The Brand Naming Process (Create A Great Brand Name) with Rob Meyerson

What's up brand builder Stephen Houraghan here on the Brand Master Podcast and in this episode we're speaking with Rob Meyerson about the brand name process and how to create a great brand name now i absolutely love this topic because i find the brand naming process one of the most creative and rewarding phases of building a strategic brand using modern brand naming processes and techniques offers a huge strategic advantage and who better to speak to about this topic than rob mayerson who is a brand naming specialist now rob is a consultant with a wealth of knowledge

he's got a global background with the likes of hp on the client side and the likes of interbrand on the agency side where he was the director of verbal identity for many years in san francisco now he's also the host of the podcast how brands are built and he's interviewed the likes of marty newmar and david aker on there and he's recently written a book on brand naming as well called brand naming the complete guide to creating a name for your company product or service so if you want to learn how to create a great

brand name from scratch from someone who's been there and done it right at the top then stick around for this episode of the brand master podcast welcome to the brand master podcast show specializes in helping branding professionals and entrepreneurs to build brands using strategy psychology and creative thinking okay so welcome everybody to the brand master podcast uh Rob i just took a couple of seconds to introduce you and your your your background to all the listeners first and foremost thanks uh thanks so much for taking the time to to come on the show thank you

stephen i'm happy to be here um now i i went through in the intro your kind of extensive background and you you know you you really do have a wealth of experience globally both uh side and agency side and i think when it comes to uh the topic of the conversation today which is brand naming and the brand naming process um it kind of feels like a a splintered um kind of area of branding that a lot of us you know coming from a creative background or a strategy background we kind of have our hand

in the naming process in some kind of way without really looking at us as this kind of distinct area of branding what kind of led you down the road of getting into specializing in in the field of brand naming i guess i fell into it um you're right it is a distinct uh it's a distinct department and some uh some of the larger branding agencies and i guess i had the luck of starting at a big one i started at interbrand um which has a separate department for what they call verbal identity so that's naming

but also messaging and tone of voice and things like that and while i wasn't hired into that team there comes a point in naming i know we're going to talk about the naming process when you're coming up with names there is a little bit of uh the more the merrier kind of uh philosophy that that works well so i was lucky that the head of verbal identity at the time just asked if anybody on the team could submit ideas for a naming project that he was working on that was that he was sort of stuck

on and i went home and came up with 50 ideas that of course i thought were brilliant and he probably rejected all of them but it was a lot of fun and it was unlike anything i'd ever done but it really kind of tapped into some of uh the things that i like to do i've always been kind of a word nerd and um i enjoy these sort of little puzzles that i think we all get to solve in the branding world whether you're a designer or a strategist or a namer and uh luckily it

sort of worked out and i kept doing it from there first as a freelancer um just generating lists for other agencies and then eventually getting more and more into the stepping into the role of actually leading naming assignments from start to finish yeah yeah and and you know as you said it is um it's an area that you can kind of nerd out on a a little bit if if you're that way inclined and you know that's that's kind of how i really developed a an affinity with that process as you know a creative process

in and of itself but the the kind of more i dug into it the more i realized just how important the name is and it kind of sometimes gets overlooked in terms of its importance we talk so much about the logo and the visual identity and you know the the strategy and you know all of these statements um you know that that are all important within the brand strategy uh development but really brand naming it it kind of seems gets overlooked in terms of just how important it is can you talk to me a little

bit about how you see the importance of the brand name yeah and i wonder why that is i think sometimes i guess a lot of times our clients come to us with a name um and maybe they've just named the business after themselves or or taking it upon themselves but in instances where a name is needed or a re renaming is needed i think it's really important and i usually outline three reasons so the first is just reminding people how powerful language can be and and all of us know that instinctively um we use language

every day uh to explain our thoughts and the more articulate we are the better we can communicate those thoughts um but you know we've all had experiences with reading something or listening to the lyrics of a song or listening to a really inspirational speech and and feeling not only the explanatory power of language but the emotional resonance that that language can have as well and so i like to just remind people of that and and remind them that the name is the first and i would argue one of the most important opportunities for a business

