How to create the perfect brand naming presentation: Tips for success

A brand naming presentation is the tool professionals use to showcase their ideal company name choices to the rest of the shareholders in their team. Brand experts and innovators also use company naming presentations to suggest potential monikers to clients.

The question is, how do you design a presentation tailored for success?

The brand naming presentation is just one part of the full company naming process. It follows hours of research, due diligence, brainstorming, and linguistic checks.

However, if you don’t get this final point in your quest to deliver the perfect name just right, you may have to go right back to the drawing board. Getting your team, or a client to agree on a single brand name requires a significant combination of presentation skills, showmanship, and psychology.

Let’s take a look at the steps involved in a successful naming presentation…

What is a brand naming presentation?

Your brand naming presentation is what everything else in your strategy for naming a company will lead up to. It’s your opportunity to showcase a selection of potential names to your company shareholders, clients, and other professionals, to gather their feedback.

This is your opportunity to demonstrate how you’ve followed the brief given for the naming journey. For instance, if you were asked to choose a descriptive name, you can include a sentence under each title on your slide deck to highlight what it describes.

It’s also a chance to pull the whole team into alignment on a specific title. Your naming presentation should help people to fall in love with a name based on its meaning, emotional impact, and even its simple memorability.

Here are some quick dos and don’ts to get you started:

Do

• Review the brief while creating your presentation, so you can highlight areas where you’ve achieved the goals expected from you.
• Stay formal with your design. While you can use animations and illustrations, don’t just give people a list of names on a post-it note.
• Prime the audience with information about each name, where it came from, and what makes it special.
• Create a slide for each name idea. This will prevent the names from competing for attention on the same page and overwhelming your audience.
• Say each name out loud as you present it. This is a great way to connect with your audience, rather than simply asking them to read the name themselves.

Don’t

• Have a discussion after presenting each name. Instead, cover all of your naming options at once, then invite your attendees to share their feedback.
• Spend too long on any slide. Give your audience time to consume each name in the same amount of time, before moving onto the next.
• Try and “hard sell” a name by arguing with your shareholders or clients if they have a negative reaction.

How to structure a company naming presentation

The exact strategy you use to structure your brand naming presentation will depend on a number of factors. Your company might already have templates to follow when it comes to sharing information with stakeholders or clients.

While there’s plenty of room for flexibility in the presentation, some of the key elements you will need to cover through the process include:

1. The overview

Start by explaining what the team is there to do. The aim is to choose one business name from a selection of potential candidates.

Ask your team members to think very carefully about their preferences and try to choose something they like about each name, rather than just allowing them to suggest nothing “feels right”.

During the overview, you can share some insights into your creative process, and how you came up with each name. Let your audience know you’ve done your research by evaluating the business, the audience, and the marketplace.

This will help them to trust you’ve chosen a brand name with meaning. You can even share reports and statistics from your research.

2. A review of the naming brief

When given the task to name a business, most professionals and employees are given a brief to follow. This brief outlines a few key rules, like what style of name the company might want to choose, and what sort of titles they most want to avoid.

Covering the brief again and highlighting the rules you followed carefully will show you’ve taken the job seriously.

Going over your brief for a second time will also prevent the shareholders from suddenly changing their mind about what they asked for initially. If they do decide they want to change paths, the shift will be the fault of the shareholders, not you.

3. Audience priming pages

There are tons of great business presentation examples out there which show examples of “priming” an audience. The Airbnb pitch deck primes viewers by telling them the problem the company was trying to fix, before going through to the solution.

To prime your audience for your company naming presentation, introduce a question you were trying to answer, or a request you were responding to when coming up for each name.

You might have a slide that introduces how your business is creative, playful, and fun, for example, before following up with your introduction of a similarly fun name.

4. The name slides

As mentioned above, it’s a good idea to give each name its own slide in your presentation. This is a good way to ensure the full attention of your audience is on each title you represent. You don’t need your group to start comparing names until later.

In each slide you present for your names, you should include:

• The name: This should be the center of the slide in large, neutral font.
• A logo design: You could also include a logo mockup but be careful not to allow the style of the logo to dictate your group’s decision, rather than the name.
• A description: While most of your names should be self-explanatory, it’s helpful to add some bullet points or a quick description about the meaning of the name, why it’s relevant to the brand, and what made you choose it.

As you present each slide, speak the name out loud, so your audience can understand the pronunciation of the word. This is particularly important with invented names, as it’s easy for people to end up with different perceptions of how these might sound.

5. The summary

At the end of the presentation, create a summary slide where you can list all of the names you’ve suggested in one collection in the middle of the screen. Don’t worry too much about how to position the names, or which order to put them in.

If you’re not sure, alphabetical order is fine.

During the presentation of the summary slide, this is your chance to re-iterate why you chose each name, how you’ve accomplished the brief, and what the next step is. Tell your group to think carefully about their perceptions of each name before they start sharing their opinion.

A good way to get your team or clients in a positive mood before you jump straight into a discussion is to ask them to say something positive about each name, so you can make a note of the things they like.

This will come in handy if you need to return to the drawing board.

Collecting feedback from the business naming presentation

The last step in your business naming presentation is simply collecting feedback. You’ll need to gather as much in-depth information as possible about each name before you can take your next step.

Ideally, you’ll want to wait until the very end of the presentation until you start discussing options, so ask your attendees to hold their comments as you progress.

Make notes of the things your team says they like and dislike about each name. If someone gives a basic answer like “it just doesn’t feel right”, try to dive a little deeper into how the name does make that person feel, so you know what to avoid in the future.

If you’ve done your homework and followed the brief, you should end up with a few names your business leaders or clients like. However, they may offer some suggests, like changing the spelling, or getting rid of words if there’s more than one in a title.

If you find none of the names are approved, it might be a good idea to go through the entire naming brief again and find out where you might have gone wrong.

Fabrik: A naming agency for our times.

We’ve made our name famous by naming other businesses.

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