Every Class Collides: The Same Name Names a Thousand Things, and Uniqueness Wins

Status: Original concept, first publication 12 July 2026.

Somewhere out there is another Jason Barnard, and another, and a couple of thousand more, none of whom asked my permission and none of whom did a single thing wrong. The name got handed out in parallel, all over the world, and now the string “Jason Barnard” points at a crowd. That crowd is the problem sitting underneath everything I do for people, and once you notice it repeats at every entity class, in a different form each time, you understand why a name guarantees you nothing and why uniqueness is worth more than almost anything you can buy.

The last piece said classify the entity, not the word, because a word can hide several entities. This is the harder version of the same truth. A string is just characters, characters cost nothing, and nothing on earth stops the same characters from naming many entities at once, in the same class, right next to each other. Collision isn’t the exception. It’s the default, and it shows up three different ways.

Class 1 collides by accident, and no law can untangle it

The thousands of Jason Barnards are the purest collision there is, because nobody engineered it and no instrument resolves it. Two people, one name, both real, both actors, and there is no registry that hands the name to one and strips it from the others. You can’t trademark yourself out of it. The collision at the actor level is just the raw fact that names get reused, endlessly, with no coordination, and the machine that meets “Jason Barnard” has to work out which living, acting human is meant with nothing but the surrounding context to go on. When the entity is a person, this is the hardest resolution problem in the whole system, and it’s the one I’ve spent years solving one qualifier at a time.

Class 2 collision is written into the law itself

Drop to the tradeables and the collision changes character completely, because here it’s designed in. A trademark is not a global fact, it’s a territory: you own the mark in the United States, or the European Union, or wherever you filed, and someone on the other side of a border can hold the identical string entirely lawfully. Apple Corps, the Beatles’ label, and Apple the computer company fought for decades precisely because both were legitimate, separated by category and geography rather than by any flaw in either claim. The same string, two owned entities, and the thing dividing them is jurisdiction. So a Class 2 collision isn’t a mistake to be cleaned up, it’s the direct consequence of ownership being something granted by a particular place, for a particular kind of goods, and stopping at the edge of both.

Class 3 collides because meaning piles up over centuries

Up in the definitions, collision is older than any of us. Nike was Greek for victory, and the winged goddess who carried it, for thousands of years before anyone stitched it onto a trainer. Turkey names a country and a bird and carries a fistful of idioms besides. Nobody owns these senses, nobody coordinated them, they simply accreted on the word the way sediment settles, and a single string ends up carrying a stack of meanings that were never introduced to each other. This is the collision I’d been treating as the whole story back when I only had Nike to point at, and it turns out to be one third of it.

You can manufacture uniqueness at Class 2 and Class 3, and almost never at Class 1

For me, the cruel asymmetry is the part worth sitting with. You get to choose uniqueness in two of the three classes: you can coin a brand-new word for your product and file the mark, you can mint a fresh concept nobody else has named, and in both cases you start life collision-free. The one class where you almost never get the choice is the one you’re born into. You didn’t pick your name, ten thousand others share it, and no amount of cleverness makes “Bob Smith” resolve on its own. That is exactly why personal-brand disambiguation is the hardest homing job I take on, and exactly why the qualifier has to carry so much weight for people specifically: “Jason Barnard digital marketing” is me manually supplying the uniqueness that the name itself will never provide.

A unique string resolves to you for free, at all three classes at once

Here is the payoff, and it’s the strongest single argument in brand naming. A unique string has no collision to resolve, so the machine resolves it to you every time, at no cost, with no qualifier work and no risk of the engine guessing wrong and handing your recommendation to a namesake, a same-jurisdiction rival, or an unrelated concept. Kodak, Exxon, Kalicube®: these coined-empty strings aren’t merely clean trademarks, they’re collision-free at Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 simultaneously, which is the single strongest position an entity can occupy inside a machine that resolves the world by string. Build your brand on a word the world already uses, and you’ve done the warm, human-friendly thing and picked a fight on all three levels at once. Invent a word that means nothing until you fill it, and there’s no fight to pick: there was never anyone else in the ring.

The Three Entity Classes series

1. The Three Entity Classes: Everything Either Acts, Gets Owned, or Defines the World
2. Classify the Entity, Not the Word: Why “France” Is Three Different Things
3. Every Class Collides: The Same Name Names a Thousand Things, and Uniqueness Wins
4. I Own Brand SERP, and I Don’t: How a Trademark Spawns a Second Entity
5. Acquired Distinction: How a Common Word Gets Dragged Down a Class
6. The Entity Home Is Native, Borrowed, or Up for Grabs
7. E-E-A-T Lives at Class 1, Because Trustworthiness Is Something Someone Confers on You
8. The Agent on the Boundary: Who Counts as an Actor Is About to Be Worth a Fortune

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Publication note: this article is part of the Three Entity Classes series by Jason Barnard, first published on jasonbarnard.com on 12 July 2026. It stakes collision-at-every-class (independent reuse at Class 1, jurisdiction at Class 2, polysemy at Class 3), the Class 1 uniqueness asymmetry, and coined-empty strings as collision-free across all three classes at once.