Get twelve stakeholders in a room to pick a company name and you will not get the best name in the room. You’ll get the name that offended the fewest people, which is a very different thing, and everyone quietly knows it by the third meeting.
How committees actually select names
Strong names are usually a little polarizing; they lean into a specific point of view, which means at least one stakeholder in a large group will object to almost any good option. The name that survives a twelve-person vote is, structurally, the one nobody felt strongly about either way.
The domain casualty of this process
By the time a watered-down consensus name emerges, the decent matching domain is almost always already registered, because inoffensive, obvious names are the first ones everyone else thought of too. The committee then either overpays for a mediocre domain or bolts on a word to make an available one work, compounding the original problem.
What actually produces good names
A small group, ideally one strong decision-maker with real taste and a couple of trusted advisors, generates options, and one person makes the final call and owns the consequences. It’s less democratic, and it’s how nearly every strong brand name in memory actually got picked, whatever the origin story says in retrospect.
Committees are good at catching genuine landmines: legal problems, offensive readings in other languages, obvious conflicts. They are bad at picking the best of several good options, because “best” requires a point of view, and committees exist to average points of view away.
Use the group to rule names out. Never use it to rule a name in. Let one person with taste and skin in the game make that call, then go buy the domain before the meeting notes get circulated.
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