I may name things for a living, but I’m not in a rush to name all the steps in my process. My plan is not to design a list of fancy techniques, but rather to keep doing the work and to note the methods so useful and so unique they call out for a name. One such practice I’m excited to share is fittingly most useful during the inception of a naming or branding project, and its goal is to augment (or in some cases replace) the left-brain brief with some unexpected, evocative right-brain shortcuts to the endgame.
Triangulation™ takes its name from the classic geometric technique used in geographic surveying, by which an unknown position can be derived from what is known about existing locations and their spatial relationships to the missing data point. Applied to naming, the method denotes a process of selecting those existing brand names (within all relevant categories) that will serve as inspiring reference points for the new name.
The axiom: There exist names that are equally similar to and different from the name we are looking for and it is these names that we want to both belong among and distinguish ourselves against.
The key question: Which three or four or five names that already exist in the broad category we plan on entering capture the essence of what needs to be communicated in a tone we think is right?
The other axiom: The best brand names aren’t so much invented as found.
As an information-gathering technique, Triangulation can work just as well when one person contributes an answer as when twenty do. It adapts to a workshop exercise, an email interview, or a conversation. It is a thought-freeing exercise, flexible because it can be applied across very different competitive and cultural paradigms. Relevant names can include not just the competition and sister brands in the portfolio, but also names that might wind up appearing alongside the new name in various everyday settings, or ones that simply feel overwhelmingly pertinent to the target audience or the business at hand.
The application of this method to my work follows the somewhat heretic observation that a brief isn’t always the motivating medium it aspires to be, especially when it is a seemingly brilliant brief that isn’t giving rise to any good solutions. Sometimes verbalizing strategic assumptions appears to block the creative mind instead of opening it, much the way witnesses to crimes are reported less able to recognize a face if they have made a previous attempt to describe it using words. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a flawless brief—I’ve merely learned that sometimes you need to take your brief, flawless or flawed, and fold it up into a paper airplane so you can try something different.
That’s really it, distilled: Triangulation is the brief that is completely different.
