A Guide to Brand Naming

Ian Paget: Rob, it's really great to have you on the podcast. I'm going to jump straight into a juicy question because you've got a new book out called Brand Naming, and I want to talk about brand naming. So as an opening question, why does a good name matter?

Rob Meyerson: Great question. And I start the book there actually, because I do feel that as a namer, I should be able to answer that question convincingly and I know that a lot of people reading the book may have to answer that question. So if they are an agency person, they may have to explain to clients why it's important. If they're working in house, they may have to explain to their leadership why they should invest time and money in a brand name and not just spend an hour in a conference room brainstorming and be done with it. So I think there are three big reasons that a brand name is important. First is just recognising how powerful language is. And we know this intuitively in our lives, but it's helpful to just remind ourselves that great speeches, great books, great song lyrics really impact us in very emotional and deep ways. And I'm not necessarily saying that every brand name does that, but a brand name is language just as these other things are like language.

And you need to take advantage as a business person of this opportunity to harness the power of language and the name is the first and best opportunity to do that. The second reason is kind of a negative one, it's just how wrong naming can go if you don't pay attention to it. And we can talk more about all the horror stories, but things like getting sued for using the wrong name or finding out that your name means something bad in another language. All of these things really do happen sometimes and so avoiding them means that it's important to take naming seriously. And then the last is just thinking about what a good investment it can be over time. It's one of the first decisions we make about a business or a product and yet it's one of the few that rarely changes. So you may change your logo or your website, but your name probably will stay the same for the life of the company or product. And so when you put it in that context, I hope it explains how important it is.

Ian Paget: Oh yeah. And I never really thought of it like that. So people listening to this most likely graphic designers, because this after all is a podcast about logo design, but I do like to go into branding and strategy and so on. So people listening to this, they are very likely to be in a position where they could be working with a client. So in my case, and I'm going to assume people listening might be in the same situation, they will have a client come to them. That client already has a name. They've already got a business. They've already got products. They're reasonably successful. They've done the whole DIY sort of logo and now they've got to a point where they want to get their identity redesigned so that they can basically look like who they intend to be.

But sometimes as you've rightfully said, when you hear a good name, you know it's a good name, but likewise, when you hear a bad name, you know it's a bad name. And I don't know if listeners have had this before, but I've had clients come to me that have had awful names. So I think it's worth having this conversation. So how do you approach telling someone that they have a bad name?

Rob Meyerson: Yes. Very carefully.

Ian Paget: It's like telling someone they have a bad logo, right? You don't do that.

Rob Meyerson: Yes, exactly. Or it's like telling someone you don't like their significant other or something. Well, think of it this way, it could be that they came up with a name themselves. It could be that they love it even if that love is completely irrational. It could be that their spouse came up with it or something like that and that in insulting the name they'll perceive that as a slight on whoever came up with it. So I just say that you really do have to be careful and mindful of how much they may have invested in this both personally and financially. That said, you're being paid as a branding consultant, most likely and the name is part of branding. And so even if you're not a namer, it is probably closer to your area of expertise than your clients.

And so I do think that it's something that you should try to bring up if it really feels like something that's going to hinder your client. After all they're paying you to help their brand succeed and if you think the name is going to prevent that, no matter how great of a logo or whatever else you're doing for them is created. So a couple of pointers on this I guess, one is to think about timing. You probably don't want it to be the first thing you say. You'd like ideally to earn a little bit of credibility with your client before you start telling them really anything that you think is wrong with their business. So, unfortunately you can't design the logo for the wrong name and then tell them it's the wrong name. But if it's a client that you have a relationship with that you've done work for before then that makes it easier.

Another thing you can do is try to make it so that they don't just have to take your word for it. And so, a lot of times for a logo project you'll be doing some kind of discovery on the front end. Maybe you are talking to people inside the business, maybe you're interviewing some of their clients, whatever it is that you do to ground yourself in the client's business and brand. And so if you're doing that, then you might use that as an opportunity to sort of subtly get in questions about the name even if that's not really something you were asked to do if you can elicit without manufacturing it.

But if you can elicit honest responses from people saying the name is terrible, then you can present it more as sort of, I had an inkling about this name and it turns out a lot of people feel the same way and I just wanted to bring this up because it came out in the research. So that's another thing that you can try to do, but ultimately it's a pretty difficult conversation to have. And one thing that I've learned about naming over the past 15 plus years is that it is very emotional, people take these things, sometimes they think about them very irrationally. And so you just have to make sure that you're delicate in however you phrase this.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I really like what you said there, because I think it's the same as a logo, you don't go into a business and say, you have a terrible logo I need to come in and redesign it. That's not how you sell logo design and I'm sure naming is very much the same. You need valid reasons to be able to explain in the way that you have, because you're not going in there with what you said and say, I don't like the name, you are giving very valid reasons so that you're able to have that conversation.

