Episode Transcript
Don Mock 0:19
All right, episode 61. We’re back, Rob.
Rob Broadfoot 0:21
We’re back.
Don Mock 0:22
Yeah,
Rob Broadfoot 0:22
We are back.
Don Mock 0:24
Back in Black. Fantastic album, right?
Rob Broadfoot 0:28
It was a good album. That was-
Don Mock 0:29
Maybe fantastic is too-
Rob Broadfoot 0:31
At the time, it was fantastic. I mean, I remember that was the jam for when I was in… I think I was in middle school and it was like the middle school soccer team. When we would go to away games, you’d be on the bus to go the away games-
Don Mock 0:43
They would blast Back in Black?
Rob Broadfoot 0:45
That was our jam.
Don Mock 0:46
Wow.
Rob Broadfoot 0:46
Back in Black. That was article it was our height music.
Don Mock 0:48
What was the color of your uniforms?
Rob Broadfoot 0:50
Green,
Don Mock 0:51
Oh, so it makes perfect sense. Right.
Rob Broadfoot 0:52
Yep, green.
Don Mock 0:54
And the bus you traveled on was probably yellow. I am assuming it wasn’t black.
Rob Broadfoot 0:59
It was yellow.
Don Mock 0:59
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Broadfoot 1:00
That’s right.
Don Mock 1:01
Alright, Episode 61. What are we gonna talk about today, Rob?
Rob Broadfoot 1:03
We are going to talk about-
Don Mock 1:06
Drumroll, please.
Rob Broadfoot 1:09
We’re going to talk about naming.
Don Mock 1:10
Naming?
Rob Broadfoot 1:11
The task of naming a company, service, whatever. But yeah, naming projects. How we attack them with ferocity.
Don Mock 1:20
Yeah. Like a badger, like a cornered badger. I don’t even know why that popped in my head. So yeah, naming is a tough thing. Where did the names come from? I mean, obviously, you have names of people, right? I mean, a lot of companies- Ford- the name of a person that 100 years later has grown into, obviously synonymous with automobiles and things. But names, they come from all sorts of different places and thoughts and consideration sets. There’s descriptive names, there’s just made up words are all over the place. I mean, think about all of the prescription drugs you see during a sporting event, Xarelto and Keytruda.
Rob Broadfoot 2:01
Wugovi. Ozempic.
Don Mock 2:03
Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts. There’s a scientific way of naming those things, right?
Rob Broadfoot 2:08
I Don’t know how scientific that is.
Don Mock 2:11
And/or is there, right?
Rob Broadfoot 2:12
Well, a lot of the reasons that they create those names are because they’re made up words. And when they’re made up words, you don’t have to worry about the trademarking and-
Don Mock 2:21
Correct.
Rob Broadfoot 2:22
All of that.
Don Mock 2:22
There’s no competitve said.
Rob Broadfoot 2:23
There’s no legal loops you may have to go through. So that’s-
Don Mock 2:26
Absolutely. Delta Airlines versus Delta Faucet.
Rob Broadfoot 2:29
Yeah. But But yeah, I mean, I think naming… kind of the way that we come at it, it sort of depends on what we’re doing. So first, I guess, if we talk about the process versus understand, what are we naming? So is it oh, I created a widget, and we’re naming this widget?
Don Mock 2:47
Yes.
Rob Broadfoot 2:47
Um, we have a new business service. We have a new service line, we need to name that. We have a new division, we need to name that. So we kind of start with Okay, well, what are what are we naming? Then we start to think about, Okay, what are other names that are under a company umbrella? How do we fall in line with that? Is there a system that we need to become a part of? Or are we completely independent, and this is a new product, and it can be anything that it wants to be? So we sort of start there, and then- because it is so wide open- for me, I usually like to start with guidance from the client on, hey, we need to we need to stay in this lane. Or we’re open to whatever, sort of follow that. Then generally speaking, because it is such a wide range of possibilities, there are, ee start with buckets. Strategic buckets. Because otherwise your brain just doesn’t know where to start.
Don Mock 3:46
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, well, that blinking cursor in the in the white Word doc is a hard place. Yeah.
Rob Broadfoot 3:53
26 letters but infinite possibilities.
Don Mock 3:55
Yeah, but it’s because there’s infinite possibilities. There could be a little paralysis by analysis, like, I don’t know where to begin this process. So I like your concept there, your direction of like-minded buckets. Categories.
Rob Broadfoot 4:09
Yeah. So it’s, pick a strategic path. Then go down that path. I spend some time playing in that sandbox.