to try to harness that power just like you're harnessing the power of design with a great logo and a great website and everything else to harness that power of language and use it to your advantage so i think language is powerful is one naming is really hard is the second reason and look no further than uh bodie mcboat face and all these other horror stories that we hear brands that mean something terrible in another language uh companies that have had to rebrand because they got sued by another company for using a similar name it's just

hard to get right and if you've tried it yourself you probably uh have experienced that and then lastly just that a good name is a good investment it's the it's the one brand asset that i can think of that that really should not change um you know there's there's often good reason for a logo to at least be evolved and updated um often logos are redesigned every five to seven years websites even more often but the name if it's the name of the company or the name of a product hopefully just stays the same for

the life of that company or product um yeah and you you touched on a couple of things there that that kind of um you know that that certainly spoke to me when you when you talked about the the one thing that doesn't change um you know really you there are many examples of great rebrands where you know they've completely overhauled their look and feel you know they've identified a new segment of the market that they want to go after and they've they've they've changed you know old spices is a great example of that how you

know they they were this kind of old man's brand for so many years and they they saw the problem that was in front of them and they knew that they needed to appeal to this you know younger generation but you know even though they they overhauled the the look and feel the the visual identity they even uh they even changed the logo slightly and they completely overhauled their personality and their verbal identity um you know they still stuck with that old spice name because you know there was heritage in that there was brand equity in

that um so so in terms of the one thing that you hold on to uh yeah that's that's absolutely true even even if a brand pivots later on you know you want to hold on to that brand equity that's that's been built up otherwise you know you're you're resetting and you're starting off as as you know with zero advantage so you you don't ever want to let go of of that equity that's been built up over time um and uh yeah in terms of and i think we chat chatted about this before the the the

was the example of uh kim kardashian recently wasn't there what was what was her her brand name yeah yeah so she um she has a shapewear brand that she tried to name kimono and she talked about that on twitter before launching the product and got a lot of backlash for cultural appropriation feeling that she had taken uh a word that had great meaning in the japanese culture and was just taking it for her brand name and um she had to backtrack on that and renamed it skims which i gotta admit pretty smart to get the

name kim in both of those words kimono and skims um that was the hook there but um but yeah you can see how and i know we're going to talk about the steps in the name process but one of them is is trying to uh trying to avoid this kind of cultural issue or sometimes it's a language issue um if you if you if you're not careful you can accidentally do something uh that's gonna offend a lot of people and potentially then have to change the name yeah yeah absolutely and and um the the the

other thing that you touched on before was was the language and i i really feel that um you know coming from this this visual identity this design background where uh are are so important um i really didn't have a grasp for the importance of language early on in my branding career and the more i kind of dug into that the more i dug into strategy and uh verbal identity the more i realized that you know the the visuals are a very important hook to to kind of grab that attention and you know it's it's you

know it's a it's a visceral connection uh you know that that visual connection first and foremost but you know once you grab that connection it's then the language that needs to really speak to who that audience is and make those connections in terms of your um work within the the i know we're kind of getting to the side of brand naming for a second but in terms of the work that you've done with verbal identity what would be the main elements that uh you know that you would focus on within that yeah um and the

reason we use verbal identity uh which is a pretty nerdy uh like wonky term um is not just to sound smart but uh but to to try to say it's not just naming so another big piece of it is messaging um the the longer copy not not even so sort of in between copywriting and the actual words that you're gonna put onto a website and strategy which is usually more behind the scenes there's this strategic messaging layer where we just try to figure out what are the things that we want to say about ourselves as

a brand or just the things that we want to say i should say about the brand and then voice which is how we say it um so that's where we evoke our our personality um through the word choice through the sentence structure through the style of the writing um and speaking so it's it's usually those three things and then i i suppose i'd also add something like tagline development and taglines are not always necessary but um to the degree that we do things like taglines or descriptor lines or something like that that's also verbal identity

