An interview with Rob Meyerson (Podcast) 🔈
By: Arek Dvornechuck
Tags: Brand Name, Brand Strategy, Brand Naming, Branding, Brand Identity

1. Naming Brief

Arek Dvornechuck:

What’s up branding experts! — Arek here at Ebaqdesign. And welcome to On Branding Podcast — The only podcast where I interview branding experts to give you actionable tips on everything branding and beyond! In this episode, I interview Rob Meyerson and we talk about brand naming process, and Rob is a Brand Strategist and Founder of Heirloom which is an independent brand strategy and identity firm. And prior to launching his own firm, Rob was a Global Head of Brand Architecture and naming at HP (Hewlett-Packard), and he also held Strategy Director Roles at several leading international brand consulting firms. So, Rob has written about brand strategy and brand naming for leading publications: such as TechCrunch, Business Insider, The Guardian, Venture Beat, and Branding Strategy Insider. And Rob also hosts How Brands are Built which is a popular branding podcast and blog. So, basically, Rob is a strategist with a strong focus on brand naming, that’s why I really wanted to have him on our podcast to talk about brand naming process. Hello Rob! Thank you so much for taking the time to join us in our podcast.

Rob Meyerson:

Thanks for having me.

Arek Dvornechuck:

So, you work on the first naming project at Inter-Brand, and it was about 15 years ago. So, since then you’ve had a behind-the-scenes view of the naming process at well over a dozen agencies. So, based on all those naming projects that you’ve worked on, you’ve developed your seven-step naming process, right? So, I just wanted to make this podcast actionable for our listeners and ask you to just give us some overview of your process and perhaps some of your thoughts, and you can share maybe some of your tips on how to approach brand naming like a pro. So, starting with the naming brief, because on your blog and on your podcast you often talk about the importance of creating a naming brief, right? So, you say that the single biggest problem with naming is; decision-makers, who are not involved in the process — meaning that if you work with everybody else but not the busy CEO or Founder who is often the ultimate decision-maker then what oftentimes happens is you present the work and all you hear is ‘no’ to all of your great ideas. So, there was no agreement on what we are looking for in a name so it becomes very subjective and this is because they were not involved in the process from the beginning, right? So, can you speak to that a bit, what’s the goal of creating a naming brief and why it’s so important?

Rob Meyerson:

Sure, yeah I’ll start with a couple of things, the process that I outline, you said that I’ve come up with it, I guess I’d say that I have really just documented what I think is kind of standard operating procedure has seen it and done it at all these different agencies, and in-house. Different agencies and different naming professionals might have slightly different paths that they take to that final name, but by and large, these are the steps that you kind of need to go through in order to really do what I consider a full naming process, and it does start with that naming brief. And again, that can differ widely depending on the situation, there’s a lot of naming advice out there and a lot of good naming advice out there. A lot of it is geared toward small businesses, or even entrepreneurs that are one-person operations, and of course naming in that environment is quite a bit different than in a large enterprise where you have layers in a hierarchical organization of people that need to look at a name and approve it before it goes out. And so, that naming brief can range, therefore, from a few emails between you and your co-founders of; what do we want this name to be all about, and let’s just get on the same page, to a really formal document. And in those larger organizations, it’s typically a more formal document that requires some approvals before you even start coming up with name ideas and I do think it is really critical for a couple of reasons — really just two reasons. One is it puts everyone on the record saying this is what we want the name to be about and that way when you start coming up with name ideas or even if you hire somebody else to start coming up with name ideas, they know what they’re trying to do. They have some idea of what you’re looking for in the name, what’s inbound, what’s out of bounds, even documenting what are our competitors using as names for similar things so that we don’t look like a copycat or get into legal trouble, getting all that sorted is really important. So, that’s at the beginning of the process, and then on the tail end of the process when you’re just trying to make a decision; say everything’s gone smoothly and you’ve narrowed it down to your top three ideas, the brief again can become really useful at that point to just take yourselves back to the beginning, you know what did we say we wanted this name to be about, and try to make more of an objective decision about which name really hits the target of that brief as defined in that brief, and not just as you said, a subjective decision of well my favorite is this one or something like that.

