Hello, My Name is Awesome Read online

  In April 2009, Norcal Waste Systems changed its name to Recology, fusing the words recycle and ecology. This progressive new name evokes the company’s environmental shift, resonates with both residential and commercial customers, and is a source of pride (instead of embarrassment) for their 2,100 employees.

  A Meaningful Long Name Is Better than a Short Meaningless Name

  It’s better to have a meaningful name that people can remember than a meaningless name they can type in five keystrokes. The name of the online home furnishings store Previously Owned by a Gay Man is loaded with meaning and is much more memorable than a shortened version (PreOw) or its abbreviation (POBAGM).

  The longest name I know of belonged to one of the entertainment law firms that represented Michael Jackson: Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca, Fischer, Gilbert-Lurie, Stiffelman, Cook, Johnson, Lande & Wolf. I’m not sure how meaningful such a long name could be to their clients, but until recently, when they shortened it to Ziffren Brittenham LLP, the names of all ten partners composed the name of this twenty-three-person firm. I would love to have seen how they crammed that onto a business card.

  Do Not Name Your Company after yourself

  While it may evoke warm thoughts to your friends and family, your personal name is meaningless to your future customers. They don’t know you yet. Your name evokes absolutely nothing about your business, expertise, or brand personality. And if you’re like many of us, your name is either hard to spell, hard to pronounce, or hard for people to remember. Why would you want to have a business name with the same difficulties? (I suspect you know this, which is why you are reading this book.)

  Unfortunately, most consultants and service professionals (architects, attorneys, photographers, professional speakers, etc.) use their own name by default because “That’s what everyone else does.” Most don’t know any better, lack creative inspiration, or simply let their ego get in the way. This is a huge missed opportunity. Fortunately you are reading this book and won’t make the same mistake.

  Tejal Topiwala is a talented home stager and interior designer in Toronto. For most people in North America, her name is intimidating to pronounce. She had the foresight to know that it might be a barrier for people to pick up the phone and call if they were unsure how to pronounce her name. And of course her name wouldn’t distinguish her in any way from her competitors. We branded her company Paprika, with the tagline “Spice up your space.” This new identity recognizes her flair for color, lends itself to wordplay, has beautiful imagery, and is a fantastic conversation starter. And most of all, it lets prospective clients know that she’s creative.

  If your Personal Name Lends Itself to wordplay, Get Clever

  If your first or last name lends itself to wordplay, you may be able to create a clever brand name out of it. Dawn Gluskin is a multimillion-dollar entrepreneur and coach who shares advice through her company, Dawnsense. Steven Lord is a consultant who calls his business Lord Knows!

  If you do go this route, consider what could happen if you sell your company and your name is still attached to it, as happened to Shari Fitzpatrick, the founder of the original chocolate-dipped strawberry company, Shari’s Berries. For two decades, Shari cultivated tens of thousands of loyal customers and a reputation for creating beautifully hand-dipped creations. Shari’s Berries became well known, thanks to O Magazine, QVC, and the SkyMall catalog, where her product was featured on the cover three times. But after making a bad business decision, Shari was pushed out of her own company. A large corporation now owns Shari’s Berries and mass-produces a product that bears little resemblance to the original. It makes Shari cringe that anyone would ever associate her good name with an inferior product. There’s nothing she can do about it. She is forbidden to use her own name for her new company. (She does have a cute new name, though—Berried In Chocolate—inspired by the title of her chocolate-covered book, which is quite delicious.)

  MORE EXAMPLES OF MEANINGFUL NAMES

  Kryptonite (bike locks)

  Breakthrough (mental health website)

  Repel (insect repellent)

  Mayday (tech support button)

  Yelp (customer reviews)

  Imagery —

  Visually Evocative to Aid in Memory

  Think of people you’ve met throughout your life who have unusual first names. For me, that would be Daisy, Forest, and Chopper. I met all of them more than ten years ago during a six-week backpacking trip through New Zealand. (Chopper was a helicopter pilot.) I met dozens of people on my trip, but those three are the ones I remember instantly because the names have such strong associations with things that I can picture in my mind. That’s the power of a visually evocative name.

  Wouldn’t you love to have a product or company name that would be so embedded in people’s memories that they could recall it ten years later? You can, if you name your product or company something that conjures up images. When people can visualize your name with a picture, it’s much easier for them to remember than an unfamiliar word or acronym that doesn’t give their mind anything to latch on to. Think of an energy drink named Bloom. Now think of one named Enviga. Which name paints a picture? How’s that for flower power?

  One brand name loaded with visual imagery is Timberland, makers of rugged gear for the great outdoors. Whenever I hear that name, I imagine myself hiking in a mossy evergreen forest along a babbling brook, listening to lilting songbirds and crickets.