It is only been a few times where I've had clients where I've really felt that the name just isn't appropriate and a lot of the time it's because it's very hard to say, or because it's so many words. I've had some clients where it's had five words and 10 syllables, and I've referenced back to things that I read where say like a good name should be like four syllables or something like that. And anyway, I think your answer was perfect and I think it would be good to get into some of the process stuff. I think that would be really fun to go to in this. So I think as a starting point, I know in your book you talk about different types of names, can we talk about what these are?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah, of course. So there are a lot of different types of names and maybe the easiest way to think about it is to give a few examples. So let's pick some famous brand names. Apple is obviously a real English word, but it has nothing to do with the underlying products. So we call that a real word name, but it is also an abstract name because there's an abstract relationship between that word and the underlying products. You can also have descriptive real word names. So Southwest Airlines, for example, is really an airline that started at least in the Southwest United States. And so those are both real word names, but sort of at the opposite of end of the spectrum in terms of what I call approach, which is the relationship between the meaning and the underlying business or product.

There's also names that are not real words. So some are what we call compounds, they take two words and smash them together like Pinkberry or Zipcar. And then other names are coined, they're just made up. And that can range from a name that's just slightly misspelled like Flickr taking the E out to a completely made up new word like Kodak or Dasani. And so I tend to think of the different types of names along these two axes, one of which is that approach. So does the names meaning relate to the underlying business or brand. And then the other is construct, how is it constructed? Is it a real word, a pair of real words, coin word, also some names are phrases or acronyms, alphanumerics. So there are a lot of different types of constructs, but those are kind of the two axes I think about. And if you think about it that way, then you can come up with, or populate sort of a two by two chart with just about any combination of those two axes you want.

Ian Paget: That seems like a good starting point for coming up with ideas and I think that's the inevitable next step really that comes to mind anyways. So you've got a client that you need to rename their company, you taken on that enormous challenge. And I say enormous challenge because coming up with a name is really hard. At least, I mean, coming up with ideas is relatively easy, but coming up with something that's new or original and actually works with the company is a challenge. So in terms of generating ideas, how would you approach that with naming?

Rob Meyerson: Well, yeah, it's funny. You said, I know you're a designer and many of your listeners are, so I wonder how similar this is to what you might do for a logo. But I imagine it starts similarly in that it ideally starts with a brief, and maybe you have to do some research and work to create that brief so it could start sort of before that. But the brief contains any pertinent information about what types of names you want. So, as you said, maybe you want to only explore made up words for some reason, or maybe you only want words that are abstract and have no related meaning to the products.

Ian Paget: How would the client know that? Do you have that when working on a name, do people specifically say I want something that's made up new?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. It's a good point. You don't always know that and in a lot of cases, I think it's wise to at least explore everything, explore the full range a little bit just to see if you find something. But there are cases where it's either strategic or it's just a matter of taste. When it's strategic, it might be that as a simple example, you look at your competitive space and see that everyone is using one specific type of name and so there's this great opportunity to stand out by using a different type of name. And so you then might just rule out one type one corner of that two by two that I mentioned. And then also there are just matters of taste where clients come in and say, God, I really hate these made up words that don't mean anything at all.

And you hear things like that pretty often. That's when I think it sometimes still makes sense to explore it just a little bit, maybe similar. I wonder if you've ever seen this in logo design, but people sometimes don't know what they're going to like or dislike until they see it. And so if they say they hate a certain type of name, sometimes I will throw one or two of them into a presentation anyway, just to see if I think it's a really strong candidate and even though it's technically off brief, maybe it sparks something for them.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Already with what you've explained, it's very similar to working on logo design. And it's actually where I think that a lot of graphic designers are actually very good at naming because the process is quite similar really. I think at least the beginning, because with a logo, you want to make sure that you understand who the company is. I personally like to understand any expectations that the clients have, which is exactly what you've done. You know that the client wants to maybe avoid certain directions. I mean, not every designer does this, but I like to understand at least what they're expecting to see. If I know that they want to avoid a certain direction, I would probably avoid it.

Although I have read stories, there was a really good book that Bill Gardner did, I think it's in that book. He wrote a story about a client that specifically said, I don't want this logo to contain stars and it was purely the client's lack of imagination really. And what they ended up going for was actually a logo using a star, but it was done in a stylistic way. So, with logo design, it's worth pursuing those directions sometimes. And I think with naming, at least when I've done it, it's worth pursuing all possible directions. There's something works and it feels appropriate, it's worth at least presenting it as a potential direction even if it's off brief, like you said.