it's really any time you're using words to try to express the brand yeah yeah and and you know really for me i've really developed that uh you know that fascination and and passion about the the verbal side of of branding and i think we're going to see um you know the people's focus on that increase over the coming years now that you know kind of this this area of strategy has opened up to everybody and and you know that's that's a pandora's box in and of itself um but in in in terms of the the

we've spoken briefly about some mistakes and and certainly probably the biggest one that i see within brand naming is the the how most brand names are created in the small business space and usually professionals whether it's designers or strategists they probably don't get enough opportunity to work on brands because the business owner has come to to the table with with a brand name already and you you know this yourself rob for the for the most part they'll have they won't have done this in any kind of strategic way they might have sat down with their

their spouse or their family or their kids and come up with something that's important to them or uh you know you know emotion that they're emotionally attached to but i mean what would you say are some of the the the biggest mistakes and is is that your experience as well that that's probably the biggest mistake that you see uh i don't know if it's the biggest i i see a few consistently um that's one of them i see um i mean one of the first and sort of easiest things to do is check whether they've

gone through any kind of legal vetting process oftentimes they haven't and so you may find clients that have a name that they like but it turns out they didn't know they needed to try to trademark it and when you look at trying to do that they can't because somebody else is using it um which is one of the toughest toughest things about naming is that a lot of the the good names are taken already um i do think not going through a strategic process yes to your point um just like everything else with branding you've

got to put yourself in the customer's shoes and so just because the name is meaningful to you um doesn't mean that they get it even much less that it resonates with why they would want to do business with you so i do think that's a mistake another thing i see a lot is um overly restrictive names so uh if you if you use a name that really speaks to exactly what your business does um which a lot of people seem to be tempted to do that um if you name your if you name your butcher

shop the butcher shop um that might not uh work when you want to expand into a full full-service grocery store or something like that if you're really successful but you're then hindered by this name the butcher shop and you know people are not stopping at your store because they think that's all you do um and so that's another thing that i think a lot of um amateurs uh or or just business people that don't have this experience kind of end up falling into that trap yeah and i suppose that's just a balance really i mean

um you know and and this is why strategy is so important when you sit down and you think about your vision for the future for the brand does it include um potential expansion and if it doesn't well then you know the butcher shop uh you know you you've kind of you've laid it on the table and you're going all in to that niche so so if you're if you're clear on your strategy and you're clear on your vision then you know you can use that that to your advantage but if you have any kind of

uh plans for expansion in the future that needs to be to be taken into consideration um what would you say would be the the the kind of attributes that are most important within a brand name or you know to kind of put it another way what would you say would be the main job of the brand name i think the answer to both questions unfortunately is that it really depends um so brand name of course could be a company name or it could be a product name or service or something else and so at the

very least i think it depends on that um it depends on what the competitive landscape looks like but a lot of times what you're trying to do is is make the name memorable especially if you're at the company level um so that may only be one of several goals or a name but but memorability is a key goal and i think there are a number of different ways you can achieve that um sometimes though if you're just naming and we are called upon sometimes to name the features of a piece of software to help um

this is another sort of part of verbal identity is like a naming taxonomy so we've got 100 features and we just want to make sure that they all have names that people can understand and they don't over reuse the same words and in that scenario it's not about memorability as much as it is just clear communication um so sometimes that's that's more the goal so it kind of depends what level you're doing the naming at um but yeah memorability is one of the main things and then i'm happy to go through a bunch of other

things i think are important if you if you want me to no i i think we're we're kind of on the same page there and and of course we can go down this rabbit hole of of you know what a brand name should do and you know uh you know you've you've seen these these uh blog posts before with these checklists of all of these attributes or or all of these jobs that that a brand name should fulfill um but really it's it's these these are secondary tasks to me for me uh the memorability of

the brand is is absolutely key of course if we're talking about you know other things if we're we're talking about uh products you know uh it might just be about the communication and the clarity um of what this product is and what it does as opposed to the memorability but when it comes to kind of corporate branding um you know the the memorability for me is key and and you know although we could speak about all those other jobs if it's not memorable uh to me well then you know it's it's kind of fallen over

