I love the challenge of a naming brief, just as I like a crossword or game of Scrabble, and I have created many successful names for businesses over the years.

I created the new name for CAADA (Co-ordinated Action Against Domestic Abuse), a national charity supporting a strong multi-agency response to domestic abuse. Their existing name was difficult to say, spell and remember. To bring clarity to their new strategy, the relentless focus on family safety, we settled on the name – SafeLives. A more positive expression of their ambition.

Recently I came across several online name generators and thought that I’d try them out with the CAADA brief. After inputting some keywords, an indication of the type of organisation they are and the values that they believe in, the site returned a list of over 5,000 suggestions for brand names, with the bonus that each was available for domain registration.

The results were extensive, but clearly the process is flawed. Early results were practical; for example “Abuse Charity” but amongst some of the more extreme options (for this charity dedicated to ending domestic abuse) were; “Abuse Happy”, “Abuse Better”, "Do Abuse". Further down the list, the names became more troubling; “I Love Abuse”, “I Want Abuse”, even “OMG Domestic”, and the slightly more puzzling “Salmon Abuse”. I was still on page 1 of 50.

Great names need to be distinctive and easy to say, they should also be appropriate (without being too generic). The name generator failed. Just like the infinite monkey theorem, name generators may eventually create a great brand name that can be easily registered, but I think I’ll give them a miss for now.

As an alternative, here are my tips for online resources to help with naming challenges.

www.dictionary.com (obviously)
www.thesaurus.com (undoubtedly)
www.findallwords.com (a simple word game site)
www.latin-dictionary.net (or any language dictionaries)
www.123-reg.co.uk (to check registration)

Read more about SafeLives here