Rob Meyerson: Right. Well, we know that as professionals that things like I hate stars, or I hate the color purple really shouldn't be what we're making these decisions based on. I feel like I'm using the word strategic a lot, but again, what is your audience going to like, what's going to help you stand out in the market. It shouldn't just be the CEO's personal taste as much as it is sometimes hard to avoid that and you do have to be respectful of your client's wishes. So it's a bit of a balancing act, but we see the same thing in naming where people will say just completely irrational, I hate the letter X, or you get people rejecting names because it sounds like a restaurant that I used to hate or something like that.

And none of it really makes sense and so you have to be a consultant and remind them that what the goal is for the name, what the objectives are, that's a big place where the brief can help is keeping everyone strategic and as objective as possible even though ultimately it's kind of going to come down to a bit of a gut call probably. You can steer them away from these peccadillos that shouldn't matter and steer them toward, what is the audience going to want to see? What is this going to mean to them? What are the competitors doing? How are we standing out? And these more strategic objective questions versus do you love it or do you hate it.

The next step is where maybe diverges, I mean, I suppose a logo designer would start playing with shapes and forms and different visual expressions of ideas of course, we do the same thing in naming, but with words. And I would say one big difference I think between design and naming in the way that clients perceive it, is that a lot of your clients, I imagine, don't think of themselves as designers or design experts, but pretty much everyone thinks they know the English language, if they're native English speakers or fluent English speakers. And so it is sometimes hard for clients to understand that this is a specialised skill and that not just anyone can throw a bunch of words out there.

And so I would go back to some of the things I said at the beginning of the conversation about why naming is important and how hard it can be. And I think a lot of people imagine it will be easy until they try to do it. And some of my best clients have been the ones that have tried it and it's gone terribly wrong, or that they want me to rename their company because they did it five years ago and they've sort of hated their ever since or been suffering from the consequences of a poor naming decision. So the next step though is to just start exploring words, exploring ways of conveying the ideas in the brief.

There's a lot of using metaphors, looking at synonyms, looking sometimes at etymologies of words, trying on different pieces of words together, if we're trying to coin something new. And so there really is no right or wrong way to do it. I would say generally, it's just starting with the brief using that as a jumping off point as much as you can, and then letting yourself go unfiltered for a pretty long time and coming up with typically hundreds of ideas before you start self-editing and saying, okay, now out of these 600 ideas, which are the 50 that we think are good enough to pursue a little bit further.

Ian Paget: So with idea generation, you spoke then about basically sitting down and trying different things. Are there certain exercises that you would fall back on and I'll give you an example with logo design. Sometimes I would start with mind mapping, so something that I find really useful is say that you are designing a logo for a certain industry, say like, I use football as an example. So I write football in the middle and then I'll draw all these lines out and things that come off of the top for my head is like a goal, football pitch, fans. You keep writing down all these words that are connected to that and that can help you to come up with visual ideas. And then sometimes I'll start like if I drew a picture of a goal and football, maybe I would try and mishmash different ideas together just based on words as a starting point. Are there similar exercises to that when coming up with a name?

Rob Meyerson: Well, not just similar, but identical, I think might not be.

Ian Paget: I thought it would be.

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. Mind mapping is a very good place to start and it could be literally drawing that mind map. It could be sticky notes on the wall kind of clustered the same way you would with a mind map. I tend to work sometimes just in lists where I'll just sort of vertically list concepts and words related to each other, and then move over to a new list and do a list based on another concept or something like that. But it's that same idea of mind mapping, basically. One thing that you can do a little bit, I suppose this might work in exploring concepts visually as well, but you can think about just the various relationships between words. So if you thought about football as a sport, then you might think sort of inside of football, what are all the different components of football?

And so, like you said, what are the different pieces of the field? What is all the gear needed to play the game, but then you can also kind of think above football. So you can just think about sport in general or different ideas about sort of the mentality of athletes. And so there's a little bit of maybe more considered or directed thinking that you can do as opposed to just complete free association. I tend to start with that, just letting my mind completely run wild. But if I start to sort of run out of ideas or if I just really want to make sure I'm digging deeper, then I'll think about the different ways that words can relate to each other, or I'll start exploring other sources of ideas which I list in the book. Things like looking up different expressions or idioms. Looking at quotations, looking at lyrics from songs, all of these can provide inspiration. So that's another way to approach the problem.

Ian Paget: How much would you get the client involved in that process?

Rob Meyerson: It ranges, a lot of times they're really not involved at all and they don't want to be, it depends on the client. If it's a data corporate client that has a lot of naming projects and they just want to outsource this to an agency, then they just want you to come back with your name ideas. But I have plenty of clients who want to be involved. Some of my clients are creative, people consider themselves creative people that have great ideas or want to play a role.

