Startup Advice
Naming Your Company? 4 Ways to Get Unbiased Feedback
Sell your team on a new company name by following these four steps.
This article was originally published on Inc on June 10, 2015.
Two years ago, I had an epiphany. And I did what entrepreneurs fear most after successfully being in the same business for over a decade: I made a big change. I decided to drastically reposition my design and branding business, and with that came the necessary name change.
After crafting hundreds of names, I picked the name FINIEN. The team had its doubts. The name could be reminiscent of a shark (fin) or even death (finir in French = to finish), hence no one would ever hire us again, especially as a consultancy that crafts names for a living. We might be doomed. Despite these fears, we moved forward with the name, and that decision has treated us well.
Here are four key takeaways from naming companies like our own that will assist on your quest for a great company or product name. The rule above all rules: after consulting with (and hiring) professionals who derive names for a living, trust your gut and go for it.
So you went through the checklist and you feel it is the right name for your company moving forward. If that’s the case, don’t open it up for the emotional, unproductive feedback typical of a larger group. If you ask your significant other, (s)he will likely react emotionally and might not understand the full strategy, research and context. (S)he will hear an unfamiliar name and will immediately sense danger. If you ask your co-workers, they might have similar feelings, in addition to the fear of their professional future within your company. What if the name backfires? Why does our fearless leader have to ask us, “Is it not a good name?”
They should be afraid. Naming is a scary thing, but lucky for them, you already did that part for them and you’re confident that you’re on the right path. That said, sometimes you just have to ask for peace of mind and to give your key partners a feeling of ownership prior to officially taking this significant step.
As long as you present a clear case as to why a name change is necessary, tell them that you’ve narrowed it down to 1 (or 2) final name(s) through hiring a professional naming agency (if applicable) and that you have a clear favorite (and explain why). You now want their buy-in (what you will get is their opinion) just in case you forgot anything when making that decision (and make sure they’re in the know for the big announcement). If you’re about to have that meeting, here’s how to go about it the right way:
1. Define the Confidants. They Will Define The Outcome.
Who should be the two to four people who you want to gain feedback or buy-in from? Choose them based on their involvement in your company. They may be co-founders or partners, but they shouldn’t be freelancers, non-VC level employees or peers. Not to discriminate, but to keep it to a very small and influential group that you’d like to have your back during the rollout phase.
2. Be Confident. Be Assuring.
Tell them you made up your mind, even if you’re still split between two names. Explain why the change was necessary. Share how long the process took and how many names you went through to get there. If applicable, share that they’ve been professionally derived and vetted and you feel very excited about the new company/product name. It’s a new era and you’re thrilled to let them in early on.
3. Story First. Names Later.
Present them with only one or two names. Even if you’re still indecisive, sound assertive. If your presentation feels insecurely, they will feed that fire. First, tell the story of each name as well as the meaning and the keywords that have been used–only then show them the name. After sharing the backstory, say the name out loud while showing it on screen or on paper. As they familiarize themselves with the name, tell them your grand vision for how clients and co-workers will use it, how it sounds answering the phone, how great it would look visually, and how the name really tells the story of your company without limiting your future growth. Repeat for name No. 2, all while keeping the next rule in mind.
4. Leave the Past Behind: Say Hello To the Future
While looking at the new naming options, most will only associate with the past (the ‘faster horses’ syndrome). You’ll have to reiterate the idea that this new word will soon not represent any current connotations (usually only negative ones will be brought up by the group, like ‘death’ and ‘shark’), but will instead represent your company. Your mindset is already in the future; if you’re renaming, you already emotionally detached from the current and attached to the new name. It will be a big challenge for them to overcome. Remember our name, FINIEN? The (short and rather brilliant) name would have likely died by committee based on past associations. Today, you hear FINIEN and you think about branding, startups, and yours truly. It’s how it works. Brands are being built. You have to explain why it’s necessary to think of the name six months from today. Try not to associate any words with the name, but rather the image of your company.
Gaining buy-in is crucial to finding a great name. Use these points to prep for the meeting that may decide the future of your brand’s name. And, most importantly, trust your gut.
CATEGORIES: Startup Advice Your Brand Launch: Naming
5 Ways To Create A Timeless Brand
Creator, the beautiful online magazine of wework, the highly inspirational community of creators, published an original article by yours truly yesterday, so I thought sharing is caring. It goes something like this:
If I say “Coca-Cola,” you probably see the cursive typeface, red and white colors, curved bottles, and polar bears, right? That’s because Coca-Cola has spent decades building its brand with precise imagery, a consistent logo, and steadfast messaging.