  Even Dog Food Names Can Have Imagery

  No matter what your product or company is, there is no excuse not to have a name with imagery. Pet food company Merrick recognizes the power of visually evocative names. Its canned dog food flavors conjure up some pretty tasty images: Thanksgiving Day Dinner, Grammy’s Pot Pie, Cowboy Cookout, Smothered Comfort, Honolulu Luau. Merrick’s names live up to their tagline, “It’s food worthy of a fork.” (For the record, I have not eaten any of these.)

  Make Sure Your Name Has Imagery, Not Just your Brand

  Last week, someone wrote to me, “I’ve always liked the name Wells Fargo, because it connotes reliability and speed, and it has wonderful imagery of the Wild West. The stagecoach delivered the mail, come rain, snow, or ambush.” Sure, after 162 years of building a successful brand and investing millions of dollars in advertising, the name Wells Fargo does evoke all of those things. But what if founders Henry Wells and William G. Fargo were starting a bank today and the name Wells Fargo popped up on your caller ID? What do those words alone conjure up without all of the years of visual branding? Certainly not pictures of the Wild West. Make sure your name has imagery from the beginning.

  MORE EXAMPLES OF NAMES WITH IMAGERY

  Range Rover (SUVs)

  Target (mass merchandiser)

  Hard Candy (nail polish)

  Irish Spring (soap)

  Leap Frog (educational toys)

  Legs —

  Lends Itself to a Theme for Extended Mileage

  To get the most out of your name, give it one that has legs. Strive for a theme with mileage you can build your brand around. Names with legs provide endless wordplay and verbal branding opportunities.

  A strong theme can be extended to many elements of a brand, including these:

  taglines

  tradeshow themes

  job titles

  online promo codes

  blog names

  conference rooms

  newsletter names

  theme songs

  network names

  email signoffs

  server names

  company award names

  Public relations pro, Lynette Hoy, is a fiery woman who isn’t afraid to pick up the phone to pitch a great story about her clients to the press. When I met her, she was using her personal name as her business name: Lynette Hoy PR. Unfortunately, it didn’t evoke anything about her high-energy personality or tenacity. So we branded her with a name and tagline that said it all: Firetalker PR. Hot on the press.

  Lynette took it from there and r
an with it, creating a firestorm of branding ideas. Her official title is Fire Chief. She works in The Firehouse. And her packages are called Inferno, Controlled Burn, and Matchbox. She lightly peppers her marketing materials with her theme, keeping it fresh and fun, but not cutesy, corny, or over the top. And the ringtone on her phone is the classic R&B funk song “Fire” by the Ohio Players, which she also cranks up during her speaking engagements to fire up the audience.

  Find a Theme That Can Be Stretched like Carnival Taffy

  Some especially rich themes with endless wordplay include space exploration, nature, music, travel, and art. The theme of food is also highly extendable, as we’ve discovered at Eat My Words:

  Blog name: The Kitchen Sink

  info@email: [email protected]

  Service packages: Snack, the Whole Enchilada, and Just the Meat

  Client parking sign: “Eat My Words’ client parking only. Violators will be eaten.”

  Business card: pink retro refrigerator (a replica of the one in our office, which we use as a bookcase)

  Wireless network name: Candyland

  Meeting materials: toast coasters, pens that look like licorice sticks, “Food for Thought” notepads

  Corporate workshops: Spilling the Beans

  The Right Name Creates a Family

  When you launch a product, you can’t look into your crystal ball and know what the future holds. But developing a naming theme early on will help you tremendously down the road. Apple has done this well with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and iTouch. And even though the word cloud has become terribly overused, the name iCloud is instantly identifiable as being from Apple, which makes it stand out from the rest of the cloud crowd. It works for them. (But it doesn’t work for you or your products. Don’t even go there.)

  Republic of Tea has sub-brands with very long legs:

  Get a Grip

  Get Happy

  Get Clean

  Get Lost

  Get Gorgeous

  Get Smart

  Trader Joe’s has branded their ethnic foods with clever sub-brands that play off the primary name:

  Trader Jose’s (Mexican)

  Trader Joe-San (Japanese)

  Trader Ming’s (Chinese)

  Trader Jacque’s (French)

  Trader Giotto’s (Italian)

  If your name doesn’t have a theme, you can still extend it through the personality of the brand, as Ben & Jerry’s has done:

  Cherry Garcia

  Chunky Monkey

  Chocolate Therapy

  Karamel Sutra

  Chubby Hubby

  Liz Lemon

  Naming Product Versions

  The easiest way to name product versions is with sequential numbers. Numbers help consumers quickly differentiate newer versus older. Numbering versions is especially appropriate in software because technology changes quickly. My current web browser is Firefox 24. While it’s boring, it’s clear.

  On the other hand, Android is having fun by naming their versions after sweet indulgences: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean. Android’s maker, Google, has also licensed the name KitKat from Nestlé in a clever promotional partnership. There are endless names Android can consider for future versions. Banana Split, Butterscotch, Cherry Pie, Lemon Bar, and Macaroon all sound good to me.

