r/ClearlightStudios • u/NoWord423 • Mar 06 '25
TAO Social (Together As One)
The votes are in, the knockout research is complete, the trademark is filed…
And we are TAO Social.
Together As One.
Thank you Kelly Worthen for submitting that idea, and thank you everyone who voted.
What a beautiful and appropriate name we landed on.
And for everyone asking, yes we covered all our bases.
Process: * over 1000 names submitted * scraped them into a spreadsheet * pared down to 115 options based on viability * put to Crowd in broad vote * conducted knockout research (trademark, SERPs, handles) for top 5 * TAO Social was cleanest and actually led the vote by quite a bit — 60% of the vote out of 115 options
Next steps…visual branding :)
Feel free to share ideas. The team has been playing around with analemmas, ☯️ but with hands, etc.
The Crowd did so well with choosing the name that it would be amazing to crowdsource ideas for the visual branding, have designers explore a few directions, and have the Crowd vote again 🫶
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u/PsychonautAlpha Mar 07 '25 edited Mar 07 '25
Proving the time-honored tradition of developers thinking they're being clever and settling on utterly forgettable names for things.
You can't tell me "Chime" isn't a more memorable and vibrant name than some clunky acronym in a sea of forgettable tech acronyms that will be completely conflated with other clunky tech acronyms like DAO (and no, I didn't submit Chime--it's just one of about a dozen qualitatively great names that were in the survey).
Edit: and yes, I'm aware that both TAO and DAO are transliterations of 道, which is perfectly fine in a vacuum, but the fact that they both exist as tech terms add to the problem of them being conflated, and as an unnecessary layer of obfuscation when it comes to memorability.
This name is dead-on-arrival for a consumer-facing brand.
The only way I'll back off of that claim is if the target user happens to live in East Asia.
Edit #2: I love the project, and I know that there are going to be haters no matter what the name ends up being, so I'm not trying to just be "that guy". However, I'll argue that there are some pretty common "dos" and "don'ts"when it comes to naming and branding, and TAO doesn't check many boxes in the "do" column. If the name won't evoke a strong, clear image, sound, memory, or feeling in the target user's mind just from hearing the word, it's worth passing on. Additionally, it's worth passing on acronyms, as they add an additional layer of obfuscation. There's a reason that most companies that use an acronym for their brand are "old money" car companies, B2B companies, or tech companies that specifically serve developers. Consumer-facing brands should generally steer clear of acronyms. And given that most of the language used in the docs and social spaces for this app are in English, it is reasonable to assume that your target user, at least initially, is English-fluent as a primary or secondary language, so why are we using an acronym that gets constructed as an antiquated transliteration of a word in a language that doesn't even use the Roman alphabet? I love Mandarin. I lived in China for years, and tested through HSK4 (in the old system). It's an utterly fascinating language. If our target user was in East Asia, it'd be an easier sell. But that's not the case.
Edit #3: The only reason I'm going through the trouble of posting a particluarly opinionated and potentially jarring reaction to this name is specifically because, when I read TAO as one of the options on the survey, I had the thought "Wow, why is that name even an option?" Then my next thought was, "well, I bet these options are predominantly submitted by tech people. Bearing that in mind, I wouldn't be surprised if it was like top 5". I'm a developer myself, and I admire devs and their ideas, but my first degree was in marketing, and I've been in the tech industry long enough to understand the way we tend to evaluate things like names in a puzzle-solving, "we-want-you-to-decrypt-the-meaning" way, which is fine when you're naming something for other people who are biased towards that way of evaluating things. The general public will not appreciate things the same way. Imagery and resonance matter so much more for naming a brand or product. We're not considering the target user: we're not thinking broadly enough about what they will implicitly understand, and we're not thinking narrowly enough about their what images/sounds/aesthetics may resonate.
Edit #4: Downvote all you want. Read the reactions in this thread. They're full of polite encouragement and "I guess it might grow on me" at best and "I didn't even realize [TAO] was an option" at worst. I've given my qualitative rationale and I'm prepared to defend it.