Operative Words

Operative Words is the naming agency of award-winning linguist Anthony Shore, one of the most prolific brand naming experts in the world. Google “Anthony Shore namer”! Over 37 years, Anthony has named more than 275 companies, products, and services, including Accenture, Qualcomm Snapdragon, Adobe Lightroom, Tonal, Fitbit Surge, Virgin Voyages, and Yum! Brands.

The New York Times Magazine wrote a feature about Anthony and his work. Wired, Fortune, NPR, and the BBC have turned to him as the authority on what makes names succeed. Before founding Operative Words, he spent 13 years as Global Director of Naming and Writing at Landor, where he led naming for the world's largest brands, and a year at Lexicon for clients like P&G and Intel.

What you get here that you cannot get anywhere else: the person who directed the naming of Accenture works on your project. Every name, every rationale, every presentation comes from Anthony personally. No junior teams, no handoffs, no dilution. That is the difference between hiring a big naming agency and hiring THE namer.

Anthony is an award-winning linguist (BA with Honors, UC Santa Cruz) who brings scientific rigor to creative work: corpus and computational linguistics, cognitive science, sound symbolism, morphology, and semantics, applied to the practical demands of trademark viability. He presents over 100 names in a typical project, screened against live trademark registers before you ever see them.

Clients range from seed-funded startups to Fortune 500, and the process fits both: focused sprint engagements and comprehensive two-round projects, in four to eight weeks from kickoff to final candidates.

If the name matters, hire THE namer.