  Another creative way to introduce new versions is with letters of the alphabet. Ford has done this by giving their models names that start with the letter “F”:

  Fairlane

  Festiva

  Fairmont

  Futura

  Falcon

  Focus

  Fiesta

  Fusion

  If you’re going to try this, try using an initial letter that has many words associated with it, such as S, P, C, D, M, or A. Avoid limited letters such as K, Z, and X. (As a rule, it’s never a good idea to start a name with the letter X, which makes pronunciation difficult. It’s also the most difficult keystroke on a Qwerty keyboard.)

  Names with Legs Can Mean Money

  Despite the polarizing name, restaurant chain Hooters makes an obscene amount of money selling more than 250 types of merchandise featuring its name and silly slogans, including baby bibs that say “Show Me Your Hooters.” Really.

  If you have a catchy name that makes people smile, you can slap it on merchandise that people will pay for because they love your name and want to show it off. Think about that for a minute. You launch a new business without celebrity endorsements, brand recognition, or the cachet of Nike, Polo, or Louis Vuitton. Yet people are clamoring to buy and wear products with your name on it. Instead of you having to pay for advertising, your customers are paying you to advertise your brand. That is the true sign of a successful name. Here is some monetized merchandise we’ve created for food retailers.

  Company

  Monetized Merchandise

  Church of Cupcakes

  T-shirts that read “OMG” and “Forgive me Father, for I have binged.”

  Spoon Me (frozen yogurt)

  T-shirts with the slogans “Shut-up and Spoon Me” and “If you love me, Spoon Me.” Bumper stickers that read “If you’re driving this close, you might as well Spoon Me.”

  Smitten (ice cream stores)

  Branded T-shirts, totes, and infant bodysuits. “I’m Smitten” is on the back of the bodysuits, which looks adorable when the parent is holding the child.

  Emotional —

  Moves People

  A recent Fast Company article revealed that 50 percent of every buying decision is driven by emotion. I’m not surprised. Think of how many times you have purchased a bottle of wine simply because the name made you smile. If you shop by the label as the majority of wine buyers do, it’s hard to resist a love-at-first-sight name like Fat Bastard, 7 Deadly Zins, Layer Cake, Educated Guess, Little Black Dress, and Cat’s Pee on a Gooseberry Bush. That’s the power of a name that makes an emotional connection.

  Use Emotion to Increase sales

  The hip Hotel Vitale on San Francisco’s Embarcadero waterfront experienced a 25 percent jump in wedding business when we changed the ho-hum names of their wedding services to ones that were, pardon the pun, emotionally engaging.

  Before

  After

  Rehearsal Dinner

  Meet the Parents

  Co-ed Bridal Shower

  Shower Together

  Post-Reception Bar Rental

  Last Call for Alcohol

  Post-Wedding Brunch

  Bloody Married

  Guest Rate

  Entourage Rate

  Previously, a bride and groom planning a wedding may have skimmed over a name like Post Reception Bar Rental, but nothing says party time like Last Call for Alcohol. That name makes an instant emotional connection because it’s fun, meaningful, and loaded with imagery. And suddenly, a co-ed bridal shower doesn’t sound so excruciating for the groom when it’s named Shower Together. All of these names bring levity to the stressful task of wedding planning, add value, and make everyone smile, even the parents footing the bill.

  While I’d love to share more sales figures with you, name metrics cannot be quantified unless a name is changed. And even then, with refreshed branding and new advertising, the name cannot take all the credit. Hotel Vitale can attribute the 25 percent increase in wedding sales to the name changes because they were simply words listed in a guide. Nothing else changed. Restaurants can try this by changing the name of a dish on a menu. Something as simple as changing Chicken Soup to the more emotionally driven Grandma’s Chicken Soup will increase sales.

  The power of Love

  Speaking of happily ever after, we all know that falling in love is a powerful emotion. When Eat My Words was charged with naming a new online dating website, we wanted the name to tap into those feelings. The company who hired us was eHarmony. While I loved the people we worked with there, I cringed at the name eHarmony, which is dated and pretty cheesy. Most
dating websites have dreadful names. Who really wants to say they met the love of their life on eHarmony, Christian Mingle, Farmers Only, Fuzd, or Veggie Dates?

  The new website eHarmony had created was for people who wanted a relationship but weren’t necessarily ready to get “Bloody Married.” We explored the positive emotions of romance and seized on the feelings people get when they are super excited about meeting someone new who they really, really like. You probably know that rush of excitement and happiness. It’s the best feeling in the world. We landed on Jazzed, a timeless word that people in the target audience are comfortable saying. It’s not only an emotional name, it’s literally an emotion. And a nice little bonus was that, like eHarmony, Jazzed evokes music. The client loved the name and launched the site.