Don Mock 4:17
Totally.
Rob Broadfoot 4:17
I don’t ever edit anything, when I’m naming, I just go, just start going. I love that. Then take that bucket and then maybe narrow it down, and then move on to another bucket, so that you ultimately come out with this landscape of, Okay, here’s six or seven paths, different strategic paths that we can go down. That, generally speaking, as a first round presentation for a client, helps them start to think about where they want to be and what might make sense for the particular project.
Don Mock 4:45
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Rob Broadfoot 4:47
But what’s also interesting about naming is, we’re working on a project right now. We’re naming a software. We’re naming a piece of software.
Don Mock 4:56
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Broadfoot 4:57
It’s like Okay, well, in naming in that piece of software, you start to think about Okay, well, what does it need to be a descriptive name? Can it be a whimsical name? Because potentially the software could be intimidating. Do you want to make it approachable? You know, you think about-
Don Mock 5:14
It’s a good point.
Rob Broadfoot 5:15
I used this example earlier today, but in talking about like, I’ve got an email platform. I send out e-blast. Well, are you a constant contact? Which is the the IBM of the of the email world. Or are you a MailChimp? Which is super whimsical. I’m more of an Apple. I’m more of a whimsical, easy to use approachable sort of platform?
Don Mock 5:39
Yeah, absolutely. It’s great example, too. I would say that’s literal, right? That’s literally describing what we’re doing.
Rob Broadfoot 5:47
So then from there, it’s really… and again, part of it is, just like other areas of business that we’re in, and other types of projects, part of it comes down to your gut.
Don Mock 5:59
Yeah, there is a subjectivity. I was wondering if we were gonna talk about this.
Rob Broadfoot 6:01
It completely has subjectivity to it.
Don Mock 6:02
Yeah. I like this. I don’t like that. Or I like the way this sounds. There’s something too, we haven’t talked about yet, but the alliteration. When we’re going through client presentations, it’s always interesting to have you sort of go through not only what the word means, but also how it sounds, the vowels. Sometimes, depending on the thing, you want a nice hard consonant in there. If you’ve got an aggressive, we’re doing tools, or whatever the case may be. Do you want that versus Oh, we want something that promotes harmony. And it’s very soft and uplifting. I mean, it’s more than just the 26 letters. I mean, I know you joke about that, but there is a science and a strategy behind the feeling of the name as well.
Rob Broadfoot 6:42
And you have to stop and think about… oftentimes, when you see it the written. When it’s in your head, and you think of the name, Okay, great, it’s a wonderful name. Then when you write it out, are there gonna be any enunciation issues? Is it crystal clear exactly how to pronounce that word when you say it. Because sometimes you overlook those things, and that can be a bad thing.
Don Mock 7:09
Quick sidenote, along those thoughts, though. We’ve had our friend Payton from Vivex on the podcast before. So we can name drop this one V-I-V-E-X, right. I have heard it pronounced Vivvix.
Rob Broadfoot 7:23
Vivvix. Right.
Don Mock 7:24
Yeah. And I’ve never even thought about it. Now, we’ve been working on them for over 10 years. It’s always been Vivex, Vivex, Vivex. They’ve got a derivative. “Vie-a” is one of their product lines. But I’ve also heard that referred to by vendors as “Vee-uh”, right. It was like, oh, Man, I never thought about it that way. So I mean, it is an interesting point that, you got to make sure not only… I think, actually on the presentation today, you mentioned Hey, write it down on a post-it note and show it to somebody and have them read it.
Rob Broadfoot 7:52
Well, it’s an idea that the client really liked. I think he sort of gravitated towards right out of the gate. And it was, hey, it’s a really cool idea. However-
Don Mock 8:01
Fact checkers.
Rob Broadfoot 8:02
There is a potential for… Yeah, exactly. Write it on a post-it note and go pass it around and say, Hey, what does this say?
Don Mock 8:09
Yeah, pronounciation matters. I always joke about, what’s the state of California? When I ask people, depending on where we grew up in the United States, there’s “Or-eg-un” versus “Or-eg-on,” that type of pronounciation. So when you’re naming things, you got to consider all these things. I also, obviously, come at it from a what does the word look like? Is it a good looking word?
Rob Broadfoot 8:29
Absolutely.
Don Mock 8:30
Does it look strange, the combination of letterforms, you know. Or when we have to design marks for brand new things, which we’ll be doing for this project? Are there any cool letters in there? Is there a Q? Or do you have all these letters that don’t really fit together.
Rob Broadfoot 8:46
They don’t play well together.
