 shake hands with naming or naming workshop. I am Laurel Sutton. I'm gonna be the host for this session and I co-founded a naming company called Catchword. And also present today is one of my co-workers, Erin Milans, who is a project and creative director at Catchword and who's been with us for a really long time. Erin, how long have you been at Catchword? Well, maybe not really long. Six, seven years? I don't know if that qualifies as really long. Well, I feel like we've been relying on you for a long time. So I also wanna introduce Marcus Robinson, who's our support person and he will be helping us out with stuff in the chat and providing links and just giving anybody a hand if they have problems. So I know some of you also went to the naming panel yesterday and today we're gonna talk about the art and the science of naming and why linguistics is a big part of it. So today we're gonna look at the naming process, the process that Catchword uses but many other naming companies use to produce those great brand names. And we'll discuss the techniques for creating and validating those names and then talk about maybe architectures a little bit too. And we've got a little case study so we can do some collective brainstorming to show you why naming is hard but also some clues for how you can approach it. And as we said in the naming panel yesterday, the challenge of naming is finding names for companies that are both appropriate, so appropriate for the company or the product but also available. And availability is just such a huge issue these days and I'm gonna do some on the fly trademark screening later to show you exactly how that sort of thing works. So I am now going to go back into presenter mode. So some upfront stuff that is a bit educational. There is business, there is marketing. So marketing is a big category that covers things like product development and advertising and promotion, employee communication and it also includes things like branding. So marketing is a very big part of any business. Branding is a smaller part and branding encompasses things like naming of course but also graphic design, the packaging that you get your products in, even the design of the stores. I mean, think about Apple, think about how designed their stores are and how it meshes so well with the product design and the packaging design and their website as well and also the UI and all their devices. All of that is branding. It can also include things like music or copy and naming. So naming is this very, very small part of big marketing, smaller branding and then naming. So we as a company catchword are very specialist firm. We do one thing which is naming and we like to think that we do it well because we've been doing it for so long. I think there are opportunities for linguists in any of these circles, naming, branding, marketing. I know lots of linguists who are in all three areas. I think we've talked a little bit in some of the others about opportunities in marketing and there's a lot more to learn there. So linguistics is a skill that applies because it's all words, it's all communication. Just a little bit about our company. We've been around for a long time. We really focus on the storytelling aspect of naming. So names as a way to express a brand in a way that's engaging to customers. We are a small company. There's only really six of us who are here but we have lots of partners who do graphic design, partners who are translators and transliterators, partners who help us with the linguistic analysis that we do and we take a quantitative approach. So if you were in the panel yesterday, you heard that typically when you're creating names, you know, you're not creating 10 names. You're creating 300 or 500 or sometimes 1,000 names. So you need more to get to those names that are both appropriate and available. And a lot of what we do is screening. So trademark screening, linguistic screening, domain screening, there's a lot of validation on names that needs to be done before you can get to those names that clients can actually use. And one of the things that I'm very proud of as one of the co-founders of my company is that over the years, we've had so many repeat clients and also retainer clients. And that really shows you that although this kind of work is consulting essentially, you're always looking for that next job. When you have clients who are on retainer, you're working with them constantly and it's because they trust you and they trust the work that you're doing. And it also makes finding that next job a lot easier because they're always coming to you for more work. So some of the ones on retainer now are PWC. We've been doing work with Home Depot. We were on retainer with Indeed for a while, with Corning. I'm probably missing out a couple there, but it's great to have long-term relationships. Here are some of the names that we've developed over the years. I tried to pick a selection that were in different categories. So some company names, some product names, some that are more evocative like Voodoo, which is the name for a streaming service. Some that are pretty straightforward like Refreshers. Oh, these drinks are good. What do they do? They refresh you. Well, let's call them Refreshers. There's a good name. We named a vaccine, disaster vaccine. You guys probably aren't old enough to get