And so in some cases I'll run a workshop usually right at the beginning to capture that sort of free association stage to give everyone a chance to feel like they've gotten a bunch of ideas off their chest right off the bat. As I'm sure you and your listeners will understand there's partly a sort of political or psychological aspect to this of making sure that people feel that they've been involved in the process. It can make more likely to accept the final output whether or not they see their own names. So yeah, sometimes it can be involved quite a bit and other times not at all.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I think it depends on the client. It sounds very... I'm coming in at this as a logo designer and it's similar from client to clients, some clients want to get quite involved and in cases like that is good to get them to at least feel like they've been heard even though their ideas might not necessarily be used in the final Lego. At least you've given them a chance to have their say or you've listened and you've acknowledged their ideas. So yeah, I guess it's from a client to client basis.

Rob Meyerson: Yeah, that's right. And I guess it is again, a little bit different in that really anyone can throw out a bunch of word ideas it's much easier and sort of less time consuming than sitting and drawing a logo idea, which I suppose anyone can do even if they're not a designer they can try their hand, in sketching something. But I guess there are a couple of risks with involving the client, which I don't think will surprise you. So one is the sort of psychological aspect of it backfires and that they think they've come up with the best name and why didn't they see that in the presentation that you gave. And so I do tend to try to take a lot of the client's ideas and look at them from a legal standpoint and see if they look like they might be available so that I can at least answer that question. Because a lot of times it's as simple as saying, well, we looked at that, but it wasn't available from a legal standpoint.

If they do have great ideas, then that's great. But then the risk is that they feel like we paid you a lot of money and we came up with the idea, right, which is ironic because they said they wanted to be involved. And so I try to take the stance because I truly feel this way that a great name can come from absolutely anywhere. That the actual word or name can come from an off the cuff idea from someone on the client's team or it can come from the agency and they're not really paying ultimately for just that one idea, they're paying for the process, they're paying for legal pre-screening and linguistic screening, which we haven't talked about. But these steps that all these names have to go through and they're paying for the expertise and experience of sort of identifying a good name when we see it as opposed to just handing over a list of 500 ideas.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Okay. So I think with anything, coming up with an idea is easy. If somebody is listening and they are trying to come up with a name, if you can't come up with one idea you have a problem. Somebody that's creative, that's good with ideas should be able to fairly quickly come up with probably 100 different ideas. The challenge is narrowing that down or knowing what works, knowing what doesn't work, knowing what's right, what's wrong and so on. So I know based on your book there is a process for narrowing this down to one. Can we talk through how you go about taking those 100 ideas and funnelling it down to a handful of suitable options?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah, of course. And I will say for a lot of projects, 100 won't be enough. It depends on the category, but the legal constraints can be so tough that you may find that 90 plus percent of your ideas are not available legally. And so...

Ian Paget: That's scary.

Rob Meyerson: It is.

Ian Paget: So you have to come up with thousands of potential ideas.

Rob Meyerson: I would say hundreds if not a little over a 1000 mostly.

Ian Paget: I think this is one of the things that graphic designers completely underestimate, because I've seen, I've known students come out of university, they're trained as graphic designers. One of the things that they want to start offering is naming not realising how hard it is. I think coming up with a good name is actually one of the hardest things that anyone that's involved in brand strategy properly faces, because sometimes a good idea can just crop up and you roll with it. But most of the time, like you said, you have to come up with thousands and then run through this whole screening process to narrow it down and it's very time consuming, so.

Rob Meyerson: Yeah, both the generating of ideas, I mean that, like you said, it's relatively easy to come up with 100, but coming up with your 300th idea, it starts to feel like you're squeezing blood from a stone in a pocket. And that's why I have in the book a lot of recommendations for things to do to build out your list, things to do when you hit sort of writer's block, just different approaches to the problem. And that's also why sometimes it helps to have multiple namers on a project. I typically work with others and we'll each come up with 250 ideas. And surprisingly not as much overlap as you might think and so you very quickly have a list of 600 or 700 ideas.

But to answer your question, how do you get from so six or 700 down to say 20 that you might want to present to a client or 10? It's a few steps. So first I just shortlist from that long list. So because it's been somewhat freewheeling, there are bound to be a lot of ideas in that longer list that just aren't quite right when you really think about it. And so I go back to the brief, remind myself what we were trying to achieve, go through the list painstakingly sometimes with other namers and just pull the best of the bunch. And that's usually less than 100, so you're back to a somewhat manageable list. And then those need to go through what's called preliminary trademark screening. So like I've said, trademark availability is a big hurdle for any name and yet it's near impossible or just unreasonably expensive to ask a lawyer to go through a list of 50 or 100 names and really examine them all for availability.

So what we do instead is a short and relatively inexpensive preliminary trademark screening, or what's sometimes called a knockout search where you're just looking for obvious problems with that long list. And saying, okay, well out of these 100, these 40 just immediately came up with red flags that somebody else is already using them or we went to the website and it's a direct competitor. And so it's easy to just knock those out. Maybe another 20 seemed completely clear, we couldn't find anything related to them. And then the rest are sort of in the middle, like a yellow light in a stoplight system. And so that's one place where you start to weed out names. Then you would also do typically a linguistic check. So it depends on the situation, but especially these days, most clients are going to be exposed to multiple languages and or cultures with whatever name they're creating, whether it's a company or a product or a service.