Don Mock 8:47
Well, we’ve got V’s or W’s that have very extended wide letter forms with a lot of negative space in there, you know, next to an I.
Rob Broadfoot 8:57
Yeah.
Don Mock 8:57
You’re like, uh-oh, how to group and nest these things together. But that is less important, I do think than, what the name is, and depending on the strategy of the naming, uniqueness, adoption, ease of use… there’s a lot more to it. Design kind of comes to the end I think.
Rob Broadfoot 9:15
Then it’s also too… the name is the name, which is tremendously important, of course. But then it’s, what do you do with that name?
Don Mock 9:23
Oh, for sure, for sure.
Rob Broadfoot 9:24
It’s, how do you articulate the brand around that name? What is the tone of voice and what is the look and the feel? How does it all come together, once the name is in place?
Don Mock 9:39
I mentioned Ford earlier, joking about Henry Ford’s name. But you’ve heard me say this for 10 years, if you were starting a company now, I wouldn’t name a car company Ford. That’s a horrible name for a brand new startup, with a crazy-looking “F” that nobody writes in cursive anymore, things like that. But it’s seared in our minds, Built Ford Tough, that visual of the concrete breaking. That’s what makes it feel like it’s a tough rough-and-tumble, you know. So it is what you do with it, to your point, not only the name or the logo itself. It’s how it’s positioned out in the world and treated.
Rob Broadfoot 10:12
Yeah. And then there’s some, like, a name like BMW. It’s Just an acronym. Bavarian Motor Works.
Don Mock 10:19
Bavarian Motor Works, yeah.
Rob Broadfoot 10:21
You don’t say it, you say the letter?
Don Mock 10:24
No.
Rob Broadfoot 10:24
You just read the letters.
Don Mock 10:25
Yeah, absolutely.
Rob Broadfoot 10:27
So it can go it can go a ton of different ways, really.
Don Mock 10:30
But BMW aren’t three letters that go together. I’ve always been interested in SAP, you know, the big software company. Everyone knows it’s SAP. But SAP actually is a word sap? Which I always thought was kind of random and interesting, too.
Rob Broadfoot 10:45
BMWs. We’re missing vowels- we need to buy a vowel.
Don Mock 10:48
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Rob Broadfoot 10:51
But it can go… it’s fun to do. It can be daunting. Because I think a lot of clients don’t really know what they want it to be, sometimes more often than than other types of projects.
Don Mock 11:04
I would say of all the projects we do, we probably get- correct me if I’m wrong here. But I feel like we probably get the least direction upfront.
Rob Broadfoot 11:13
Yeah.
Don Mock 11:13
In terms of what, where to go. Right. Because they really don’t know. It’s the job that has the most “I don’t know what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
Yeah. Right.
Which is definitely a tough, it’s a murky waters to be in.
Rob Broadfoot 11:28
Well, there is no more blank slate.
Don Mock 11:31
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Broadfoot 11:32
It doesn’t even have a name.
Don Mock 11:33
But I think that’s what ties into the strategic approach that you take for naming, in regards to different strategic directions or buckets. We always call them buckets. Then write to that. Hey, This is the direction that is ease of use. This is the direction that is category specific. This is the direction, all the different type of approaches. I think that helps organize the thoughts, potentially, for clients.
Rob Broadfoot 11:59
Yeah. Then I think, out of that… so you do a round round one, where you’ve got the six or seven buckets, and then generally speaking, clients will come back and say, Okay, I’m so glad you thought about this. I feel like I know now that we don’t want to be in that direction, or we do want to be in that direction, or whatever it is. Come back with a couple of different sandboxes to play in, and then we can kind of refine from there.
Don Mock 12:21
Yeah, this is not dissimilar to first round logos, sometimes. Sometimes it’s not easy to pick the ones you love, but easier to eliminate the ones that you know are not appropriate, right?
Rob Broadfoot 12:32
Right.
Don Mock 12:32
So it’s kind of the thinning of the herd or the culling of the herd, to sort of see what’s left and then sort of go from there.
Rob Broadfoot 12:39
Yeah, and we do that with all types of projects. We’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth mentioning again. A lot of times, that is the path to finding what you like. Is finding what you don’t like.
Don Mock 12:50
Yeah, for avariety reasons.
Rob Broadfoot 12:51
It’s a proces of elimination for a little bit. And with names, too… We were saying this, this morning on a presentation. Okay, so we’ve got the first round, and you’ve got, 15 names on a page. Take the ones that you know you don’t like off the table. The ones that are left, let’s say there’s four of them. Write each of them on an individual piece of paper so that you can see them independent of the other words on the page.