that, but I am and it was great to get it. We named a bunch of products for Fitbit. So if you own a Fitbit device, we probably came up with the name for it. We did not name the company, but we named lots and lots of their products. We've named computer games. We've named chicken sandwiches for McDonald's. We've named technology for Intel. We named Photoshop Elements. So we didn't name Photoshop, but we named the Elements part, which was quite a struggle to get to. As easy as that might seem, it was hard coming up with that perfect word Elements to say why this was different than the regular Photoshop software. So here's a little bit of education about names. This is how we break it up. And this should be pretty familiar to you kind of as a taxonomy and a continuum within linguistics. We always have to put things on a spectrum. So in naming brand names, you have names that can be extremely descriptive of the thing that they are. And international business machines is quite a descriptive name. General Motors, also a really descriptive name. Then you get into names that suggest something about the product of the company. So Ivory soap, for example, like it's not made out of Ivory, but it looks like Ivory because it's white and it's very pure looking. It has a sort of a sheen to it. Energizer for batteries, that's what they do, right? They energize. The name suggests something of what they do. Then you get into names that are more abstract that sometimes don't even say anything about the company. Or if they do it, it's in a very lightly tied way. So Google, for example, is a real word, not spelled this way, but it means one with 100 zeros behind it. It's a very large number. And Google chose that name because that's what they felt you were getting from the search engine. It was just as many results as you could imagine sort of approaching infinity on results. So it ties to their purpose, but in a very light way. And lots of people don't even know that Google is a word and that was okay with them. They were fine choosing a word that might be completely abstract. A name like Virgin, for example, for Richard Branson's stable of companies, they chose that name early on because he'd never done business before. He went to school, but he wasn't a business guy. And so he thought, well, this will just show people that I'm new and I'm brash and I have a new approach to things. And it has nothing to do with any of their businesses whatsoever. They started as a record company and now they have spaceships. Those are all real words. The spectrum applies to coined words as well. So something like Kodak coined made up is completely meaningless. They didn't choose that for any reason that they liked the fact that it started with a K and it ended with a K and it was a nice consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant structure. I'm not gonna read every single one of these, but I think you can see why they fall where they do on the spectrum. In the last column, we have compound names. So two words put together. Sometimes we call them composite names as well. Those are very popular also. They express what they do, usually in real English words, but unexpected when you put them together. Back in the day, you wouldn't have expected to see a word like micro paired with a word like soft, but that's what they do. They make software for micro computers and that's where that name came from. This is a slide that's meant to show that even the greatest brand names can sometimes not be great names subjectively, right? So let's look at some of the ones in that top left corner. These are names that companies chose, but I would say that they have some issues with pronunciation or perhaps spelling to a native English speaker audience, right? So Pfizer, for example, which is in the news all over the place. You learn how to say that because in German, that's a very common construction. In English, it isn't. So you have to learn that it's not Pfizer, that it's just Pfizer. Hagen-Daz was a completely coined name that they made up to make them sound like a premium ice cream. It doesn't mean anything at all. It's sort of cod Swedish or something, I don't know. But they had to teach people how to say it. Touareg, which was a Volkswagen brand, was also initially quite hard for people to pronounce. But all those brands have been good brands and people got used to the weird pronunciation and spelling. I was gonna make a little side note about Hagen-Daz, that I'm sure you all don't remember this, but when they very first came out, they had a map of Denmark on the carton. Wow. And when I was a teenager, I worked in their flagship store and it was in Fortley, New Jersey. So not Copenhagen. Definitely not. So there can be coexisting names, right? You can have the same name in lots of different categories as long as the products are not similar to each other. So a Ford Explorer, an internet explorer, wildly different, yet they still share a word part. And legally speaking, that's okay. There are names that are quite unusual in the category, Blackberry, Apple, Orange. I mean, these are all fruits. What do they have to do with the things that they represent? Nothing really. You could try to come up with a story around why they chose those names. The likelihood is that they were just meant to sound different and to stand out to be