Key Points:
- AI Enhances, But Doesn’t Replace, Human Judgment: AI can generate creative brand name ideas, but it still lacks the emotional intuition and cultural sensitivity that human insights provide.
- Subconscious Reactions Matter Most: Consumers often respond to brand names instinctively (System 1 thinking), making emotional impact more critical than literal descriptions.
- AI Misses Contextual Nuances: From trademark conflicts to cultural missteps, AI tools still fall short in fully understanding language and societal context.
- Best Results Come from Human-AI Collaboration: The most effective branding and market research strategies combine AI’s speed and scale with human emotional intelligence and experience.
When AI Meets Branding: Lessons from the Naming World
Let’s talk about something fascinating that’s happening at the intersection of AI and market research. In a recent podcast from early 2025, naming expert Mike Carr shared some eye-opening insights about how AI is changing the game – but not entirely replacing human judgment.
AI: Your Creative Brainstorming Buddy
If you’ve played around with AI tools lately, you know they’ve gotten pretty impressive at creative tasks. Carr confirms this, noting that with the right prompts, AI can now generate brand names on par with those from top creative professionals. It’s like having a 24/7 brainstorming partner that can take you down paths you might never have explored on your own.
But here’s the kicker – while AI can spit out dozens of creative name options, it struggles with something fundamentally human: knowing which names will actually connect with people on an emotional level.
Where AI Still Falls Short
Even in 2025, Carr points out that AI has some significant blind spots when it comes to market research:
“Their linguistic analysis doesn’t find everything. There are still some gaping holes between what they say they can do and what they can actually do.”
For instance, AI trademark searches often miss potential conflicts that could derail your brand launch. And when it comes to checking names across different languages and cultures? Let’s just say you shouldn’t trust AI alone unless you’re comfortable with potentially embarrassing translation fails.
The Secret Sauce: Our Subconscious Responses
The most fascinating part of Carr’s discussion revolves around how our brains actually process and respond to brand names. Drawing on Daniel Kahneman’s concepts of System 1 (fast, instinctive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate) thinking, Carr explains that most of our reactions to names happen below our conscious awareness.
“The brain is the one organ in the body that uses the most energy for its weight,” Carr explains. “Rational thought, conscious thinking, just burns tons of calories.” Because of this, we’ve evolved to let our subconscious handle many decisions – including our initial reactions to brand names.
Real-World Example: The Smart Toothbrush Test
To show this principle in action, Carr shares a fascinating case study about a smart toothbrush designed to help parents monitor their kids’ brushing habits.
When researchers asked parents to consciously rate different name options, “Intelligent Toothbrush” came out on top. Makes sense, right? It clearly describes what the product does.
But when they measured how quickly and instinctively parents responded to each name – tracking that gut-level, System 1 reaction – “Smart Mouth” was the clear winner. It triggered an immediate emotional response that the more descriptive name simply couldn’t match.
The follow-up interviews revealed why: while some parents disliked the name (reminding them too much of their kids’ backtalk), many recognized that this playful, edgy name would actually appeal to their children. As one parent put it, “Smart Mouth sounds like something that they might want to try.”
Finding the Sweet Spot: Human + AI
Carr’s ultimate takeaway? AI is an incredible tool, but it’s at its best when paired with human insight:
“That combination of a human with the AI seems to be the most productive path forward for us.”
The technology can generate options and analyze certain kinds of data, but it can’t replicate our intuitive understanding of emotional connections and cultural nuances. The brands that will win tomorrow aren’t choosing between AI or human market research – they’re skillfully blending both.
So next time you’re considering cutting humans out of your market research process entirely, remember: some aspects of consumer psychology remain uniquely human territory. The most successful companies will be those that leverage AI’s strengths while preserving the irreplaceable human elements of market research.
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Podcast Transcript
Mike Carr (00:06):
This is our first episode of 2025 for NameStormers, because we’ve been inundated playing with AI and all the different flavors. But there’s something we’ve learned about AI that I wanted to share with you today and provide actually an example. AI makes us all more human, and that actually is a very good thing when it comes to naming. These LLMs, these GPTs, these AI agents, the generative ai, et cetera, they’re getting pretty darn good when it comes to creating names, right? With the right prompting, the right iterative approach, at least for us, they’re actually able to create names on par with some of our best creatives. More importantly, they’re able to give us a springboard, and give us some directions that we wouldn’t have gone down without their help. But what they can’t do, and I don’t think what they ever can do, is really assess which names are the names that you seriously consider, and which names should you not.
(01:11):
Now, some of them will say they can go out and do trademark searches and they can do linguistic searches, and we’ve tested that, and as of end of January, 2025, they still miss things. Their linguistic analysis doesn’t find everything. So there’s still some gaping holes between what they say they can do and what they can actually do. But the thing that I wanted to talk about is they can’t really assess which name is going to grab your attention and cut through that clutter almost without any conscious thought and get you to take that next step. A name really has to build a connection with your prospective customer very quickly for it to work the way you’re probably going to want it to work, regardless of how much money or how little money you have. So lemme take you through an example, and this is a study we actually conducted with parents, but it’s a fictitious example.
(02:08):
So you’re a parent of some kiddos and they’re middle school and you took ’em to the dentist, and guess what the dentist said, both your son and daughter have got multiple cavities. They’re clearly not brushing their teeth. If you don’t get them to start brushing their teeth properly, next time you come in here, you’re going to four figures. The dental bill is going to get into thousands. Oh my gosh, right? And so you go home and think, oh my God, what are we going to do? You start researching, how can I get my kids to brush their teeth better? And you find out that there’s this new toothbrush out, it’s a smart toothbrush, and it’s got some built-in technology, actually some AI technology. And I’ve got a picture on the screen right now of what this thing looks like. At least our mockup, if you’re just listening to this, I’ll describe it to you.
