My brother’s wife, Ruky, has been working for the Ace School of Motoring in Dudley for 12 months, but recently decided to go solo and after a period of reflection announced she wanted to call her new driving school, Learn To Drive.

I was horrified. Indians don’t have a great record in coming up with interesting business names: “Patel Newsagents” is about as creative as it gets. And driving instructors have perhaps an even worse reputation — their only criterion seems to be getting to the top of phone directory lists with names like 4 Wheelz. But Learn to Drive was lame even by those standards.

I begged her to let me help come up with something better, or at least let me get some consultants to come up with something better, until eventually she conceded. And last month, as she discussed her requirements with a branding agency called Heavenly, I went off to find out whether anyone had ever offered advice on the art of naming businesses.

They have. Unfortunately, not much of it is useful. Here was one expert suggesting naming a business after a founder was a bad idea because doing so “may limit its potential to grow beyond the founder”. But what about Honda? And Ford? Here was another saying that a “geographically limiting name” was only OK if you planned never to expand beyond “the referenced geographical area”. Kentucky Fried Chicken? Scottish & Newcastle? And then the advice to “avoid vague names”. Admittedly PwC’s attempt to rebrand itself Monday and the Royal Mail’s conversion to Consignia, and subsequent decision to consignia the name to history, was disastrous. But these controversies were more about companies changing from specific to vague names. You need only flick through any stock market listings to find hundreds of companies thriving with names as fuzzy as felt.

Indeed, it was beginning to look like my research was not going to produce a single nugget of useful advice, when I stumbled across an article on the internet suggesting “silly names should be avoided”. Fair point, I thought. This isn’t because names like Secsinthecity (a London recruitment agency) and All Cisterns Go (a Chichester-based plumbing company) aren’t funny. It is simply that any joke gets less funny on repetition, and most companies require repeat business. But there was a surprise in store farther down the piece: it transpired that the article was actually about the art of naming babies. “Yes, there really was a lady named Ima Hogg,” it continued. “Not many parents would intentionally give a silly name to their child, but it can happen accidentally.”

The mistake inadvertently highlighted an important point. Branding experts, in an attempt to justify their fees, will attempt to convince us that naming is a mysterious science, with one company, Biz Naming Central, going as far as claiming in a press release that “the energetic frequency of [a] spelling releases a silent subliminal vibration that carries great influence”, and suggesting that the reason Enron failed was that the name contained “a fair amount of energetic discordance.”

But, in truth, in most respects, naming a business is no more complicated than naming a child. You shouldn’t give a business a joke name, no more than you should call a child Albert Hall. You should make sure a company name isn’t a rude word in another language, just as you should ensure a baby’s name doesn’t mean “bottom” in Spanish. And, as with children, it is wise to make sure no one else in your vicinity has the same company name.

The only real difference is that, because companies need to sell things, it helps if a new company name is memorable and epitomises its business mission. But even this doesn’t matter that much because, as with people, businesses grow into their names, not the other way around. There are as many successful companies with seemingly unpromising names (IBM, BP) as there are successful people with seemingly unpromising names (Gordon Brown, George Bush). Dare I say it, but even Learn to Drive and Patel Newsagents needn’t be a hindrance, if the businesses in question are good at what they do.

And the way in which Ruky ended up talking to Heavenly is a good illustration of the point. Research had thrown up tens of companies specialising in naming, all with intriguing names: Namebase and ABC Namebank International, to name two. But I chose Heavenly not for their name but because they were in London, they had a cool website, their past work looked interesting, they didn’t make ludicrous claims about the art of naming and they were willing to take the difficult brief on for free.

And my faith was repaid. After conducting a “brand audit” with Ruky, during which they concluded her particular aptitude for dealing with female clients and ability to speak various Indian languages should be reflected in the name, they came back with four suggestions. There was the Asian School of Motoring, which Ruky liked as ASM was an oblique reference to market-leading BSM, and might make her sound bigger than she was, but rejected because she had non-Asian customers and didn’t want to alienate them. There was Miss Asia, which she rejected for the same reason. And then there was Ruky’s, which she liked for its simplicity but rejected because she liked the fourth idea more: Intuition.

I know what you’re thinking. Another trendy one-word company. You can’t move in London for businesses with names like Pumpkin, Orgasm and, yes, Heavenly. There is even a chain of estate agents called Abode. But Ruky and I like it — Intuition subtly implying female intuition and female friendliness, without being so overt that it puts off male clients. And, of course, the other respect in which baby naming and company naming are similar is that the most important thing is that you choose a name you like the sound of. You’ll find it in the Dudley Yellow Pages, eventually, listed somewhere below 4 Wheelz.

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