Choosing a brand name in 2016: It’s all about how and not what you say (a ghostwrite)
Let’s talk names, on the chance you haven’t yet got one―or need a new one.
The naming process used to start with a conversation about company purpose and desired clientele. What are you going to do and for whom do you aspire to do it? As soon as you had answers, you picked a name that incorporated those keywords which best communicated to your desired clients and potential consumers what you intended to do.
This was before we had search engines and even before we called keywords keywords. Check out those firmly established Fortune 500's if you doubt me: Walmart Stores; UnitedHealth Group; General Motors; American Telephone and Telegraph (trippy, isn’t it, to be reminded that the second T in AT&T stands for telegraph?)…
Now, however, something has shifted in the brand/company name game, and I figured this out by accident. Interested? You can follow me to my epiphany here, then let me know if you concur. What happened went something like this:
In my own life, I had been thinking a lot about the keywords that best sell my blogs, was wondering if I might be able to use this knowledge to help a Mexico City colleague to name his soon to be international consulting firm. Those words/phrases for which I was making money included:
business culture, company culture
launch, start-up, shoestring
B2B, B2C, P2P
cultural translation, empathy interview
transformative (as in transformative storytelling)
enablement (as in sales enablement)
strategic, impact [and impact is not yet a verb, dudes; let me just leave this here?]
real world
co-creation, co-creating
differentiation, identity
praxis
metrics, measurements, ROI, SEO
analytics
Next, while reflecting upon these, I decided to see who was writing on keyword strategies (not just for naming, but in general) in the blogosphere. I found this. And this. But the work that really left an impression on me was this one.
My thoughts, following my quick research (I scanned blogs for no more than an hour) and drawing, too, from my long history of writing blogs for start-ups and start-up supporters (consulting firms, marketers, accounting firms, etc) ran like this:
1. We’ve evolved past needing brand/company names that reflect our keywords to facilitate our visibility. This means our names no longer need to explain what we do. Think: Amazon, Google, Uber, … Yoast.
2. Those names which are best suited to 2016 are the kinds of names that communicate meaning to our clients not by *what* they say, but by *how* they say. This is a result of their dynamism and flexibility. Again, think Amazon, Google, Uber, … Yoast. These names are words that have been fit with meaning by marketing teams which came into being after the names were chosen. And just as they have been fit with meaning, they can continue to be fit with meaning. For these are evolving labels in a hyper-dynamic present. Okay, you’re right, I descended into linguistic anthropology professor selfhood here, but … this point is vital.
3. Relatedly, at present too many of us are focused on names that communicate indexically (ie they point directly to ideas): ABC Financial Services; DEF Consulting Services; GHY Marketing Services; etc, etc. Such names contain words that meant things to us from before they were appropriated by the companies now using them. Which leaves me to make the following, final, point:
4. Not only is relying upon monosemous words less important now than ever before. In fact, such a strategy can turn out to be detrimental. Monosemous words are rigid rather than flexible, unmoving, rather than dynamic. They limit or even trap us in ways that words like, say them with me one more time, Amazon, Google, Uber, … Yoast do not.
The tech guys seem to have this figured out (and we might list such naming strategies among tech shared cultural understandings). But there’s no reason that we can’t be on their heels in our own naming practices. Norms and understandings are and always have been, after all, ever evolving.