(02:55):
It’s a toothbrush that glows a little bit, and when you put it in your mouth, a timer comes on. And so it beeps once you’ve brushed so much in your upper right quadrant or your upper left quadrant, your lower left quadrant, behind your teeth, in front of your teeth. So that two minutes is the total elapsed time. You get all eight quadrants of your mouth and it actually can track and keep score of how well your son or daughter did in brushing their teeth on a day by day basis. And there’s a little app so you as a parent can get a little report whenever you want it on who brushed their teeth appropriately and all this other kind of stuff. So it’s a very cool idea. And so we named this thing, we provided a bunch of names because one of the things we want to try to do is, okay, let’s let parents know that this is even out there and maybe engage them to try to give it a shot.
(03:46):
And so we tested these names, and we showed a bunch of names on the screen. You can see that now if you’re watching the video and we’re looking for, the obvious question is, you want to know which name on this five point Likert scale is of greatest interest to you, right? It’s going to drive purchase intent, it’s going to grab your attention, very much so, not at all. And so they score these names. That’s the traditional way of doing research. But what we’re doing, this is what’s so interesting and what’s so important about this methodology, and it goes back to Daniel Kahneman’s book, thinking Fast and Slow, where he talks about the system one versus system two thinking. But basically, we as human beings have evolved to use less energy when we don’t need the energy. So the brain is the one organ in the body that uses the most energy for its weight.
(04:35):
And so rational thought, conscious thinking just burns tons of calories. So the default that we’ve evolved through over the ages is a lot of things never rise to the conscious thought level. They’re just dealt with subconsciously. It’s a reaction. You can’t even understand why you’re reacting that way necessarily. It’s just that quick. And that’s called System one. And that’s the way most folks evaluate names. They don’t think of a name as a great name, a crummy name. They just react to a name. So when we’re testing these names and we’re asking parents to evaluate these names on this five point scale, we’re not as interested in which names they score as top as much as we are which names do they react to instantly and select initially, and then they don’t mess with it. And so we’re monitoring the order of selection, the speed of selection, and some other metrics.
(05:36):
Now if you do this the traditional way, here’s the graph and the traditional X axis, linear scale, you can see all the names are sort of clustered together. And the one that’s sort of on the top is Intelligent Toothbrush. That’s the name we suggested. And sure enough, when parents think about it, well, this is a smart toothbrush with some AI technology built in. Intelligent Toothbrush seems to be the obvious choice, right? It tells you exactly what it is, but then when you look at their behavior, you look at their reaction on this next chart, the Y axis pops up, and that’s where we’re looking at that speed of response and that order of response. All of a sudden, another name blows up to the top, and that’s Smart Mouth. Now, we then had some verbatims in our research about why did they pick intelligent toothbrush? Why did they pick Smart Mouth and some other names?
(06:25):
And not everybody loves Smart Mouth, which is one reason it didn’t score as well on that positive axis as Intelligent Toothbrush. Intelligent Toothbrush was actually rated by parents as the best. Smart Mouth was a close second when you think about how did parents rate it. But Smart Mouth was way above the others when it came to that speed of reaction. And the Verbatims shed some interesting light there. Some parents did not like Smart Mouth. Why? Because their kids were already back talking to them. They already had a smart mouth, and they didn’t want to encourage that kind of behavior with a toothbrush that had the name. But a lot of other parents said, you know what? That’s a name that I think my son or daughter would find cool and hip. And for them it’s got an edge to it. It’s got a little bit of personality.
(07:18):
They want to be a little bit rebellious and not always do what Mom and Dad asked them to do. And Smart Mouth sounds like something that they might want to try. And so those parents felt like it would increase compliance, that they wouldn’t have to harass their kids as much. If the toothbrush was called Smart Mouth, they thought it’d be sort of cool and hip versus a name like Intelligent Toothbrush that was just boring and the teens could have cared less about it. So we recommended going forward with Smart Mouth just based upon this research. And what it comes back to is to us Smart Mouth is a name that connects emotionally. It generates that instant reaction. You don’t necessarily even know why, but it’s a characteristic of being a true human. And it’s something that AI can’t necessarily pick up on. It’s that nuance.
(08:14):
It’s that subtle thinking that comes through with a name development. So in developing names, we certainly encourage everyone to use AI. It is a great brainstorming partner. We wouldn’t necessarily start there. It can sort of bias your thinking. And a lot of the names AI comes up with tend to be Me Too. They tend to be like all the other names already out there as opposed to breakthrough names. But it’s a great tool. It does fall short in a few areas. I mentioned a couple of those at the beginning. One was don’t rely upon it for trademark legal screening. It simply is not correct, and it’ll lead you down the wrong path based upon a lot of testing we’ve done. Don’t rely upon linguistic or cultural screening for profanities. It misses a ton of stuff. It doesn’t pick up on all the phonetic equivalencies. It doesn’t pick up on cultural nuances. And most importantly though, it can’t suss out which of the names is really the best name because it doesn’t understand the nuances and the subtleties of the human mind and how we react to things almost unconsciously. But that combination of a human with the AI seems to be the most productive path forward for us. Enjoy the rest of your week. Talk to you here again pretty soon. See you.