And so you want to do again, not a deep search with heavy quantitative research in each market, but a knockout search where you're asking a handful of native speakers in those countries, does this name mean something bad. But it's not just that, I mean, that's kind of the nightmare scenario that everyone thinks of and sometimes laughs at, is oh, your name means barf in this language, but there's a lot more subtlety to it than that. It could be that there's just a brand in that country already. And maybe I was naming something recently and it turned out it was just a facial tissue brand in another country, which wasn't in the same category.

So it wasn't legally problematic, but it just felt a bit weird to have basically the same name as, as Kleenex or something. Everyone in that country would've associated it with that. And then sometimes it can just be a pronunciation issue. So it could be fine from a meaning standpoint, not similar to anything else, but people in Poland can't pronounce the GH together at the end of that name. And so it's going to be a problem in that country.

Ian Paget: That's really interesting. So can I just quickly ask with the trademarks stuff, is there a specific website where you are going to basically type in a name and double check what's coming up?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. The most useful site is the United States Patent and Trademark Office has a free public database called TESS, it's the Trademark Electronic Search System. Right. So I can't remember what the two S's are.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I've heard that, I've spoke about that with a trademark attorney when I've interviewed someone and that seems to be a common way of checking. Is it global when you use that trademark?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah, not technically because it's the US PTO, but a lot of especially big companies will register there even if they're not US-based. But no, there are analogous systems all over the world, there's a big European one called YPO and other countries have their own systems. And so I'm not familiar with all of them, but I'll typically, I suppose most of my clients are either US-based or at least have a big exposure in the US. So I'll typically check there. But another really important thing to check is just Google or just a search.

And you may find things that aren't registered, but at least in the US, you don't have to register a trademark to still be able to claim some trademark rights. If you've been using a business name for a decade but never got around to registering it, you can probably still go after someone for using the same name as you if it feels like it's going to confuse customers or it's going to harm your business. And so that's one reason, but also just because it's easier to just Google around and see if anyone else seems to be using the same name for the same goods and services.

Ian Paget: Yeah. So I guess at this point, you're just doing a quick check really just making sure that there's nothing obvious coming up if you was to present these 10 names to a client. But obviously when you do finally get to that one, I guess it's the same with logo design. There's only so much that you can actually do, checking online, checking on these databases and stuff like that. But until it goes through the actual registration process, you never entirely know. So I guess that's exactly the same issue with names, probably even more so with names than logos, because logos are well, I work with a trademark attorney sometimes and he told me it's rarely the logo that's the issue, that it's normally the name, if anything does come up because if another company sounds remotely similar, then there's an issue.

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. So I know that the same trademark database can be used to search for logos, but it's pretty hard. I'm not an attorney and I've never really done a logo search, but I've heard and it seems that it would be pretty difficult because you have to describe the logo the same way somebody else has described it in order to find whether there's a hit. So you're searching for things like triangle or the color or something. Whereas with the name, it is just the word. And there's still a little bit of difficulty there and that if somebody spelled it differently by one letter contrary to some popular belief, you can't get around a trademark issue by just changing a letter in the name or removing a letter or something like that. If it seems really similar, then it's still a problem. And so you need to do somewhat of a flexible search looking for not just the exact same spelling, but similar enough names that it might cause confusion.

Ian Paget: Yeah, sure. So we spoke about narrowing this list down, say you've got 10 you're checking whether it's legally available, whether it's comfortable to say it, what are you actually presenting to clients when it comes around to sharing what you've done with them?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. So I'll show names that have gone through this whole process that have been shortlisted that don't have any obvious legal conflicts or linguistic issues. Sometimes there's a little bit of domain checking in there as well. And so whatever names sort of remain the best of the bunch at the end of that process, I'll typically present. I try to present somewhere between 10 and maybe 20 up to sometimes closer to 30, but that's pretty rare. It does depend again just on the situation. And the way that I present them as little design as possible, basically I don't want to bias people. I don't want to show, I know some people do this or think that this should be done, but I don't want to ever have even sort of sketched out logo ideas for each name. First off, I don't think anyone wants to rapidly sketch out logos because it kind of devalues the entire process, but also it can bias people for, or against the name.

So I really try to show them in a neutral font on a basically black and white slide. I do try to provide a visual aid though, the same visual aid for each name. And that is purely because it really helps people imagine a basically an unfamiliar word as a company name or as a brand. If they see something that looks realistic, if they see it with maybe a circle R next to it on a business card with somebody's details, or if they see it mapped up on the product that is eventually going to bear its name. It's such a leap of faith to just say this seemingly sort of out of thin air, this word or especially if it's an invented word is going to be a brand that we're going to invest a huge amount of money in, or that's going to be worth a lot of money one day, or that millions of consumers are going to pick up at a store. It just seems strange to do that. And so sometimes that visual aid can really help people get across the finish line.