at the first hurdle if you tick that box and you can add uh you know anything else to it in terms of sentimentality or uh or or meaning or or a connection to the outcome that the the brand uh provides then great but you know getting that memorability for me is is absolutely key and it it kind of it kind of brings me to this this place of well okay at what stage in the brand building process do you go through naming because a lot of people do it at the start for me my processes

include um strategy up front first and foremost so there's clarity on exactly who the audience is and at the position that the brand is going to take in the market um and after that the naming happens and then of course the visual identity where does the naming process fit into um into what you do and your strategy development yeah that's brand development i should say yeah what you just said sounds exactly right to me that and i know we'll talk about the naming process but the first step is is a is a naming brief and

that brief really it could pretty much just be your brand strategy um because on that brief you're going to want to answer uh what kind of ideas should the name convey what kind of personality we call it tonality when we're talking about the name but that's basically what kind of personality should the name uh have or not have uh and so all of that's gonna have to come out of the strategy work um whether that was a really formal strategy process or in some cases if there hasn't been a strategy process and you're just somehow

jumping straight to the name you still have to do sort of the same discovery process that you would do for strategy and interview the founders or talk to some customers and just get a sense of those key ideas that need to be baked into the naming brief and then and then yeah you're going to want to have the name before you start any kind of logo design process or visual identity process because the name may well first off you have to design the name into the logo probably but the name also may determine a little

bit about what the visual identity is trying to achieve in fact sometimes i've seen i've seen it where the the name and the visual identity have kind of they have to balance uh different they have different jobs they express sort of different aspects of the brand and so if you know that the name is really heavy on one piece of the strategy then maybe the visual identity can help you fill in the rest of it or vice versa so i do think that's the right step-by-step process so so let's get into the weeds then of

of the process a little bit because you know when when it comes to developing uh the brand um or when when it comes to developing the brand name the best results are going to come from processes that are that are repeatable time and again rather than willy-nilly you know sitting down in a room and asking everybody to put their ideas forward so talk us through your structure process and how you go through these steps to come up with a great brand name sure and first off yeah i couldn't agree more i think a lot of

people have the misconception that uh the right way to do brand naming um or just the way that it's done is to get everybody in a room a bunch of smart creative people uh talk about what you're trying to do and then maybe get out the post-it notes and start writing ideas down um and there's a time and a place for that i'm not saying there's anything wrong with it but that is certainly not the entirety of of naming there's a lot that needs to happen before it and after it um and so my process

uh i don't think it's it's different significantly from from that of other namers but the way i've outlined it is seven steps um it's the naming brief that we talked about once you have that locked down it's generating names you generate a really long list hundreds maybe even over a thousand ideas and then from that you need a short list so you need to look at that long list and say what are the top 50 to 100 ideas put those into screening so that's step four um step five is presenting names that have been screened

and then step six is a full legal search um asking lawyers to dive a little deeper and then step seven is really just selecting based on uh that full legal structure else that you've done um so those are the seven steps and i can go deep on any of them uh if you'd like to to hear me talk about any of those more yeah absolutely so just for the listeners to recap on those it was number one the naming brief number two generating names number three short listing four screening five presenting six legal search and

seven selecting so why don't you talk us through a little bit about each of those and i i i would uh i would imagine for for me anyway and where i tend to nerd out is is um is number two generating those names that's really where the creativity is so so talk us through a little bit about each one of those steps sure um we've talked about naming brief a bit already so i won't spend a lot of time on it i the one thing i would say is the mistake that a lot of people

make is not paying enough attention to that step so getting that strategy that document locked down and making sure that everyone has agreed to it before you get into generating names will save you a ton of trouble down the road so i really can't emphasize that enough make sure that everyone is aligned on even just what the name is trying to do before you realize three weeks later that you never had that alignment and now you have to start over generating names is uh you know to some degree it's it's whatever you want it to

