Coming out of quarantine, pickleball was the craze sweeping the country. Upstart pubs and clubs were popping up left and right, and every one of them was reaching for the same innuendo from the game — dinks, dunks, bangers, every term you could imagine shoved into a brand. A homogenous branding explosion disguised as something novel.

We didn't want the low-hanging fruit. We wanted to think about what a night playing pickleball was actually like, and beyond that, what a good experience in any ball sport feels like. Tennis, basketball, football, baseball. They all share the same phrase. Sometimes you get a good bounce. Sometimes things go your way.

That's what we wanted the name to carry. Whether you were picking up a racket or picking up a glass to toast your friends, the promise was the same: something good is going to happen here. Sure, there was pickleball. But really there was a chance to go have a great night with your friends — and for things to go your way.

Different names call for different approaches. Sometimes the right move is conceptual or oblique. With GoGoMeds, the right move was immediate clarity — because the speed of understanding had to reflect the speed of the service.

The category was crowded with versions of express and speedy and quick. GoGoMeds was for the taking.

The name does two things at once. Verbally, it's plain — there's nothing to decode. Then there's the rhythm. Hard G, hard G, M — a mouthfeel like Gargamel or Gilgamesh. Say it out loud and the cadence carries the urgency. The name doesn't just describe the service. It embodies it.

That's the trick. A name that seems simple but is doing layered work — telegraphing the benefit at the level of language, then doing it again at the level of sound.

When a person develops dementia, the decline is just as hard on the family as it is on the patient. The disease takes things in pieces — the names of children, then grandchildren, then eventually their own name. A slow, sad unraveling.

But there's a place in the mind where music lives, and it's one of the last to be touched by the disease. Music therapy uses that place. It can bring someone back from confusion into comfort and joy, into reconnection with who they were and the people they loved.

When we set out to name the program at Atria Senior Living, we looked at a lot of places. None of them felt as right as the language of music itself. Legato is the musical direction to continue and to connect — to play notes as one flowing line.

That was exactly what the program did. It kept the residents connected to each other, to the lives they came from, to the moments they cherished.

This one was bigger than a brand exercise. I'm proud of having been part of it.