Ian Paget: Oh, wow. That's really interesting. So to some degree you are taking the name, picking out a font colour, but then using that same thing throughout your presentation so at least they can picture how it could look. I like that, because it's especially for graphic designers. Because I think something that's going to happen, people will listen to this and if they don't already offer naming as service, they might consider it. So it's going to be graphic designers offering this as a service. And it's quite nice to actually think that when it comes around to presentation, you can start to build the identity right away from the name and present it as an identity. Because it sews the seed for other services.

Rob Meyerson: Yeah, potentially. I mean, yeah, I try not to go too far down that road because well, first off, if it's the same one for every name, then the name I would think might ultimately impact the design and solution. And so you kind of don't have an opportunity to tailor it to the name if you're showing the same thing. Also, I do try to avoid colour on the off chance that someone has an aversion to a colour or something and I don't like to bias them that way. But yeah, you can start to kind of get people thinking about this as an identity and we didn't talk too much about what makes a good name or bad name, but I do think it's important for everyone listening and their clients to know that they should be thinking about the name visually as well as verbally.

So that's part of the reason I show it on the slide and say it out loud. I want them to hear it. I want them to think about radio ads or podcast ads. And so does it roll off the tongue, but also it's going to be a logo probably, or a name that's on a product or on a website. And so even if it sounds great, does it have the potential to look great. And I'll rely oftentimes on designers to help me there, that's one place where a name and a logo designer can really partner is I've had designers tell me it's going to be really hard to make a logo out of this name. It's too long or this cluster of letters is just kind of ugly. Obviously great designers can work magic with just about anything, but still it's good to have the input of some names just really lend themselves to a great identity and some less so.

Ian Paget: I totally agree with that. Something I wrote down as a potential question while you was talking. So coming up with a name, one of the most important things is this protectable check, whether it can be trademark, we've already spoken about that. I think that's the most important thing really. If you ticked all of the other boxes, you can register and so on. Domain names, social media, that's some something that as a graphic designer, I think of that before the actual trademark registration and I'm sure a lot of your clients do. Have you come up with a good solution for what you do in the situations where you come up with the most incredible name, it's available, you can register it, it works perfectly for the business. But then somebody has taken the domain name, they've got the .com, the dot code UK is gone, all the social handles have gone. Have you come up with an interesting way to get around that sort of scenario or would you deem that as a problem for that name?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. Now it sort of yes and no. I've dedicated a chapter of the book to it. It is sometimes a big problem and sometimes much less of a problem than clients tend to think it is. So the big takeaway, my advice is to not let the domain availability or lack there of drive your entire naming process. That's the mistake I see people making is they just start with what .com can I get? And that is a decision. And if that is really your priority and you've thought through it carefully and that is for whatever reason, rarely would I think that it makes a lot of sense, but if you just insist on having an exact .com, then frankly, I would throw out a lot of the naming process or at least postpone it and just go look at what .coms you can get, then start narrowing down from there, or put it through the legal process.

Another big piece of advice here is just to make sure that you're never conflating domain availability and legal availability. So just because you got the .com success does not mean you own that name from a trademark standpoint and just because you registered a trademark does not mean you can bully someone into giving you the .com because you have a registered trademark for that name. They are two completely separate things for the most part. So the way I solve it though is I like to try to discuss it a little bit upfront with clients. I want to make sure that we're not completely misaligned because typically the exact .com for any name that I'm going to show them is probably not available. That's just how bad the availability picture is right now with .coms.

And so I try to make sure that they're not going to insist on that or think that I've screened everything for available .coms when I haven't. The best and most common solution is to add a descriptor after the name. So if you're an agency you put agency after the name. If you sell coffee, you put coffee after the name, and that will often open up a .com or least a .co or something like that seems reasonable. You can look at alternative top level domains, not just .co, .io, but there are 1500 of them now. So if you do have that coffee shop, you can get .coffee. If you do have an agency, you can get .agency. So I tend to think about all these alternatives once the name has been chosen, or in some cases once we've narrowed it down to maybe a top three or a top five.

The other reason is it's really impossible to know what the full domain availability picture looks like until you do some pretty significant digging sometimes. I know that there are these bulk domain searches like on GoDaddy, where you can put in your 100 ideas and see which .coms are available for 12 bucks or sometimes 1500 bucks. And that's great, but the ones that it says aren't available could be for a lot of different reasons. It could be that somebody has bought it and they're just holding onto it. It could be that a business is using it, but the business has been out of business for five years. It could be any host of things.

