Top American QSR Brand

Before the larger systems work began, our relationship with this brand started with two discrete naming projects. The first: rename the brand's Kids' Meal. The existing name felt generic—a category placeholder rather than a brand expression. Our task was to develop a Suggestive name with real personality: something playful without being juvenile, fun without being forced, and capable of standing on its own without the words "Kids' Meal" attached.

We developed Naming Criteria to anchor the work, defining what the name needed to accomplish before a single candidate was considered. From those criteria, we ran a full development process—two rounds of creative generation, stakeholder scoring sessions, legal screening, and consumer survey testing. The final name was selected through a rigorous shortlist review and earned strong marks across every dimension of our testing framework: appeal, anticipation, brand fit, and clarity.
The project gave us our first window into how naming decisions were being made across this organization—and what it would take to make that process more reliable at scale.

We began broader naming systems development with research—structured conversations with stakeholders from every team that touches a menu item name: Brand, Market Research, Product Development, Culinary, and Legal. Our goal was to understand how the current process worked in practice, where it broke down, and what the real pain points were for each group involved.

What we found was a pattern common to many large organizations: naming decisions were being made reactively, inconsistently, questioned too late, and without clear ownership. Working names adopted early in product development were becoming entrenched long before any formal naming process could intervene. Testing methodologies varied from project to project, producing data that couldn't be compared or accumulated over time. And without a shared vocabulary or framework for naming decisions, disagreements tended to escalate rather than resolve.

From this research, we helped design an entirely new cross-functional naming workflow—one that defined who owns naming decisions at each stage, established formal input processes across cross-functional teams, and built in structured review moments at key milestones rather than ad hoc. We formalized two distinct roles: a Naming Lead (the engine that keeps the process moving) and a Naming Advisory Team (a cross-functional group with decision-making authority at critical approvals). We also introduced a code-naming practice to prevent working names from calcifying into de facto final names before proper development begins—solving one of the brand's most persistent sources of naming churn.

The second early project was a Suggestive name for a new event format the brand was introducing—a fresh retail experience distinct enough from their traditional experience to warrant its own identity. Here the challenge was different: the name needed to feel like an extension of the parent brand without being derivative of it, and it had to work across signage, marketing, and internal communications without confusion.

We developed Naming Criteria specific to the format's positioning and strategic context, ran the name through our full development and screening process, and delivered a name agreed upon across both the brand and PR departments that gave the new concept a clear, memorable identity—one that could carry its own weight while still being unmistakably part of the brand family.

Naming architecture, as we define it, is the relationship between name types and product types on the menu—a framework for how names should function across categories, and when different naming approaches are appropriate. This brand already had the bones of an architecture, but it had never been fully codified or built from a place of brand intention, which meant it was applied inconsistently and couldn't be used effectively to guide individual naming decisions.

We worked with internal stakeholders to define and operationalize a naming architecture built around two name types—Descriptive and Suggestive—and two naming designations—Parent-branded and Parent-referential. Each type and designation was given clear, specific criteria for when it applied, so that naming decisions at the product level could be made with reference to a shared strategic framework rather than individual judgment.

A central feature of this architecture is that it determines the naming process a product goes through—not just what the name looks like, but how it gets developed, tested, and approved. A Descriptive name follows a streamlined, efficient path. A Suggestive name—reserved for specific naming challenges where the extra investment is justified—requires a more intensive development process with its own criteria and rounds of review.

The architecture needed to be translated into practical, actionable guidance that anyone involved in naming could use. We developed a comprehensive Menu Naming Guide—the brand's first fully articulated naming guidelines document.

The guide covers the full naming process from end to end: the philosophy behind why names look and function the way they do; a detailed description of each naming phase and who owns each step; specific guidelines for building Descriptive names (word order, modifier and root conventions, length, phonetics, and formatting details); criteria for Suggestive and Parent-branded/referential names; and a full glossary of naming terminology.

Particular attention was given to making the guidelines opinionated enough to reduce churn—specific rules for word order, recommendations against common pitfalls, and illustrative examples from the existing menu—while remaining flexible enough to accommodate the full range of products a QSR menu must accommodate, from flagship sandwiches to limited-time beverages.

The document was built not just to be a reference guide for the Naming Lead, but to serve as an alignment tool for every stakeholder who interacts with naming across the organization: a shared language that makes naming conversations more productive and naming disagreements easier to resolve.

One of the clearest gaps we identified in our stakeholder research was in name testing. The brand had been testing names—but doing so differently every time, which meant results couldn't be compared across projects, long-term patterns couldn't be identified, and the data was too variable to serve as a reliable input to naming decisions.

We redesigned the brand's name testing operation from the ground up, establishing a consistent, minimum-viable testing methodology for all menu item naming—one rigorous enough to generate genuinely useful short-term insights, and standardized enough to accumulate into a strategic long-term database.

Critically, we embedded the testing operation within the naming workflow rather than treating it as a standalone research function. We established clear guidelines for how testing results should be weighted against other inputs—legal findings, naming guidelines, product strategy, and expert judgment—so that testing informs decisions without dictating them. We also addressed what testing should not trigger: a name change after market deployment is reserved for genuine naming disasters, not ordinary mixed reactions or preference-based disagreement.

A good naming system doesn't just run—it improves. To build continuous improvement into the workflow, we established a Naming Meta Review structure: a cadence of regular meetings designed to step back from the day-to-day work of naming individual menu items and take stock of how the overall process is performing.

The Meta Review framework includes two types of recurring events. Biannual Naming Advisory Team Meetings bring the core decision-making group together twice a year to review aggregated testing insights, assess whether the naming architecture or guidelines need updating, and evaluate the process itself. Quarterly Naming Town Hall Meetings open the conversation more broadly, inviting anyone across the organization who touches naming to participate, ask questions, and surface issues that might not otherwise reach the Naming Advisory Team.

Together, these structures ensure that the naming system stays alive and responsive—that the guidelines remain useful, the architecture stays calibrated to the brand's actual needs, and the process continues to reflect what the organization has learned from experience.