While Coca-Cola is the quintessential timeless brand, many entrepreneurs have a tough time replicating its success because they’re drawn to the latest fads. Unfortunately, that’s not the key ingredient for enduring the test of time.
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen (Via Creator)
Styles change, but your company’s name and logo should not. You need to get it right from the beginning so you won’t confuse your target audience. It’s imperative that you create a brand that reflects your company’s values and is based on a shared passion with your target audience.
The brand that stays top of mind with consumers is the one that was built with “soul,” is driven by passion, and is marketed truthfully and consistently. A brand like Coca-Cola is truly timeless. Despite shifting marketing and advertising efforts, the brand is always surrounded by its unmistakable logotype and color scheme.
So how do you build a timeless brand? Here are five tips to get started:
- Buck the trends. If it’s in the moment, it’s unlikely to be in the future. Trends don’t hold up over time. People want something that stands out. A trend is cool for a very short time, then it quickly turns into an annoyance. The more honest and creative you are when crafting your brand identity, the more likely it is that you’ll create something timeless.
- Find a unique angle. If you try too hard to be like everyone else, you won’t be able to define your own unique brand identity. Look beyond your competitors, and dive deep into your own beliefs. Nail down what you’re about as a company, basing it on your core values, then determine how you want to communicate that to your target audience. Once you decide exactly what message you want to get across to your audience, you can create a truly unique visual and verbal brand language that’s lasting.
- Define your brand. A timeless brand has a shared passion with its audience. For example, Patagonia makes clothing for people who love climbing, skiing, and other outdoor sports that don’t require a motor. The brand caters to anyone who likes to connect with nature—hence it was able to expand from climbing gear to items for all other outdoor activities without losing its focus. This shared passion is directly reflected in the company’s sales because saving Mother Nature equals saving its audience’s playground.
- Be consistent. Your company name and logo are the first things that people will think about when your brand comes to mind, so keep them consistent. Make sure your logo is distinct, easy to adapt across different media types, and reflective of what your product or service actually delivers. (Hint: As you can learn from Zappos, it’s happiness, not shoes.)
- Avoid being too descriptive. When launching your brand, stay away from a name or logo design that’s too descriptive to avoid costly rebranding as your core focus shifts in the future. The uncertainty surrounding a rebranding effort could cost you time, money, and even loyal customers. At the very least, you’ll confuse them—as we recently saw with Airbnb’s rebrand PR nightmare.
When you solidify your brand from the start, you can focus on stabilizing it and investing in it. A brand that’s in unison with its identity remains relevant over time, and every party involved knows why the brand looks, walks, and talks a certain way. Base your brand on your unique offering, and connect with your audience meaningfully—you’ll be well on your way to developing a timeless brand.
Is Your Startup Turning Into The Meh Factory?
You start off with a grand vision, the big thought. You can imagine the person who will go crazy over your offering right in front of your eyes.
As you find yourself diving head-first into product development, in many cases your target audience starts to automatically widen and with that you run the risk of your startup turning into a factory of…meh.
A Meh Factory is pointing towards, and hitting the center of the bullseye perfectly. A good thing you’d assume, but the bullseye is smack in the middle of everything: not too this, not too that, it’s just right in the middle. A product that tries to appeal to everyone and do everything. It is not the cheapest, not the priciest, not the coolest, not the best – no, it’s just right there, sitting stagnant in the middle of it all and by hitting the target spot-on, it is missing its target audience, its initial reason for existence, entirely.
Becoming a Meh Factory is an even easier trap to fall into for an existing brand that is losing its soul, a great example being Gap (You can indulge in this story, exemplifying a brand’s quest to remain relevant).
As a startup you can protect yourself from falling into this gap (sorry!) early on. As you enter the development phase, remind yourself that as a new brand on the market it has to be your main goal to work towards reaching someone’s heart and not everyone’s mind. Only if you get one ‘tribe’ to not only like, but fully love your offering can you create a cult brand. And that is exactly what you should target. Shoot into any corner, just don’t point towards the center as you’d be missing your target – you know, the person you were thinking of when your idea first popped into your head. Make her love your brand, others will follow.
