Fritinancy

From the archives: The D-Words

Originally published on October 13, 2016; revised where appropriate.

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Earlier this week I spoke via Clarity, an expert-advice service, with a CEO who was considering changing his company’s decade-old name. He told me he didn’t have the budget for professional naming services, so he and his business partner, both tech guys, had attempted to come up with a new name themselves. After 12 (!) months of brainstorming, they finally had a couple of candidates. One name, the CEO told me, was a great description of their product. The other name described what their customers wanted. They’d already bought a bunch of domains – some for more than $1,000 – related to both names.

I kept silent, but I heaved a private sigh. Within five minutes, my caller had mentioned the two troublesome D-words of naming: describe and domain. One of those words can doom a branding project; the other is almost always a distraction.

I’d hoped to hear a different D-word, the one that matters: distinctiveness. But my caller admitted he hadn’t known it was a factor in brand development.

That CEO is far from the only client I’ve worked with who has focused, misguidedly, on descriptive names and “available” domains and neglected (or been unaware of) distinctiveness. It’s such a common oversight that I wanted to take some time to talk about it.

New writing: When to change a name--and when not to

My new story for Medium is about the tricky question of company and product name changes. Sometimes they’re necessitated by legal challenges, sometimes they’re a good idea when the brand story has undergone a major shift. But sometimes the name isn’t the problem at all.

Read the story. And remember to “clap” if you like it--up to 50 claps per story!

How implicit egotism affects naming

When it comes to choosing company and product names, we’re all a little egotistical—we prefer the sound and spelling of our personal names, and gravitate toward company and product names that mirror our own. Read about the implicit egotism effect in my latest story for Medium: “You, Yourself, and Your Brand Name.”

Identifying your brand's personality

Years ago, when “having your colors done” was trendy, I thought there might be a story in it, so in the interest of research I sought out a color consultant and handed over my money. There were a lot of charlatans and opportunists in this field, but I lucked out: The color analyst I found was John Kitchener, who had an art-history background and an unerring eye. (He’s still in business, but has relocated from the Bay Area to the Atlanta area.)

For what I remember as a not-inconsequential (but worth it) fee, John gave me palette of fabric swatches that suited my eye and skin colors. He also gave me something equally valuable: a lesson in what he calls “style essences” and what other image consultants sometimes call “style personalities” or “style profiles.”

Color Me Beautiful (1981), an early and influential guidebook. Not John Kitchener’s system.

 

Knowing my style essence—which shapes and textures harmonize with my overall look, which styles to avoid—greatly simplified my wardrobe choices and gave me an objective assessment that my mirror never quite delivered. (After the consultation, it dawned on me that even when I was 4 years old I looked and felt terrible in “youthful” clothes.)

Style essences continue to interest me, and when I read a post on the subject by style blogger Susan of Une Femme d’un Certain Age, I realized that there was a lot of overlap between the fashion-y side of style profiling and the brand-y side that I do. When you’re building a brand—starting with the name and tagline—you first need to identify your brand’s personality: its style essence. As with personal style, brand style is often a blend of two or more traits: dramatic, classic, romantic, nerdy (that’s my term; style consultants don’t use it!), playful, and so on.

Want to know more about how brand personality can influence your choice of a brand name? Read my new story on Medium, and let me know in a comment about your own style-personality and brand-naming experiences.

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This is the latest in my series of Naming 101 posts.

 

The unfamiliarity principle

Here’s something do-it-yourselfers often overlook when they’re struggling to name a product or company: the importance of making something familiar seem unfamiliar or making something unfamiliar seem familiar.

I’ve written about branding’s unfamiliarity principle in a new story for Medium. You can bypass the paywall to read it by clicking this link.

I’m experimenting with Medium—an elegantly designed, ad-free platform for writers—as a way to reach a wider audience and (maybe, someday) earn a little money from my writing. The payout depends on subscribing members reading and “applauding” my work (note the little clapping-hands icon), so if you like what you see, please subscribe.

My other Medium stories:

Need an Inspiring Brand Name? Look Outside

Hanging Out with the Godless

What are naming criteria, anyway?

(Part of my Naming 101 series.)

A couple of years ago I published a post about naming objectives: what a name should or must communicate. Naming objectives are a key element of your written naming brief, and one of the foundations on which names are developed.

There’s another important foundation: naming criteria.* If objectives are about meaning, criteria are about everything else that goes into a name: spelling, sound, legal requirements, web addresses.

Here’s a checklist for your own naming criteria:

For naming inspiration, look outside

Where do you find a brand name? More specifically, where do you find a powerful, memorable, lasting brand name?

The answer, in one famous instance: outside the window.

In 1982, computer scientists John Warnock and Charles Geschke were working in Warnock’s garage in Los Altos, California, on a page description language for controlling printing. The product would end up being called PostScript; in 1985, Warnock and Geschke would license it to Apple.

PostScript is a solid product name. But Warnock and Geschke, who had been colleagues at Xerox PARC, had bigger plans. They needed a company name that wasn’t defined by, or limited to, a single product.

They found that name when they looked outside the garage window and saw Adobe Creek.

 

A fallen redwood in Adobe Creek. (Wikipedia)

 

New year, new name? Ten tips.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is naming – or renaming – a company, a product, an organization, or a process, I’m here to help. Yes, you could hire me to do the job. Or you could do it yourself by following these guidelines.

Can a name be TOO distinctive?

(Part of my Naming 101 series.)

As trademark lawyers love to remind us, distinctiveness is a paramount goal of brand naming. A name doesn’t need to be original – consider Dove deodorant and Dove chocolate — but it does need to stand out in its category.

But can a name ever be too distinctive – too much of an outlier to connect with its intended audience?

I recently spoke with a business owner via Clarity, the expert-advice service, who wanted my opinion on a name that was distinctive in the extreme. This person, a graphic designer in the Pacific Northwest, was dissatisfied with her current business name, which combines her initials with “design.” She’d come up with a new name and, she told me in an introductory email, had already bought a couple of domains associated with it. The name she wanted my opinion on was MOZZAFIATO.

Mozza-what?

 

It sounded distinctive, all right. It also sounded like nothing I’d ever heard of. Google Translate told me mozzafiato is an Italian word meaning “breathtaking,” which is nice but not helpful. How was this name going to help the designer grow her business?

The case of the forbidden letters

(Part of my Naming 101 series.)

The naming brief was comprehensive and clear, except for one line toward the end: “No names that begin with A, B, or F.”

Wait. What?