And so really what you're going to ultimately have to do or probably want to do is either hire a domain broker or in some cases do it yourself and reach out to people that maybe have the exact .com, find out if they're willing to sell it. And that can take time to get them to respond. It can take a lot of negotiating over price. It could take time for you to figure out what you think the right budget is. And so doing that for 100 ideas on your list is just you can't do that. And so I tend to try to make that something we solve for closer to the end of the naming process.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I know why I got the .com of Logo Geek. It wasn't available originally, but the person bought it, but didn't ever use it. And it took me a long time to be able to track them down and contact them. But in the end we made a deal. I paid a lot of money for it, but I felt like it was important to what I was doing. And I actually think it wasn't too expensive for what it was really.

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. Congrats on getting it. That's great.

Ian Paget: I think they could have asked for maybe, if they five Xed it, I probably would've still have bought it because as far as I'm concerned, I need or I want it. I put so much work into Logo Geek, it makes sense to get the .com and to actually get that and to own all of the other domains and all the social handles and so on. I think as a business owner, it is really valuable if you can get that. So they are sometimes extremely expensive, but if it's worth it for you, then go for it. That's how I see it.

Rob Meyerson: A couple points on that. That's a great story about getting Logo Geek. Just a brand consultant and professor named Larry Vincent just told this story the other day that apparently when Microsoft wanted Bing, they went to whoever owned bing.com and said they wanted to buy it. And the owner said, "Sure, but it's going to cost you a lot of money." And Microsoft said, "Okay, what are you thinking?" And he said, "$500,000." And the Microsoft attorneys who were charged with getting this domain agreed and breathed a sigh of relief because they had been authorised to spend $5 million for it. So it's kind of heartbreaking for whoever owned bing.com to know that. But yeah, a couple of thoughts on this, there are people who do this professionally that know a lot about what different domains sort of really are worth. It's just like buying a home there.

There's kind of no real value except what other people are willing to pay for it. I guess that's not just a home, that's kind of everything, but I tend to relate it to homes because you look at comparables, what of other domains that are similar in terms of length or meaning or words sold for recently, and they can do this the same way a real estate agent would and figure out about what they think a domain should cost. They can negotiate on your behalf. And then really importantly, tying back to the Microsoft and your Logo Geek story, if you go after a domain and the person who owns it can sort of sense how much you want it or picks up on the fact that you are Microsoft and have deep pockets, they're going to charge a lot more. And so another thing that you can do either with a domain broker or if you're just pretty savvy, do it yourself is just make sure that they don't know who you are or they don't think you want it as badly as you did.

Ian Paget: I did that. I ended up using my Hotmail address and just casually come cross this domain, does it happen to be available, would you be interested in selling it? I think you have to be like that. Because I think if you go in and you're like, oh my God, I've been working on this company for 20 years and I desperately need this, obviously, anyone that's got any ounces of common sense is going to be like, yeah, you can have it for a lot of money. Because you know as a seller that they really need it and they're going to exploit that. So definitely if you're going to do it yourself, be savvy with it. It's like if you're going to go into buy a home, you don't be like, I really love it. You'd be like, that's all right. Yeah. Quite like it. I think this could work for us, it's one of the 10 that we're looking at.

Rob Meyerson: Exactly.

Ian Paget: That's hilarious. Okay. So we're coming up to about 50 minutes. So I think to close off this conversation about naming, so now you picked a name, how do you approach actually launching that into the real world?

Rob Meyerson: Yeah. First you have to make sure you've secured it. So even after you've checked the availability, you do typically want to register a trademark. And so then you are probably going to want to work with a lawyer to do it. You could do it yourself, but probably want to work with a lawyer to make sure everything is done properly. You may still have to go after that domain as we've discussed. So, first thing is just make sure you've kind of got it locked down tightly, social media handles as well. But then when you actually go to launch, so much of it depends on the context, whether it's a company or a product, whether it's renaming or a new name. But a few rules of thumb, one is I tend to advise clients not to think of launching a name, but to think of launching a brand of which the name is one piece.

And so try to launch everything together. So if there is going to be a logo design for it, then don't announce the name and then later show the logo. If it's a new company, then just launch the company all at once with the name and the logo and the website. And the reason is when you've put too much focus on the name, a lot of times that'll just cause sort of an unnatural judging of the name out in the world. And inevitably, some people will love it and some people won't, but it's kind of strange to have people just react to the name as opposed to the way they would actually react to seeing a company online or seeing a product on a shelf. So try to launch everything at once, make sure you get your story straight in advance.

