What is naming and messaging?
Naming and messaging is the verbal half of a brand identity. Naming decides what the brand, its products and its sub-brands are called. Messaging decides what the brand says about itself: the key message, the supporting points, the tagline and the language it uses with each audience. Together they define how a brand is introduced the first time someone meets it, and how it is described when that person tells a friend.
They are often delivered as one project because they depend on each other. A name sets expectations that the messaging has to meet, and the messaging gives an invented name its meaning.
Why it matters
Why naming and messaging matter
Most of a brand's first impressions are verbal. People hear the name in conversation, read a headline, see a line under a logo. If the name is forgettable or the messaging is vague, the visual identity has to carry the whole load, and it rarely can. When the words are right, everything else gets easier: the design has something to express, the films have a point to make and the sales team has a story it can tell in one breath.
The verbal identity is also the part of a brand that other people use. Employees describe the company in their own words every day, customers recommend it in theirs and journalists summarize it in a sentence. Giving them a clear name and clear language to borrow is how the brand gets described the way it intends.
In practice
How naming and messaging work in practice
- 01
The work begins with strategy: the brand's position, audience and personality. Naming comes first, generating and screening candidates for meaning, sound and legal availability. Once a name is chosen, the messaging is built around it, starting with the key message and the brand voice, then the tagline, the boilerplate and the descriptions for each audience.
- 02
Both are tested in real use before they are final: on a homepage, in a launch film script, on packaging, read aloud. The output is a verbal identity guide that sits beside the visual guidelines, so that every writer, partner and spokesperson introduces the brand the same way.
At RIOT
Naming and messaging at RIOT
We named and designed our own brands, Krova, AltSounds, vandal_, Muvvoo and Modchip, so we know what it takes for a new name to start meaning something. On the client side, our 2022 rebrand film and new identity trailer for the Washington Commanders helped launch the team's new name and identity: the moment where naming and messaging meet the public for the first time, and the words have to land with everything riding on them.
Watch out
What people get wrong about naming and messaging
Doing them separately, with different teams and no shared strategy, then discovering the name promises something the messaging cannot deliver. The other mistake is leaving the words until after the design. A visual identity can express a story, but it cannot invent one; the story has to be written first. A third is testing names on their own, in a list, where nothing sounds right. Names should be judged inside the messaging they will live with.