Arek Dvornechuck:

Right, so the takeaway just for our listeners would be to; as you said, the naming brief can vary from if it’s a small business it might be just some emails between you and the founders if it’s a larger organization it’s more formal. But anyway, you need to align the team or you and whoever is the decision-maker on the same vision basically; on what the name should express, and have them approve the brief before you move into the brainstorming session. Because we need those objective criteria and this is going to allow us to judge those naming ideas.

Rob Meyerson:

Yeah exactly, I left that part out, but yes, getting approval, getting a review and approval and everyone to agree on the brief, and make sure that they really read it and think about it and discuss it and don’t just kind of say; sure and go ahead. Because you sort of alluded to a quote that I use a lot from Clive Schaefer — a great professional Name who I’ve worked with quite a bit, who says that the single biggest problem with naming projects in the naming process is when you fail to get that sign-off and approval at the beginning and it’s because if there’s some senior decision maker or even just someone who’s going to have veto power over the name and they hasn’t been involved at all, you may be completely off course and coming up with name ideas that just do not at all fit what they want the name to be about, there’s also a little bit of psychology involved here, there’s a lot of psychology involved in naming. But getting people involved at the beginning also sort of forces them to have a little bit of skin in the game. It also, when they are looking at the ideas they may see a little bit of their own thinking in those ideas, and as much as you’d like to think that this doesn’t influence people, they’re much more likely to approve or sort of like an idea if they feel like they played a hand in helping to create it. And so, you want to involve them at the beginning so that they feel like they played a role, otherwise, it’s really easy to look at a list of names that somebody else came up with and just sort of think to yourself; well I could have done better because you weren’t involved in the process and so you don’t know how much work went into all those ideas.

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2. Generating Name Ideas

Arek Dvornechuck:

Right, yes it definitely makes sense. So, if they are involved in the process, it’s just hard for them to disagree because you can point out; hey, you approve that but if you remember we agreed on those criteria… so, okay so once we have the naming brief ready and approved, and we have some clarity on what we are looking for in a name, then the next step would be to generate name ideas, right? So, with that, we can jump into Brainstorming which is the fun part, and start generating those name ideas. So, in your naming guide, you say quote “There is no right way to generate name ideas, but there are best practices and rules of camp” so I just wanted to talk about those best practices and perhaps you can share with us some tips on how experts approach name generation. So, for example, you talk about you know running multiple sessions to maximize the outcome and going for quantity first, and coming up with hundreds of ideas and you really emphasize on using the master list template — which is a spreadsheet and is available and it’s a great tool and I recommend everyone to go on your website ‘Howbrandsarebuilt.com’ and it’s available for free. And I think it’s a great tool. So, this allows us to keep things organized because ideas can come from different places, so we need to put them in one single document and then track the progress. So, can you speak to that a bit?

Rob Meyerson:

Right, there are a couple of best practices like you just mentioned one, it seems obvious I guess but just write everything down, have a centralized location, especially if you have lots of people coming up with ideas. I know that sometimes it can just team emailing; what about this idea, what about that idea, and those email threads can get really messy, and all of a sudden you sort of losing track of all the ideas. So, having a person dedicated to documenting it all or a single shared document where you’re putting all of those ideas is critical. And like you said, that the sheet that I make available for free has some columns in there for sort of other data that I recommend collecting as you’re just writing down all those name ideas. I heard your episode with Alexandra Watkins and a lot of her advice is great and I don’t want to repeat it but there’s sort of this no bad idea philosophy that I think you need to have; whether you’re we’re all familiar with that in a group setting but even if you’re just naming on your own, and I do think a lot of naming should be done individually even if you’re breaking apart and coming back together as a group and looking at what you’ve all come up with individually. You got to write everything down because something that you think is a bad idea may spark something for somebody else or may give you an idea of something to look into that then helps you find that name. So, that’s another best practice. I think there are all kinds of different ways to come up with name ideas and I generally take a more the merrier approach to sort of coming up with ideas. I guess another thing that’s a bit counter-intuitive to people who haven’t done this before is that, you do want to go for quantity first. Of course, we’re concerned with quality you know we want the best ideas, but you’re also almost always going to have to come up with way, way more names than you would think in order to find those best ideas, and that’s partly just because of the way I think our brain works — the more you kind of dig into this the more you think about it, the more time you spend thinking about it the more really interesting ideas start to pop up. Another great name that I’ve interviewed on the podcast — Amanda Peterson said something about the first 200 ideas that anybody has for the name of something, those are usually the sort of expected ideas and they’re all “wrong” and so you have to kind of get over that hump of just, like, what are the obvious ideas and then you get into the really interesting one. So, you need to come up with a bunch of different ideas. Another reason for that of course is legal availability which is a huge aspect of naming, not to mention domain availability and other sort of types of little logistical hurdles that these names need to go through. Once you start ruling things out you’ll be really glad that you have 500 ideas and not just six because chances are all six of those will be ruled out for some reason.

