for me. So you're feeding into whichever AI tool you're using, the relevant history, the competitive environment, the marketplace, things like we don't have much of a budget for this. Certain names lend themselves to success, but only if you have a big budget. Think about some of the automobile companies, some of the pharmaceutical companies that have these more esoteric extract names. They're very cool, but you have to hear the story. You have to watch the app. Well, most of our clients, and most of you guys probably don't have those kind of budgets. And even if you're with a big company, that kind of budget only comes around once every couple of years. And most of the time you're facing much smaller, more realistic budget.

(05:58):

So you share with your AI partner, if you will, all the things, all the limitations, and just what you need. Look, I have a very limited staff, or our staff is super busy. We don't have time to launch a full social media campaign. So you paint this picture, you spend a few hours because you're feeding it all this information, web links, data that you might have in your database, internal research reports. You're building this profile and you're also painting a picture of the realities of the situation that you're in. But look, we need a name we can trademark. Now, I'll tell you right now, AI is not very good at finding trademark conflicts. We consistently try this and it just fails miserably. So it might give you an initial cut, but you absolutely have to check, right? You only name and it comes back and suggests, and then you ask it for not just the name, but give me the story, give me the context, give me your thinking as to why you think this is a good name.

(07:00):

Give me a tagline or some strap lines. Why do you think that might work? And so you engage in this conversation after feeding it a lot of data, and it retains this history. So you're building this history, loading all this into its memory. The results I think, are going to be phenomenal. Now, we have done a little bit of this. It's pretty exciting when you paint the right picture, what it's coming back with. So AI's evolving, it's changing faster than any of us could have imagined. It's frustrating to figure out even which AI do I use? Do I use Claude? Do I use Gemini? If I use Gemini, do I use deep research, which I've been using a lot. I'm pretty impressed with what Gemini 1.5 Pro deep research can do. And I know that's a mouthful, but I think that's the version I'm currently on.

(07:52):

What we're finding is most effective as a naming agency, as someone that can advise and help our clients, not really to use AI to replace what we do, because we feel like we're always bringing an expertise in the real world implementation, how to suss out hidden problems with the names, how to help with that legal clearance and that linguistic clearance that AI cannot do, and that you certainly don't want to rely upon whatever results that comes back with. So there's a lot, I think of experience and expertise that anyone that's been doing this for almost 40 years like we have bring to the table. But I think part of the value too, we're providing clients is, look, we don't want to waste your money doing things for you that you could do yourself coming up with a great name or a name that potentially could be great isn't really what you're paying is for, quite frankly.

(08:47):

It was never what you were paying is for. It's all the other things. So if we can help you get to the point where these names are looking pretty good, but you then need help with how do I sell them internally? How do I test the names with my respective customer? Are there any other names out there? Are there ways to prompt ai? Those are all spaces that we play in a very big way. And because we're doing this all the time, all kinds of customers, we're just gaining expertise and experience that you're not going to be able to by yourself even for your department. So give this a try. I recommend going to Marketing Companion. And if you're inclined listening to Dana Maloff and Mark Schafer's podcast, it's only about 30 minutes long and they cover lots of other stuff too. But I just think Boss Moms is such a brilliant name. Dana is such a brilliant marketer, and I've always thought highly of Mark Schafer, who's written half a dozen or more books. So I think he'll get some value out of that podcast. And then certainly give us a holler email, phone call, whatever. If you'd like to talk further about your naming need or how to use AI in this space. Have a great rest of your week. See you.