be you really just you know i you can't uh you can't necessarily systematize creativity but i do think that there are things that you can do um repeatedly uh different techniques approaches you can try to try to get the most out of your name generation so um a lot of times it starts with the brief you look at what you're trying to express you might create mind maps out of that on a whiteboard you might go into a room with with post-it notes um that can start as a group exercise but i do find that

a lot of times the best name development is done um individually even if you have a team of six people you could assign each person sort of a different territory to explore or just put all six of them on it and have you have them kind of come back and compare notes um because a lot of naming you mentioned nerding out before but a lot of it can be research you know it can be um i have an example in the book uh where we're looking at different ways of expressing the idea of fast and

so you can look up synonyms we can all just rattle off swift and quick and a bunch of synonyms for fast but eventually you get deeper and you start to think about well what are the fastest vehicles that have ever been uh invented what are the fastest animals in the fish in the sea you know the mako shark and and things like that and you may know some of these things off the top of your head too but eventually you want to start digging deeper um you want to look at the etymology of different words

you might get into uh different languages and nobody has all of this in their head um and it's kind of pointless to try to do that in a room with other people where you're all just looking at your computer screens and yelling things out so i find that going off alone and going through some of these steps can can really help and in the book i have about 20 of these different different ideas you know you can look at quotes you can look at song lyrics you can look at you know books and movie titles

and see where these words have been used before you can look at word parts breaking things up and putting them back together um it kind of depends on the brief but yeah i i i suppose these are just these are these are techniques and and really um the brief as you've you've put in step one feeds into that because you have to understand your goal and just to kind of give the listeners a bit of uh an insight into how you know how how deep into the weeds you can go on this um you know

if if you understand uh the the brief completely and and you know you can include uh you know the the outcome that the brand is trying to achieve or that the product is trying to achieve the feeling that the the person that you want the audience to have um you know the associations to certain attributes whether it's fast such as a swoosh uh you know so many different things that you can use but the brief kind of feeds that and you know then you can kind of pull out all the techniques and and do all

your short listing and jump on parathesaurus and this is where i i really geek at about it and you know i've i've spent you know nearly days at times with with some brand naming exercises because i what i've found is that the best results are in those moments of frustration where you feel that you've kind of opened every single door yet you don't have a great name yet you're just not feeling it and you keep pushing through and pushing through and pushing through and then something clicks and you know you you see something that was

so obvious um that looks so obvious that you didn't see before um rather than just kind of going surface level excuse me um you know uh you know going through a few techniques and settling i find that the the greatest um the greatest results are found when you're on your own in the trenches really kind of pushing the needle and exhausting every every sort of sort of angle is do you go to that level where you you kind of get frustrated and you sit there scratching your head for for 20 minutes with nothing coming out

or or do you do you kind of take your steps and move from from one technique to the next until it just shows itself um yeah no i honestly i because it depends on the brief you know that i have listed out all these techniques but um to your point some of them may not apply uh because the brief may the brief may say that we only want real words and then you know some of the techniques that i've recommended are all about making up new words and so those don't really apply anymore um so

in reality i think i sort of focus on the brief and yeah it comes in fits and starts um there's usually this first you know kind of rush of ideas and oftentimes unfortunately the first sort of hundred ideas may just be the most obvious things that everybody else has already come up with and it turns out all those names are taken or they're just not that interesting but you just gotta get them out right you just gotta get them out of your system exactly and then uh and then yeah it is it's good to have

days to work on this because you'll wake up one day and think oh here's a an entire kind of uh path that i had not considered and it's not just a name that you've come up with uh while you were sleeping but it's an entire territory that you can then generate 50 ideas against um so yeah it usually is that kind of process and you do you have to hit those walls and then break through them just like pretty much any other creative process i think um and so i have some some suggestions on how