Twitter’s Periscope: What’s The Naming Scope
As you may have heard, Meerkat now has a new, serious, competitor. And no, it’s not the Minneapolis agency Periscope, which greatly enjoyed getting a lot of buzz today when Twitter launched Periscope.
Twitter did not talk to the agency by the same name, has not asked them for their Twitter handle @periscope (Wait, really? They kept @periscopeco), nor cared about the fact that they are naming their product the same way. Twitter decided to stick with the name of the startup they acquired, a very ‘speed-to-market’ move, and when it comes to naming, a highly questionable one.
Twitter is 36.5 million followers larger than the agency by the same name, and the world will, after just a few days, think of Twitter’s service – and Twitter’s service alone – when hearing the name Periscope. Periscope, the agency, will not be so happy about it when confusion turns into annoyance and a dillusion of their smart brand name.
The question remains: Why stick with the name Periscope? A rather great name for a ‘full-spectrum creative agency’ that helps uncover and look at things differently, but for a live-streaming app?
Given all the red flags, they kept going with a name that stands for an apparatus consisting of a tube attached to a set of mirrors or prisms, by which an observer (typically in a submerged submarine or behind a high obstacle) can see things that are otherwise out of sight (via Google).
Leaving early adopters to adjust to a new name in order for a brand to focus on its much bigger future after having serious funding infused, or being bought by the big guys, would be the right move. Startup names are often just that, they are quick MVP’s of something that really should not be driven by lean startup methodology to start with. And definitely not go past an acquisition or merger.
CATEGORIES: Startup Advice Your Brand Launch: Naming
Your Brand’s Core Values: From Document To Embodiment
Deriving your venture’s core values early on is essential to formulating a strong brand from within.
Imagine your core values being displayed beautifully in your company’s lobby: Your team will see them every day and it should engage and inspire them. At the same time, clients and shareholders should be able to read, and be in agreement with, your core values actually representing, and serving, your brand well. They need to resonate across the board. We advise to keep those value-statements to three very short and actionable sentences (some of the more universally applicable examples we derived with our clients in the past months are shown below):
It is easy to notice that core values often sound similar, perhaps even a bit generic if taken out of context, regardless of how hard we worked with our clients on crafting them. They often do not feel naturally implementable either. No surprise then that they often stay put on a desktop in a PDF document, rather than being embodied by the team.
I gave this issue a lot of thought as I urge my team and myself to create work that is intrinsically being embodied by our clients to push their ventures into great brands.
I recommend embodying your core values the same way I would recommend you preparing for a very important presentation: Once you have the presentation deck done, the speaker notes inserted, and you start practicing, you will realize that the more you practice, the more you embody the content and overall spirit. The day of the presentation you will notice that you fully embody the content, to the extent that you could hold a successful speech even if a major electricity outage hit – in candle light, without slides, without speaker notes – because you are living the content.
Treat your core values the same way: Try assigning one of your new brand’s three core values to each day of the work week, then make it your goal to do something each day that turns the words of one core value into action. It might be a project scope document and you decide to question the status quo and try to turn it into a better product. It might be actively doing good and being the example by staying late to help a co-worker meet her deadline.
Examples are endless, core values there are only a few, so if you start checking one value off the list day after day over the course of two weeks, and you ask your team to be doing the same, you will quickly realize that you do not have to be reminded about the values anymore – you will just be doing it. This will be the magic moment where you will be embodying your brand’s core values, and that brand document that resides on your desktop can now be accidentally erased, because it does not matter anymore. Action, as we all know, speaks louder than words.
Startups: Stay Human
Yes, of course, all of the above is why we are all interested in startups, but the real reason why I dedicated the majority of my professional life to working with Founders comes down to something much more basic: Startups are human.
The beauty of purely human business interactions is lost in the vast majority of large companies I worked with over my career. I only get to feel them at the local Farmers Market and in the startup community. Not knowing is a virtue, learning a given, sharing a must. As startup Founders gain success, I urge you, do not lose the magic you possess, the magic you enjoy so much while being amongst yourselves, that magic of not only being human, but acting human.
CATEGORIES: Blog Startup Advice
Do You Embody Or Represent Your Brand?
You can establish/own/run your brand; you can represent your brand; or you can literally be and fully embody your brand.
