Welcome to Naming in an AI Age!

Welcome to our creative community! After a temporary hiatus from our podcasting days, the NameStormers team is back with a new channel: “Naming in an AI Age.” Episodes will span topics from our creative name generation to our preliminary trademark screening techniques to our proprietary market research methods. Join various members of the NameStormers team every Tuesday at 7am to gain more insight into the mind of the consumer and the little-known niche of naming! On this inaugural episode, join Mike Carr (founder and CEO of NameStormers) and Adelaide Brown (interim podcast host) to learn more about the NameStormers process and the future of the podcast! Watch our first episode on Youtube or listen on Spotify!

Episode One of “Naming in an AI Age” Podcast

Adelaide Brown:
Hi, welcome to “Naming in an AI Age” with NameStormers Creative Consultants. My name is Adelaide Brown, and I have the pleasure of putting these podcasts together with our founder and CEO, Mike Carr, to create and build a community curious about creative naming development with the introduction of new technologies and research techniques. Mike, can you tell us a little bit about the background behind the creation of the NameStormers Company?
Mike Carr:
You bet. And we were terrible, terrible namers when we got started. So, we have made lots of mistakes. So back in 1985, we left, uh, a subsidiary of Nielsen, the market research folks, and four of us started this new company. We had no idea what we wanted to do. One of the guys had written a naming program on an IBM, uh, mainframe, for Anderson Clayton Foods. So, we thought, hey, PCs are pretty new, why don’t we write the first naming software for a pc? But we didn’t really know for sure we were gonna do that. And so, we came up with our own name, which was “Salinon.” And “Salinon” is a real mathematical word that represents four semi-circles and since there were four of us that started the company, we thought “that’s pretty cool.” But can you imagine a naming company calling themselves “Salinon”? It was awful. And so, we had to get away from that pretty darn quick. But anyway, we got started and we wrote the first, uh, commercially available naming software available on a PC in the world. Sold thousands of copies from there. So that’s a little bit about how we got started.
Adelaide Brown:
That’s super exciting and quite the journey they say, “practice makes perfect,” so it seems like y’all have gotten enough practice under your belt. “Salinon” with a, a bit of a rough start, but look at you now.
Mike Carr:
For sure.
Adelaide Brown:
So, tell me a little bit about these copies that were sold and how they developed the AI-kind of module platform developed into the consulting company you hold now.
Mike Carr:
We actually had an AI module back in 1985/86 in Namer. “Namer” was the, the name of our software product. It actually ran in DOS. This was before Windows really was a thing, and we really understand what AI was, cause it really wasn’t a thing. But the way the adaptive learning model worked was you taught it and so it would throw up a name. And then you would, you would rank it or rate it, you know, good or bad, and then it would sort of try to learn from, okay, it’s, it’s seen, you know, 15 bads and five goods. Let’s try to give you, as the user, more names in line with your preferences. The problem was it took forever to learn, right? It, it had to ask literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names, so it got to be very tedious. So, it was a disaster when it comes to what artificial intelligence, chat GPT, generative AI can do today, but it did lead us to a Windows version, which came out a few years later called Name Pro, and it had more sophisticated databases, it had better data, it had some new methodologies, and again, still artificial intelligence. AI really wasn’t discussed. It wasn’t a buzzword at all. But we were moving in that direction. What we found, however, was clients and customers and folks that needed a name needed more than just what a software tool could give them. Uh, they had trouble figuring out, well, is this a good name or a bad name? Uh, does this name pass the hurdles in terms of trademark screening and linguistic screening? Does it work with my target? You know, would they like this name? And so, they ended up just calling us and saying, “Hey, we either love or don’t love, or maybe sort of like your software, but why don’t you just guys do this for us?” So that’s sort of how we segued into the consulting business, even though we started as a software company and even with some software, that was sort of the, the beginnings of an AI solution.
Adelaide Brown:
