Children love donuts and juice and the stringy meat on your fingers.

Bad names are everywhere. From the corner store to the corner office, people find themselves giving terrible names to the things they love, and no one seems to be able to stop them from doing it.

Well, um, stop it.

We’re tired of seeing neat things with lame names. That’s why we’ve set up an exercise to exorcise your moniker monsters: before you start looking for good names, come up with some ridiculous ones first. This way you’ll get it out of your system and hopefully have a better understanding of what doesn’t work. Besides, a pig doesn’t learn how to find truffles without rutting through a few turds first.

So here’s some really bad names for a donut shop. Follow along, takes notes, and try not to glaze them over.

Glory Holes

Nothing makes a donut-lover salivate like being forced to think about hand-carved portals for anonymous sex. Sure, it’s a pun, but the potential for grossing out and scaring away half your customers outweighs the smirks you’ll get from passersby. Plus, see what happens when you ask for a Bear Claw in a place called The Glory Hole.

Biggest Loser

In reality shows about fat people exercising, losing is actually winning. But in the world of donuts and candy and things filled with cream, being a loser means you’re about to eat something that will remind you of how much you hate yourself. Try not to give your donut place a name that will reinforce your customers’ confidence issues.

Can’t Lardly Wait

The idea that you are in such anticipation of a deep-fried jelly roll that you cannot find a way to pass the time is, for some reason, incredibly disturbing. Please don’t come near me.

Fresh 15

College is the best time of your life. Except for that part in the beginning where you ate only spray-cheese and beer and gained a large baby’s worth of fat around your face. Yeah, don’t remind people of that.

Healthy Donuts

Fresh 15 promises that you will have serious regrets AFTER eating there, but Healthy Donuts promises those regrets will be immediate. People eat donuts for their nutritional benefits just as much as they want a Hummer to be good on gas or Big Macs to be made out of real beef. It’s just not in the recipe.

So what have we learned today? Donuts are bad for you, stay away from bears, and before you’re ready to figure out who you are it might be a good idea to figure out who you aren’t.

Now you’ll have to excuse us. We’re going to Cinnabon.

Where in the world did we get all these applicants?

Strategy

Initially the company was called Admitpad, mostly because a lot of professors who review applications were smitten with the idea of using the iPad. But this was really about something a lot bigger. The idea that the software could help schools dig deeper into the data and find the applicants who will thrive at their school. It’s really a sophisticated tool for matching applicants to colleges or programs.

Approach

After diving into the fundamentals of the brand, we felt that it wasn’t about the software or the iPad. The company is changing the way students are admitted to universities. So we knew the name had to say something big. What works about Matchbox is that it’s very familiar and comfortable but it has a whole set of new meanings in this context. Students want to find the right school and the schools want to find the right students.

Nice digs.

€4500 and it's yours

Any person who discovers a new species has the right to choose its scientific name, and to party as best as scientists can. After the celebrations, it’s time to find a name for that new fern you found.

I’m sorry to say that My Little Ferny isn’t going to pass the test. Rules stipulate that you have to choose a binomial name, which has to be in Latin and must adhere to a long list of rules provided by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.

Remember the hierarchy of biological classifications? Just in case, here’s a refresher: At the top is Life, which is followed by Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. The first half of a binomial name is the Genus, the second half is the Species. Let’s say that fern you found belongs to the Equisetum genus. The species name? That’s for you to decide.

You might choose the standard route and name your fern after a specific physical characteristic it displays. Or you’ll base the name on the place you found it, e.g. Reno or a deep dark cave. How it looks and where it lives is a reasonably safe bucket of names and ideas to pull from. Most discoverers use this bucket.

Alternatively, you could take the ego-centric approach and name the species after yourself, a loved one, or a significant figure in your life. Do you love a girl named Sally? Your fern might very well be named Equisetum sallae, or however you say Sally in Latin. All fine and dandy right?

Sure, but there’s another option: monetize the process. A case study by the United Nations Environment Programme examines the advantages of having a benefactor own the naming rights of a new species after donating money to support conservation  efforts that are tailored to their chosen life form. Cool stuff.

One organization, known as BIOPAT, has been selling the species naming rights since 1999. For €2400 you can name a Cushion Weevil, or for €4500 you can name the Spurred Forest Beauty orchid. Weevils = €. Orchids = €€.

This leaves us in a moral no man’s land. On one side is the discomfort that comes with selling the rights to something that nobody truly owns, and on the other is the financial support that conservationists yearn for.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Go find some species, pad the wallet, and save the world. Brilliant, just remember who told you about this gig.

Matchbox in action.

Matchbox is being put to the test at MIT. The iPad-based admissions software is managing the 5000 applications received every year by MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Founder Stephen Marcus spent several years on the Sloan admissions committee. Rod Garcia, the Director of Admissions at MIT Sloan, asked Steve to build an application that would eliminate paperwork from the admissions workflow. Eight months later Matchbox was his response.

We worked with Steve to develop the name for the company and the software suite. We felt Matchbox had a nice double meaning: creating a spark between two objects and matching students to schools.

For more, check out this article from The Boston Globe and visit the Matchbox website.