Arek Dvornechuck:

Right, there are so many businesses, so many brands created every day, and it’s really hard to come up with something that is available because you’re going to come up with everybody is creative and we have great ideas but most of those probably are going not going to be available. So, let’s talk about a bit about the brainstorming process, right. So, since we know more or less how to do it, we can do it by ourselves on our own or with a team. So, we go for quantity right, we use the spreadsheet, we keep things organized. So, basically what we do is, we just have the brief at hand and we pull some keywords from that brief and we just take it from there, right? We create mind maps, we can use sticky notes, put them up on the wall or I’ll just use the spreadsheet and then once we exhausted those keywords from the naming brief and those are like those initial ideas then we go for synonyms metaphors and we just Google basically and browse into some directories Wikipedia dossiers and things like that, and organize those ideas into categories or teams, right?

Rob Meyerson:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good start. It doesn’t all have to be online. I do think there’s a lot of usefulness in looking at reference books and getting your eyes off the screen. Even just even just because a dictionary a paper dictionary is the best way to find a list of words in order, you know that’s actually sort of hard to find online, it’s easy to look words up but if you just want to see a bunch of words that start with a series of letters, you can look at a dictionary, there’s ways to do that online as well. But yeah, looking for just different angles from which to approach the puzzle as it’s been laid out in the brief. The brief should have a few what I call jumping off points, a word, or a handful of words that you think could be in the name, or could contain ideas that you want to get into the name, and the easy stuff is just looking at thesaurus.com and thinking of other ways of saying those, but eventually you should be getting into lists of terminology that have to do with something associated with one of those words or something like that. And the only other thing I’d say is, don’t try to do it all in one sitting. A lot of where your great ideas will come from is from kind of dwelling on it over a series of days potentially, so sleeping on it, you know making sure that you’re going out into the world and just giving yourself a chance to get inspired by something that you see or something that you read or a conversation that you have as your brain is in the background working on this problem is really useful. And so, if you have the time to spend a week thinking about this kind of on and off, you’ll find that a lot of interesting ideas will pop up. You know, you’ll be sitting at dinner and all of a sudden you’ll think; oh that’s another way I could have thought about that, and then when you get back to your computer you can dig into that by Googling or whatever else you need to do online to kind of fully examine and probe that one way of thinking about the name idea.

(Now, we are going to take a quick break here but we will be right back. Listen! My mission is to help people design iconic brands; so whether you’re a business leader who wants to be more intentional with branding and all of its aspects, or you are a creative who wants to attract powerful clients and truly be able to help them with branding, then you need to start with a discovery session and then develop a strategy that will inform all your creative work. And everything you need to learn how to do that, you can find in my online courses at ebaqdesign.com/shop; where I share with you my worksheets, case studies, video tutorials, and other additional resources to help you feel safe and strong about your process. And now let’s get back to our conversation with Rob Meyerson)

Arek Dvornechuck:

Yeah, that’s a really great tip. I think it’s similar to for example designing logos is just going to take time, and you mentioned that in your guide as well to take a break, socialize exercise. And while taking a break also being ready to write those ideas down as they pop up, right? And some of the techniques also for name generation, so, for example, you talk about mix and match words so to create like compound names, combining with prefixes and suffixes, ordering spelling, you know changing letters, perhaps you know using other languages — words from other languages, looking for rhymes, and idioms, quotes, songs, movies, other shows, books, podcasts, and things like that. Is there anything I’m missing that you think is a really great way of coming up with ideas?