to break through those or if you really feel stuck what to do um but ultimately it's just it's just a question of yeah working on it and putting the hours in to come up with that long list of ideas yeah and it pulls into to focus the importance of that initial brief so you don't go off down a path and spend days on something when and then you come back to the presentation phase which we'll get to in a second and you know you you're way off the mark because you weren't clear on the brief

so once you've gone through that that um generating names uh process um you move on then to short listing right how does that work um so shortlisting names uh it is kind of what it sounds like it's it is just looking at a really long list and uh sometimes printing that list uh and sitting in a room with the uh rest of the naming team and just circling the ones that you think work best um that said it's a really important step because this i mean this is a a place to really where your sort

of talent as a name are really shines because you need to be able to see something that is just a word on a page and imagine what what that could be as a brand and it's really hard to do and to some degree anybody can come up with the list of of a thousand ideas um you know you can crowdsource a thousand ideas and most of them will probably be junk but to be able to find that sort of diamond in the rough is difficult so um i have a a few kind of uh pointers

on what to do and what not to do but um but ultimately it is just just going through um talking it through with with other experienced namers um having i i think it's really important to have other people look at the list with you to try to sort of open your eyes to some some of the name ideas that maybe you would have given short shrift or or just you doing it by yourself um but eventually you get to that list of maybe 30 maybe 60 that you want to put into the pre-screening and and

and then yes i mean shortlisting um you know and we'll get a get onto your book in a little bit i'm sure you've got some more techniques in there that you can kind of put it into certain environments to kind of see see what it looks like and things like that but then you move on to presenting and i think this is an area that you're um you know you're super passionate about in terms of the importance of this stage of the brand naming process talk us through uh the the mistakes that some people make

when it comes to presenting and you know the right way from your perspective to do it yeah the only step in between shortlisting and presenting of course is the screening and so um just to mention it really quickly it's it's the legal pre-screening um and then linguistic screening sometimes and then maybe also looking at domains although we can talk about the importance or lack thereof of domain availability um but once you've got those names screened you're ready to present some things that you think may be legally available and so yeah i think something that's overlooked

a lot is is the presentation um and it's not something that i mean even working at some of these big brand agencies um there wasn't a real training on like how to present names it's all just uh watch people who are good at it and uh and sort of try to figure out what they're doing and so i've tried to do that and and really document it um in the book and so i think i i think the the thing to realize here is that you will not you will not likely bowl somebody over with

the brilliance and creativity of your of your ten name ideas to the degree that they will instantly jump on one of them and say that's the name and then that's the end of the project and and everybody's happy um you know think about the fact that a lot of times you're presenting to a group of people and that you need to get them all to agree which can be quite difficult and so um i like to say that you know a lot of the project is not just creativity it's it's sort of the psychology of

driving consensus within a group and so um thinking about what you share with people before you show them the names to kind of get their mind ready to prime them to be thinking about this in the right way thinking about how you present the names and the order even in which you present them uh the way you ask them for feedback on those names all of this is these these subtle little things you can say or not say or do or not do can can really influence um how that meeting goes and of course that

meeting uh is is to some degree the success or failure of uh of the naming project and you know i tend to think of this as a consultant presenting to clients but this is true even if you're working inside of a company and coming up with a name and presenting it to your boss the same sort of rules apply yeah so i mean in terms of the the experience that i've come from early on in in my career the the naming was was kind of this if i was lucky enough to to get to work

on on the name um you know it really didn't have that emphasis of of the importance of taking the time to just allocate uh some time for first of all the development and then the presentation um with the client to kind of go back and forth with that so it's something um you know if you are offering branding services and uh you know this is part of your process it's something that maybe you could spend a bit more time on to pull out and really kind of emphasize the importance of that and then you move

on to legal search so tell me about legal search and how it's different from screening yeah it's a great question so um the the screening in in step four so before the presentation is sometimes called a knockout search which hopefully gives you an idea of what it is it's really looking for the obvious problems um it's not just googling around usually you would actually want to look at a trademark database like the uspto's it's publicly available information um or there are equivalents in other countries typically and just making sure that you're not presenting a name