If you create a brand that is solely based on yourself (obvious examples include a fashion brand, thought leadership brand, Etc), know that if you ever have the desire or need to re-brand and/or re-position, you will face many challenges. Sounds logical after the fact, but as you go down that path of associating your name with the brand, it is easy to let the ego, or the simplicity of finding the domain name, run the branding process and push you into the limelight for good (may that actually be for better or worse!).
The issue of personal brand re-positioning will gain public attention during the US presidential election next year as we will be faced with two very different (and different types of) personal leadership legacy brands. Who is Hillary Clinton 2016 is what I pondered in The Washington Post (read this past Sunday’s cover story here) as we are collectively trying to re-define what her brand stands for today. Is the latest Bush brand in fact what the general public would assume it being based solely on his brand inheritance? I am not in politics (and smart enough not to discuss politics as part of my professional blog), but this comparison is the easiest way for you to watch the strategy, drama, and difficulty of personal brand re-positioning unfold on the big stage.
If you decide to be your brand, like a Martha Stewart did so famously before you, the coming months might make you re-consider and opt to solely represent your brand instead.
“Have You Eaten With Us Before? We Do Things A Little Differently Here.”
Really? Tapas-style? You don’t say!
Carrie Brownstein (of Sleater Kinney and Portlandia fame) responded to this all-too-common restaurant dilemma in a recent Rolling Stone article, “I always want to tell them, ‘I’ve eaten at a restaurant before. Unless I have to order in Esperanto, I think I’ll be able to get the hang of it…'”
Just like with restaurants hopping on the bandwagon a little late looking like fools, your venture will easily fall into the same trap, may it be through ‘our gamification aspect’, ‘our delightful experience’, the ‘unique social component’ etc. It’s still tapas to the rest of us, because we do not see how your product will make us feel differently.
Ask yourself if you have found your true differently yet. To give you a head start, write a brand memorial speech. Once complete, it should make you feel the same way Carrie Brownstein felt when she heard the punk-rock style riot grrrl for the first time: ‘This is the sound my heart would make if I could amplify it.”
Listen to the heart of your startup, then amplify it so we can all hear it, and believe in it! And next time your waiter starts his differently speech, read him this post aloud.
Make Your New Brand Image Bland And Unmemorable
…was the advice I gave an entrepreneur last week. Wait, did I just really say this out loud? Yes, and here is why:
Like many entrepreneurs at the early (very early) stage, he was at a point where he needed to have a brand presence, just enough to get him through meetings looking legit. A business card in hand, a Powerpoint design to show and a web site to link back to. He was at a point where he needed to discuss his new venture in a professional manner with potential collaborators to further shape his concept. There was no outside investment and the core of the company strategy could sway depending on these initial meetings. It was not a time to invest in brand design, it would put the cart in front of the horse. So what to do?
There was no way for him to create the brand design the right way, so instead of applying any kind of distinct design language (making it memorable), he thought to make it “meh.” Make it bland, make it colorless.
I sincerely agreed. In this very rare case you actually do not want your brand image to stick in your customers minds.
People should be educated about what you do and who you are, but you should not create a memorable brand design and language around a very early stage concept if you know it will all change, very soon. Once the startup strategy is formulated, the brand can be shaped.
So go out there and have them call your number rather than recall your brand image.
Just How Much Do They Love Your New Offering? Assume They Truly Loathe It.
Gaining early user feedback? Don’t assume they love it; assume they loathe it.
Like so many of us, I was looking for a better way to find mutually available times for meeting requests; an easier way to manage my calendar with third parties. I tested a plug in that promised to do just that, but as I was at the height of my frustration with the product (a few computer crashes later), I received a message from the startup checking in on me. I was delighted as I had tons of feedback to share. Here is how their message read:
My first reaction: How pretentious!
I do not like it, do not feel it has potential (at my current state of frustration at least), and surely won’t be thinking about added features if the core was not working to my expectations. Where was my fourth option?
d. I do not like my experience with your product. (Please advise us as to why)
Don’t assume they love it. Assume they loathe it.
If you reach a frustrated user and you give them a chance to speak up about why they greatly dislike your product, you will:
a. learn and in consequence have a chance to better your offering
b. have a chance to keep the customer
c. potentially turn loathe into love
As for this plug in, I waved it good-bye upon receipt of that E-Mail. As for your next launch, I am just glad that you will share the love while inquiring about the hate.
The Post Host
Fabian Geyrhalter is the Principal of FINIEN, creating clarity for brand transformations.
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