okay so jorge guzman and scott stern they're professors at mit some would argue that's the best university in the world um i'm not gonna argue that point but they looked at the success rates of businesses from 2001 to 2011 and what they discovered you know what leads to a business's success how do you tease out what's not causal versus relational so what they discovered is that eponymous names firms named after their founders were 70 less likely to succeed short business names one to three words in length were 50 percent more likely to become prosperous so
then you can put a bomb through that statement i just made but you are going to remember spoon me as an ice cream company much more than you're going to remember phillips ice cream parlor so i want companies not just to have a memorable name i want them to have an unforgettable name and there's a big difference so yes you're gonna have a personal brand if you are an agency especially if you're the founder and depending on your predilection for a public life but if you've got a name that is easy on the tongue easy
to share has got something unusual about it then people it makes it easier for people to talk about so let's talk about that a little bit let's talk about the kind of the physicality of naming because i used to do a whole lot of work in the in the food industry and you said something you use a word mouth feel which was very familiar of my days in cpg because i heard that a lot right what's the mouth feel so there is talk a little bit about that sensuous or that having to do with the
senses aspect of naming sound mouth feel fluidity talk about the you know how you feel about the importance of that or what people need to keep in mind about it let me ask you a question who's thinner bill or bob you're thinking too long bill who's thinner yeah why is bill thinner than bob because bob sounds bigger yeah so when you say bob so say bob again and notice where your tongue goes bob yeah so where does your tongue go bottom of my mouth yeah so that oh has got it it opens it up google
feels like a big company because it's got big mouth feel and it sounds like right so if you want something just sound small and intimate you're going to have a sound that's small and intimate if you want your agency to sound big well then you might be using more open vowels so the sound let's talk about the food industry you're competing on that shelf and if your name doesn't pop out in some way like if you've got coca-cola you've got two billion dollars you can spend on marketing but if you're not coca-cola if you're some
smaller brand you've got to get a way of popping out you know i named a um kombucha full of probiotics and i can't remember what the original name was but i ended up calling it belly up because it was to improve um gut health now unfortunately they didn't do a great job on the tagline which is why i wrote a book on tag lines which we could talk about too so belly up is unforgettable partly because it's like belly up to the bar um and so they can start telling up about her belly up to
your health and they could do all sorts of stories that way it tested really well you want people let me talk about the brain here so what happens with the brain when it encounters a brain brand is a attentional cue will be fired off or not so a brand has to pull focus and given that alvin toffler in 1970 said we're entering an era of info obesity that was in 1970. so we've got even more brands vying for people's attention he wrote the book future shock so a brand has to pull focus that's the first
f when it pulls focus and fires off an attentional cue little neurotransmitters are doing their thing and then it goes to a feeling after that it goes to the figuring out part of the brain so focus feeling figuring out the problem is when people make decisions about brands they go do i like it do i like it do i really like it well that's figuring out that's the wrong part of the brain that's not the part of the brain that um encounter the brand first so belly up pulls focus then they can create text to
create a story that makes people want to grab that particular drink so i think it's really important to understand the neuroscience that's going on when people are naming because that can stop a lot of fights in the boardroom