to your client that is definitely not going to be easy for them to use from a legal standpoint that really does nobody any any favors and so you want to weed those out um but there's typically not time or or money um required to really do a deep dive on each name if you're going to be presenting 30 names you don't want to hire trust me you don't want to pay a lawyer to look at 30 names for you at that level of depth um nor do you probably have the time and so at the

end of a presentation what you're asking a client to to do is not choose a name but to narrow it down to maybe three four five names that uh have a lot of potential in from their point of view that you can then send to often their lawyers um and ask the lawyers to do a what's called a full legal search or more rigorous trademark search and tell you uh they won't tell you which ones are safe and which ones are unsafe because lawyers don't like to talk that way but they'll give you some kind

of relative degree of you know this one would cause more problems than this one and then you can factor that into uh your decision and and oftentimes they will tell you just don't use these two it's a it's a mess but maybe the other three are are relatively safe right so so so obviously the the um you know the early on in the process it's just about quantity uh you get down to the short listing phase and you start chopping off the the stuff that's just it's not gonna fly and you get down to the

legal stage and you've got a handful uh maybe the the front three to five front runners and by the time you get to the end of the process you're at selecting but i wouldn't imagine that's a case of going eeny meeny miny well more of a case of uh you know how much of it is uh your input and your recommendation as a consultant versus you know here you go guys here are three pick one you know how does how does that play out yeah it's a good question um and so much of it comes

down to the culture of the organization and who's making the decision but i would say that i try to err on the side of having really having the client make the decision um because i want them to feel confident with this name and um i've said before it's a i'm the last person to talk about fashion but it feels a little bit like fashion to me in that uh you know some people can get away with wearing something and other people can't and a lot of that just comes it's not about how nice the clothes

look it's about how confident they feel wearing it and how confident they seem and so i think similarly um if if this uh leadership team is going to be announcing this and they're going to be shaking hands with people and handing over a business card with this name on it i want them to feel good about it and so i like it when they make that decision what i can do though is help them make that decision in a few ways the the easy way is to just present to them kind of a score card

or some pros and cons that go through you know here's what this name helps you achieve maybe just looking at the legal and linguistics information and saying well all else being equal this one the lawyers seem to feel more comfortable with this one and this one had fewer problems in china where i know you're going to want to do business and it feels like you know people can pronounce it more easily there so you can just kind of look at all those factors and help help make a decision that way sometimes you get into naming

research which which i tend to try to avoid it's a little bit like logo research in that you're just asking people to do something really unnatural and look at something out of context and react to it um but i do think there are ways to do it um that could help i would never say just make the decision based on that but it could help inform the decision yeah yeah absolutely and it's um there's a lot of uh value in what you just said because although the sentimentality of the brand name uh takes a back

seat uh to memorability and clarity um it's still not irrelevant um you know if if the the client really believes in the brand name and they they do have that commitment uh to the brand and i speak a lot about um the the importance of workshops and really bringing the the client into the process so they're part of the development and they actually believe in the brand there's a lot of value in that believability because if they're invested in it then you're going to find less you know less friction you're going to find less pushback

because it's it's their idea and they love their own ideas um and they're far more likely to be successful with a brand that they believe in so there's a lot of value in that believability although it for me it doesn't tick the first two boxes in terms of the job the brand name does it's not irrelevant and if they believe in the brand and they're part of that selection and it's them that selects it then you know they're gonna have uh much more believability in that um so so if if we have listeners who offer

brand services they might offer brand strategy services brand design services and they offer brand naming in uh in part but they don't splinter it off into its own service they don't charge for it within its own services it's just part of what they do what would be a a tip that you could give those professionals to kind of look at brand naming from a more strategic point of view from a business point of view and and splinter that off as a standalone service yeah it's a it's a good question i think a lot of it

is using um the answers and the conversation that we've been having here today right so um being able to talk about why names are important and making sure that your clients are not just glossing over that because they want to get straight to the logo or straight to the brand launch so being able to speak intelligently about uh the process you know a lot of people even as you've said even in the world of branding don't know how much rigor and process can and typically should go into this so just being able to tell clients