I don't know if you see this with logos too, but these days it feels like people really appreciate at least a little bit of an explanation of why is this the name or why did we like it? Why do we choose it? Why are you changing your name? There should be a reason there, it shouldn't just be, we wanted to, there should be some strategic rationale. And so having that ready as in, if you're a relatively sizeable company, then you want to have something written down and shared with other employees so that everyone can be preaching from the same hymnal. It is really important. And then lastly, it's trying to present a united front when the name comes out. Again, whatever the name is, some people will probably not like it as much as others do. And so making sure that you have a lot of positive energy around the launch is really important.

One of my favourite stories is when Alphabet launched the Google parent company, Eric Schmidt, who was the former CEO, I think he was still involved with the company at the time immediately tweeted that he loved the name and it was so immediate that I felt like, okay, they planned that in advance. Whoever runs his Twitter account just set that up to go out like a minute after the announcement. And I think that's the right way to do it. I think that's really smart is have some allies that maybe don't work for the company, come out and say, oh, that's great. I love the name. I love the logo. This is such a cool looking brand. And try to build that positive momentum when you go to launch.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. So, I mean, this is one of those things where branding identity design, which the audience will be familiar with, the naming is one part of that. So I think in terms of launching a name, it's actually launching an identity, like you said, and is something that the audience will be very familiar with, because we're very much involved in that process.

Rob Meyerson: Right. There are rare cases where the name is launched alone. It's never advisable, but I'm just thinking of the Washington NFL Team that had to rebrand because their name was considered racist. When it's something like that where it's a big public renaming and people are waiting with bated breath for what's the new name going to be, sometimes the name kind of comes out as a standalone brand asset and that's where you see it. It often doesn't go that well. Right. A lot of people trash it immediately and there's so much attention on just the name, but there are cases where you kind of have to do it, I would just try to avoid it if you can.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So one last question, you have a book, do you want to tell us a little bit about that as a closing question?

Rob Meyerson: Sure. Of course. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.

Ian Paget: No worries at all, I think people should go and check out. It's a very good book. I've not read it back to back yet, but there's a handful of naming books out there and this is one of the best of them that I've seen.

Rob Meyerson: Thank you so much.

Ian Paget: And it's got a nice foreword by Alina Wheeler who also has one of the best books on branding. So yeah, you've got a good person to do a foreword there, so congratulations.

Rob Meyerson: I couldn't agree more, Alina, I interviewed her not too long ago and we kept in touch and we've become friends as well as her writing the foreword. So it's been a really rewarding experience, just her friendship as well as her professional guidance and...

Ian Paget: Yeah, she's really genuinely lovely. She was really kind after I interviewed her to send a copy of her book and she sent a card, had a picture of her on, she wrote a little letter and the actual envelope became and was decorated with stickers and stuff. She's got such a personality and she's got a lot of warmth to her. She's very friendly and caring, so.

Rob Meyerson: I agree. So there you go. There's the plug for the book, buy it, foreword by Alina Wheeler. The rest of the book is okay too. I wrote it. Thank you for what you said about the book. I mean, I'll say this and I think it may, hopefully will get some people really interested in the book. It may turn off other people, but I just want to be really candid about what it is. It is a process oriented book, that is how to do naming. It's not a whole lot of theory or sort of fluff. There are some stories in there and some funny anecdotes, but it's not sort of about other brand names in the world or the philosophy of branding or naming, it is a procedural guide to this is how professional namers do what they do from the very beginning to the very end with examples and tips every step of the way. It's based on my years of experience, as well as interviews I've done with other professional namers.

So it's sort of a don't just take my word for it book, which I really wanted to do because there are some other naming books out there. Some of them are great, but pretty much all of them are written by one expert and it's sort of their take on naming. Of course that's unavoidable and my book is to some degree my take, but I really wanted it to be a little more universal of, again, this is how people that I think are the best in the business do this consistently and consistently come up with great name ideas. It's a process and there's some magic to it and certainly some creativity, which is part of why I have no qualm sharing all of it. I really I try and not to hold back at all with exactly how it's done, but there's a lot of process to it.

And a lot of things I've learned by trial and error that honestly I wish I had this book 15 years ago because it would've helped me avoid a lot of those mistakes and answered a lot of questions that I had on day one. And that's a lot of why I wrote it. I just felt like, and speaking which that's another thing I took from Alina when I asked her why she wrote her great book, Designing Brand Identity, she said, it's the book that she wished that she had on the shelf. And that is now my answer that I have borrowed from her as to why I wrote Brand Naming.

Ian Paget: Yeah. And I think anyone that's listening to this, that's the book that they want. They want to know how to do this, what the process is and how they can actually add it as a service to the product offering. So I hope that through this conversation it's convinced people to go and check out your book, Brand Naming. I recommend it. And hopefully this conversation has given trust and credibility to you. So Rob, it's been an absolute pleasure to chat with you finally. We've been long overdue this conversation, but yeah, it's been an absolute... Yeah, it's been fantastic. So thank you so much for coming on.

Rob Meyerson: Thanks for having me and the feeling is mutual.