sort of fresh and different from say Microsoft. Apple sounds really, really different from Microsoft and the other companies that were around at the time. There can be names that have negative associations. And those are okay if the company rolls with it and plays it as a branding thing. So the word hurts, for example, even though hurts is a real word, when you say it out loud, it sounds like something hurts. Banana Republic, not a great thing, but they chose that name and they made a brand out of it. I think most people now don't even associate the name of the company with what a Banana Republic actually is, which is like a terrible colonization thing that has happened and genocide for people all over the world. But yet they chose that for a name. Fundruckers is an odd name for a food place. There are many ways you could interpret that, but they went with it. And then my favorite example is French Connection UK, which obviously would spell something very bad if you rearrange the letters. If you looked at it quickly, you might think that it spelled something bad. They have a story around why they chose this name, which I don't think is entirely true, about how faxes used to come from the French Connection UK office. And that was at the top as an abbreviation and they just thought, wow, edgy, let's go with it. Maybe that's true, I don't know. Names with no meaning, like we talked about with Kodak and Oreo and Pringles, those were just chosen as meaningless names that they could create a brand around. And then other names that have a more loose meaning. So we talked about Google before, Amazon is in the same category. They chose that because the Amazon River is huge and they wanted to convey this idea that they have everything. The Starbucks thing, a little more tenuous, they claim that that name is based on a character in the Moby Dick book who really likes coffee. That's not actually true, but it's a great story. So they stick with it. And then Bluetooth is a Danish Viking name and they just wanted it to sound sort of strong, but it's very distinctive in its way. Yeah, Oreo does have another meaning, it's true. Okay, so here is a page that I wanted to just show you based on work that we've done over the years, why doing linguistic analysis is important for our clients. So you can come up with all sorts of names, but a lot of times you wanna check to make sure that they don't mean something bad in other languages either as a real word or as a slang word, or even as a cultural word. Sometimes it's not the word itself, but it's just what it's accumulated in terms of cultural meaning over time. I'm not gonna read through these all, but these were names that we actually vetted for different clients and obviously struck them because they meant something bad and the languages were associated with their target geographies. So it's important to do these. And it's one of the things that I love doing, it's one of the most fun things about my job is doing linguistic analysis. And you just never know what you're gonna find. Like Kizmo is a great example. We thought that was a great name, it was for a kid's toy. So it felt like Kizmo, you know, a word for like a little mechanical thing and it had the K for kid and we thought, wow, it sounds a little like, you know, whizzing something fast, like it was zippy and it turns out in Japanese, there is a real word, Kizomono, which means a thing that has a defect. And all the Japanese speakers are like, you cannot use this name for a toy. Absolutely inappropriate. Who knew? But we found out. Well, and there are also changing cultural sensitivities. You know, as we've seen with, you know, all the recent rebrands, Antjamima, Redskins and so forth. I mean, for example, a name that is often considered neutral, Sherpa, is actually an ethnic group in Nepal. And to name a product that is terribly culturally insensitive, but a lot of people don't realize that. So you have to have a broader perspective than just the folks in your office. It's so funny you say that, Erin. I just had that conversation with a client this morning on the call I was presenting work and they suggested Sherpa. And I said, you can't use that for those very reasons. They just didn't know. Okay, so that's some background on all these different facets of the job and kind of how naming works. I know I'm going through this pretty quickly, but I want to get to the really fun stuff. So I want to walk you through really quickly what our process is at Catchword. It's a very step process. So step one, step two, step three, step four, you can't skip around. You got to go through it in a linear way. And we are very clear with our clients that we have to do the whole process in order to come up with a name that is both appropriate and available and that the team can get behind. So it works like this. First, we have discovery where we review background materials. We learn all about the company or the product, whatever it is. We understand who the competitors are. We try to figure out how the name should help this company or product be different in the space. How is it going to stand out? And this helps inform our naming process. Sometimes clients will give us a one sheet that says, here's all the information we have about the company, perhaps if they're a startup, with established companies, they might send