Don Mock 13:17
Great point.
Rob Broadfoot 13:18
And then, like everything else, live with it for a little bit.
Don Mock 13:22
Yeah, I think I said, it’s love. it’s great to hear the immediate snap feedback on the round one, first call. But then it’s, Hey, get away from it for a little bit. Then come back to it and see if you still have that spark or that excitement around the names that you did love. If it’s three days later, and you don’t love it as much, then that tells you something. Yeah, it’s an naming is an interesting thing, though. I think the hardest one I remember one years ago was Just “I want a made-up word.” I want something like Oh, my Lord, I mean that… what? Huh?
Google. Googly moogly.
Rob Broadfoot 13:56
That’s, uh, yeah…
Don Mock 13:57
Those are, I think, some of the hardest ones, where there’s no direction, but I know I want something. Because even Google is now a thing, obviously. Right. But like Yahoo, that actually is a word. Some of the sort of made up things that, independent of all the prescription drugs and things like that, right. Kind of creating a funky sounding word can definitely be challenging, for sure.
Rob Broadfoot 14:21
Well, thank goodness, we have chat GPT.
Don Mock 14:23
Oh, God. Every podcast seems to be coming back to AI these days.
Rob Broadfoot 14:29
I know, right?
Don Mock 14:30
Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. Well, hey, man, it’s all the rage, you know. It doesn’t seem like it’s going away. It seems like it’s constantly in the news, that the people that created AI are saying this is a horrible idea.
Rob Broadfoot 14:42
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
Don Mock 14:45
Yeah. Well, I think before we get Judgment Day and the robots totally take over, I think you’ll still need someone to direct. So I think the creativity will still be at play and the vision will still be needed, right? potentially less of the technical skills will be required. Right?
Rob Broadfoot 15:08
Yeah.
Don Mock 15:09
Again, I’m just thinking out loud. This is not strategic, but I won’t necessarily need to know how to program the binary code to do XYZ. But you still have to direct the technology and an artistic expression in a way.
Rob Broadfoot 15:23
Well, and I like to believe that from a writing standpoint, the robot hasn’t experienced and hasn’t felt the emotion in order to articulate.
Don Mock 15:33
For sure.
Rob Broadfoot 15:33
Can it write a poem about Frank going to the candy store? Absolutely.
Don Mock 15:39
Of course it can.
Rob Broadfoot 15:40
But it doesn’t have the capacity for emotion. Not yet.
Don Mock 15:43
Yeah. I wonder how would relate. I mean, AI and, or artificial intelligence, Just like for naming. I mean, if you just said, “make up words.” God knows what that would… I mean, it would be…
Rob Broadfoot 15:56
I’m sure it would spit out
Don Mock 15:58
All sorts of crazy stuff.
Rob Broadfoot 15:59
All sorts of crazy stuff.
Don Mock 15:59
Yeah. Something to think about.
Rob Broadfoot 16:01
Crazy. Crazy.
Don Mock 16:03
All right. well, that’s it. I think that’s a good little synopsis on our approach of naming. It’s always fun. Fun process. Challenging, definitely challenging one, but a fun process. We haven’t even talked about, hey, don’t fall in love with this one name. We always recommend don’t fall in love with one because as soon as you hand it to the lawyers, I feel like their job is to do everything they possibly can to squelch your selection.
Rob Broadfoot 16:28
Generally speaking, and I’m sure agents, different agencies do have a different sort of process. But for us, we generally don’t go through US patent trademark stuff in a round one.
Don Mock 16:38
Yeah, we have affiliations with trademark attorneys and things like that. We can do the cursory search and things like that. But it’s really, hey, you need at least three or four of these things to go hand to counsel, to go find out if there’s anything out there that would eliminate it. That type of thing.
Rob Broadfoot 16:56
That’s a round two thing. We’ll get to that later.
Don Mock 16:58
Yeah, we’re already Yeah, we’re still on the phone. We’re still the highest one. We’re still in the fun. Yeah, yeah. The lawyer’s haven’t crushed the dreams yet. But all right. I think it’s a fun little overview of naming and our approach to naming.
Rob Broadfoot 17:10
All right, very good. Well, everybody can check us out online of course at mocktheagency.com or visit us on the socials at @mocktheagency. We hope to hear from you soon.
Don Mock 17:21
Yeah. Thanks, everybody.
Rob Broadfoot 17:22
Talk to you next time.
The podcast
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