William Shakespeare famously dismissed the importance of names. But a more modern wordsmith has built a three-decade career on exactly those names.
Anthony Shore, 56, is a professional namesake who has named more than 250 companies and products – and one dog. The names he has directed include Accenture, Adobe Lightroom, Yum! Brands, Dreyer’s Slow-Churned ice cream, Tonal home gym, Starry Internet Services, Virgin Voyages and FedEx Custom Critical.
Shore’s names have found their way into space — a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip powered a NASA helicopter that landed on Mars — and the wrists of presidents: the Fitbit Ionic is former President Obama’s favorite watch.
Trained as a linguist, Shore has worked as a copywriter and typesetter and has led naming projects at branding agencies Lexicon Branding and Landor Associates. Since 2009, Shore has run his own naming and branding agency, Operative Words.
“It’s the best job in the world,” Shore said recently Fortune. “I sit all day and just think about ideas and words.”
Public naming
Perhaps the most high-profile naming project Shore directed was the renaming of Andersen Consulting to Accenture – “an accent on the future.”
In August 2000, the International Chamber of Commerce ordered Andersen Consulting to change its name after it spun off from the accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP. Shore, then director of writing and naming at Landor Associates, was brought in to lead the project.
The name “Accenture” was initially submitted by a company employee – and was among the thousands of original and submitted names Shore pored over. When it came time for the firm’s senior partners to vote on the final name, it was two to one in Accenture’s favor over the next 50 names, Shore said.
“It was the only name on the list that started with AC, and the Andersen Consulting logo was an A with a superscript C,” Shore said. “So there was a little bit of comfort, I think, that this name brought.”
Accenture reportedly spent $100 million on the rebrand – and it turned out to be money well spent when Arthur Andersen, the tax firm, became embroiled in the Enron scandal in 2001.
Shore declined to share how much he charges for his naming services, but according to StartupNation, hiring professional namers can cost between $10,000 and $100,000 depending on the size of the project and the company.
Kill your loved ones
Shore’s naming projects typically take about seven weeks from start to finish. He first sits down with the client to discuss their vision and tastes, and then creates a list of “name objectives.”
Using the objectives as a guide, Shore and his team come up with a list of more than a thousand names, aided by linguistic software that maps the relationship between words.
Shore then narrows it down to a shortlist of 100 to 150 names and sends it to its trademark partner to screen trademark availability. By the time the screening is complete, there are typically at least 50 low-risk names still on the list.
Shore presents these names to the customer and receives feedback within a few days. Over the next three weeks, Shore will create another, more targeted batch of about 100 names to show to the customer.
After some consultation, the client selects a shortlist of three to five names and then completes further screenings with their legal team. The customer ultimately chooses one final name and files an intent-to-use application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
“We’re developing over a thousand names, and we’re killing off all but one of those favorites,” Shore said.
Sometimes he keeps the fallen names in his back pocket, but few of them will live to see another day.
“I’m in the business of naming for the long haul, and I can’t really spend time or effort lamenting the names that have fallen by the wayside,” he said.
“I can’t turn it off”
What makes a great name? Shore points to three important characteristics: that it is inspiring, differentiable and of course legally available.
“A name is only as good as it is available,” he said.
Although Shore loves his job, he often finds himself unable to turn off his naming reflex in his daily life.
“I have feelings about names when I see them, whether I want those feelings or not,” he said. “I can’t turn it off.”
One of the names Shore has strong feelings about is Kyndryl – a spin-off of IBM’s infrastructure services that was founded in 2021. The name is a combination of ‘relatedness’ and ‘rank’, according to an IBM press release.
“It’s meaningless, it’s counterintuitive to say and spell,” Shore said. “It’s a name I just can’t stand.”
If bad names were a crime, Elon Musk’s X would be at the top of Shore’s guilty list.
“X is a branding crime,” Shore said. “It is a crime to have taken the Twitter brand with all its shares and its entire brand ecosystem and debranded it with this ready-made idea that is completely undifferentiated.”
But in Musk’s defense, “The Boring Company,” the name of his tunneling startup, works.
“I think that’s a super cool name,” Shore said. “10 out of 10, no notes.”
Shore has more than 250 brand names to his name, but he has never been asked to name a child. He once had the opportunity to name a friend’s chocolate Labrador – a rare opportunity where he could go all out, free from the constraints of trademark availability and customer feedback.
Shore named the Labrador after a brand of chocolate syrup that he remembers well from his childhood: Bosco.