Rob Meyerson:

Yeah, I think everything you mentioned, and of course, it depends on the brief you know some of those ideas are only going to make sense for certain projects, and a lot of names that rely on a suffix, like, the ‘ly’ names or names that end in ‘ify’, like Spotify, you know those are trends that in most cases you probably want to actively avoid rather than spending a bunch of time exploring that. But there are times that you want to at least try something like that just to see again if something really interesting pops up. The one thing you didn’t mention that I think is… well two things that are really kind of interesting that you can do that I’ve mentioned. One is going on a field trip. So, if you’re naming something related to farm equipment then make sure you take the time to try to get out to a farm or even just a store that sells tractors or something and allow yourself to immerse in that environment and see if something interesting comes up. Another idea that works better if you have a team doing naming is to kind of try to name something else instead of what you’re. So, think of the problem as if you’re naming something else. So, if you’re trying to name a microchip that is very fast, that allows computers to run really quickly, and so the speed is something that you’re trying to convey, then it might be useful to go to a store that sells running shoes and just pretend you’re naming a shoe that makes you run really fast and see if that allows you to come up with really interesting creative ideas that you wouldn’t have come up with had you just sort of had your brain been kind of on this one track microchip, microchip lane of this is what we’re trying to name. If you can free yourself up to think about it differently then that sometimes can give rise to really interesting ideas.

Arek Dvornechuck:

Right, so it’s kind of like lateral thinking instead of just linear thinking.

Rob Meyerson:

Yeah, I’ve heard it called obscuring the brief. There’s another terminology for it. You know at larger agencies sometimes they will literally lie to some of the naming team and say; you guys are naming a shoe, it makes people run faster, come up with ideas for that, and then only later will they find out actually you were this whole time you were working on a microchip but you came up with some great ideas and some of them will apply just as well because you know a metaphor that applies to running fast will also work very well for a microchip that lets your computer run fast.

3. Shortlisting Name Candidates

Arek Dvornechuck:

Right, that’s really interesting. Okay so, once we’ve exhausted our ideas and we have like hundreds of ideas, we have them in the spreadsheet and then the next step would be to shortlist them, right? So, we basically need to narrow down the list and focus on the strongest candidates. So, what we do, we check them against the brief and we rate them or eliminate the weakest options. Can you speak to that a bit?

Rob Meyerson:

Yeah, I mean it is pretty much what it sounds like ‘just shortlisting’. I guess a couple of things that I would advise that might not be obvious. I think it’s really, really important to do this with more than one person. So ideally there’s more than one person involved in your naming process and so you can get two or three people in a room or on the phone looking at the full list together, and that’s partly because when you’re looking at a huge list of words it’s really just hard to sort of notice all of them. You’ll get into kind of robot mode and just start going down the list and you may miss something that somebody else will catch, or you just may not sort of catch on to why a name could be really interesting, so it’s just useful to have people to bounce things off of; well why did you like that name and why didn’t you think that one could work. So, that’s one thing, another really cool idea that I’m going to steal here from Jonathan Bell who runs a great naming and branding firm called “Want”, he says that sometimes they will write some of their name ideas on individual index cards and put them on a table, now this is all pre-covid so we could all be in rooms together with the table. But to physically have the names represented as index cards and be able to kind of move them around and push them off the table when everyone agrees they shouldn’t be on the list that’s another thing that you can do to just kind of help do that shortlisting as a group. But ultimately you need to call that list from hundreds down to probably dozens to get into the next couple of steps which all are about screening and checking to make sure that you’re only retaining names that are available or viable.