and prospects that there is a process here um being able to share some of the things that can go wrong um you know i'm not a big fan of like selling through fear but but you can uh point out look you know this this company or this other company in your space maybe even uh had to rebrand three years after launching because they had a legal problem with their name um so being able to do that can can also help um but you know really i think just it's about gaining the experience and the confidence

and and considering this a a standalone deliverable and um uh you know bringing it to your clients and and uh there there will be there will be interest out there i think the the the thing you have going for you is as i said at the top of the conversation how difficult naming is uh some of my first clients and some of my best clients have been people that tried to name their own company and saw exactly how terrible it can go um without the right process and they they came to me and um you

know were very uh you know they were they were very happy to be able to put it in into my hands and while i agree with what you're saying about every client you know you want to get them involved you want to co-create this with them you want to make it a collaboration but there are some things where i think they also just want to be able to hand it over to a consultant and they're happy to pay them to to go through an expert process and um and so if you can offer that i

think people will will knock on your door yeah absolutely and and you touched on an important point that that resonated with me in because when we sell services um it's part of our job to sell the value of those services and for me you don't do that by telling them it's valuable you tell you you do that by giving examples and case studies are a great way to do that whether you're talking about positioning as a standalone service visual identity is a standalone service strategy or brand naming as a standalone service if you're able to

give examples of horror stories or success stories and then you know that helps you to frame the value before going on and and uh and presenting that as as a service um and and you know that leads us on now to to the the fact that all of the stuff that we've spoken about here today you know you you've got so much experience so much global experience with client side with agency side that you've gone and wrote a book on the brand naming process why don't you tell us about it sure yeah it is i

mean anyone who who buys and reads the book this conversation will sound familiar as you're as you're turning the pages of the book um after 15 years over 15 years of doing naming work since that first assignment that i that i mentioned um i started seeing patterns and i've done this like you said in the intro at big companies at small agencies i've done it in asia i've done it for for clients in europe and in the us and there are definitely differences in process and approach but i've really tried to capture what i think

is uh what are some best practices and also a lot of different tips that i've learned from working with with great namers and from interviewing them as well and and just directly asking them you know how do you do this step what do you what tips do you have for that step and so i've captured all of that in the book um and the book is is really you know i've made an effort to make it the most complete and the most detailed book about naming um it it goes through pretty methodically uh every step

um i even have and i don't think anyone else has done this in a naming book i have a hypothetical naming project where i actually share here's the idea for the brief now here's how i would generate names i go through all uh 20 of those different techniques and say here here are a handful of names that i would have gotten out of that technique had i actually done it um and then i take it through the pre-screening and the presenting and everything and so um hopefully that allows people to really get a feel for

what it's like to do this rather than just reading sort of a list of tips and tricks it's really kind of a step-by-step procedural awesome awesome so if if somebody wants to to get in touch with you to to learn more about about what you do or to learn more about your book where's the best place they can go so you can go to rob myerson.com uh myerson is m-e-y-e-r-s-o-n um and you'll find everything there the link to my company to my my podcast and blog and uh and also the book you can also just

go to brandnamingbook.com um to to see the book or you can pre-order it on on amazon now awesome awesome well i'll leave all of those links in the show notes for anybody who wants to grab the book or or to uh catch up with with robert to ask him any questions rob it's been an absolute pleasure it's been an eye-opener stuff that that i geek out on and i'm sure a lot of our listeners will as well and know that they'll have all taken a lot of value from it so thanks so much for your

time thanks for coming on the show yeah thanks it's my pleasure to geek out about this stuff anytime so i appreciate the opportunity here's my man really hope you enjoyed today's episode thanks so much for listening if you want to learn more brand strategy techniques to level up your skills make sure you check out BrandMasterAcademy.com there's plenty of free resources and premium content for you to download and get you going if you'd like to join our facebook group full of like-minded brand strategists all learning from each other then find us by searching for the brand

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