And y’all started with four of you?
Mike Carr:
Correct.
Adelaide Brown:
Having left Nielsen, but that’s not the case anymore. Can you tell me about the team evolution and the kind of company you’ve built now?
Mike Carr:
Yeah. We had a, we had a team of, of folks that were all pretty senior. Dan Stone was the, the chairman of, of our new company, and he had been a successful entrepreneur, at an older company called Dan Ray. Brilliant mathematician. I mean, he would read, you know, advanced calculus books for fun at night. I mean that kind of a mind. And then we had two other guys, Philip Linsley and Richard Dowd, that also were very smart, analytical types, uh, but they really like the data aspects of it. And, and moving in in more of an analytics direction and didn’t feel that naming held their passion as much as some of the other things that we were working on. So, we spun off in 1993 and started NameStormers as an independent entity and then have sort of been going forward from there.
Adelaide Brown:
Nice. So, tell me what kind of work have you been doing? What’s been a favorite project you’ve
had? Just a couple little fun facts about NameStormers as it stands today.
Mike Carr:
We’ve had some truly amazing clients and I think, you know, we try to share our learnings with
clients and at first, we were awful at doing everything- right? The names we came up with were terrible. They didn’t really fit the client’s positioning or branding. Uh, they didn’t dovetail nicely in with their whole messaging campaign. But in working with some of our early clients, I think we got a lot better at that and we would try to share with them our perspectives and we quite frankly, we, we just listened a lot, right? We listened and we asked a few key questions, and we sort of learned from there. So, one of the examples is that, you know, Circuit City came to us years ago. I mean, they’re no longer even in business. And they were sort of a big box electronics retailer like Best Buy. And they said, we wanna get into the used car business. And we just thought that was a bit odd. So, we said, why? And they said, cause it’s a sleazy experience right now. Right? Nobody feels like they’re getting a good deal. Or very few people feel like they’re getting a good deal when they buy a used car, right? You just never know. Right? You, well, did I pay too much? Is this thing gonna fall apart? And they felt like there was an opportunity to add a degree of professionalism and so they were going to really improve that whole experience. So, we came up with a lot of names for them. And one of the names was CarMax. And so, CarMax today is a fairly well-known brand in that space. You know, they’ve got multiple locations around the country and, and perhaps even outside of the country now, I’m not sure. And Circuit City went out of business, but the key to that project was they wanted something that was short, that was easy to say and spell. And most importantly, you could see on a sign when you’re driving down the road, often on an interstate. This was before Google Maps. This was before, you know, people could really just Google and say, well, gimme directions to the CarMax. And it was so new that they felt, hey, something that’s short that sort of says, we’re about automobiles. So “Car” sort of relate automobiles and then “Max,” you know, big inventory, right? Or “maximizing our customer service” or “maximizing the professionalism that you’re going to experience in a very new novel and exciting way.” When you walk through the doors at a CarMax dealership and all those things, they were able to deliver upon. So, the name wasn’t maybe super inspired, but it was a name that worked very well for them and delivered on some of the key criteria they had at that point in time. Uh, when they really started this thing.
Adelaide Brown:
Yeah. Wow. That, I mean, a few locations feels like an understatement. I feel like I see a CarMax every time I get on the highway, but I feel like that anecdote really speaks so intentionally to this statement you have on the website to the. “What’s in a name? Opportunity. We create product, company and service names that help you get the opportunities you deserve.” So, I’m excited to dig into this project, build out a couple more, have some more conversations, and um, learn more about your experiences as we keep recording, keep podcasting. So, stick around and we’ll have new episodes coming out once a week.
Mike Carr:
Sounds great. Thanks so much Adelaide.
Adelaide Brown:
Bye Mike.
Mike Carr:
See ya.
Adelaide Brown:
Join the NameStormers team next Tuesday on “Naming in an AI Age” as we discuss how the podcast actually got its name. We’ll talk to you then!