you 20 things that you have to read through and sort of pick out the gold amidst all of the technical descriptions and things like that. So we have a lot a week for that because sometimes it takes a whole week. Then we'll do interviews. So we talk to the people who work at the company, the product people, the CEOs, the sales folks, anybody who is going to give us information about what this name should actually be. We have some fun creative exercises that we do where we will ask people to, one of them is we call them masterpiece cards. So they're pictures of like cards with paintings on them, famous paintings or illustrations. And we ask people to choose the ones that best represent the feeling or the tonality of the brand or the company. And that gives us some insight as to what the tone should be. And people really enjoy that. It's like a nice break from their work day to look at these cool cards that have paintings on them. Sometimes we talk to customers too, but that's not always something we must do. So that's two to three weeks learning about all this stuff. We develop a creative brief that lists out all of our findings and the messages that we want the name to convey. We talk about, it needs to say one of these five things, we include things like it needs to be a real word or a coin word or a composite word, as we were just looking at before. The creative folks develop project vocabulary and then create a huge list of names. Erin, do you wanna talk about this a little bit here? Yeah, one question. A machine just came on in my house. Can you still hear me all right? Yeah, it's okay. It's not too loud. Okay, great. So I wanted to mention that every creative when they develop names does slightly differently in terms of the nitty gritty. But as Laurel mentioned, the process is roughly the same. And at Catchword, we adhere to these steps pretty strictly. But once we start our ideation, that's where individual preferences come out. So, and also depends on the project itself, depending on the client preferences, you were talking about the naming parameters document. If the client only wants real English words, then I'm gonna use one set of tools. If they only want coin, I'm gonna look at a different set of tools. And also depending on whether they want metaphor or they want coined words that very telegraphically convey meaning. So a word, a name can communicate one of the messages really overtly or it can be a little bit subtle or it can have meanings on multiple levels. And that's, of course, the best choice generally is you want a rich, especially for a company name. You want a name that can tell multiple stories at different levels. There's the instant the customer looks at the name and gets an idea. And then they think about it a moment longer and then they realize, oh wait, that's also this other thing. Like in the comments you're talking about Amazon. So just like people saying, oh, well is it A to Z as well as the Long River? And whether it's, whether they invented it that way or not, it's come to have that story. So that's great. Similarly, logos do the same sort of thing. I mean, it's a smile, but it's an arrow. You know, the logo reinforces that idea of A to Z because it's sort of going from one place to the other. So all of it is with this brand, everything about branding is telling a story so that you can engage. So another important part about the creative step is that it's always iterative. It's never just I sit down and I come up with a thousand names and then I'm done. You know, I will work on vocabulary first. Then I, as I'm doing the vocabulary, some names will come to mind. I'll put those in my name sheet then I'll go back work on some vocabulary a little more or look at what I've done a little more, create a little new vocabulary. Maybe I'll come up with some other metaphors. I'll look at a different resource then I'll do some more name and it just kind of keeps going around and around. Then I'll talk to some of my colleagues. You know, we'll put, I'll look at their work or they'll look at my work and that inspires other ideas. So it just keeps going around like that. And some of the tools that I use to develop my vocabulary and then the names are the client materials that Laurel mentioned because often in their, on their website and their collateral, you'll see vocabulary that comes up over and over. Now hopefully you'll have already determined whether something's a buzzword and it's too used in the space. So you don't wanna go there. But if the company culture or some other aspect, you know, that they keep talking about especially for a company name, you wanna keep that in mind as you're working on the developing your vocabulary. Then I will also look at projects that had similar themes or were in similar spaces from the past and I will look at those vocabulary lists and see if any of those are relevant. Online thesaurus, visual thesaurus, visual dictionaries, visual encyclopedias, things like how things work a lot of times especially before we're doing metaphor for site. Well, then you wanna look at all the parts of the eyeball and how the, and read about how the brain, you know, makes sense of visual input. There are phrase and idiom dictionaries, there's rhyming dictionaries, there's multi-language dictionaries. Well, you'll see, you know, a given word in 10 languages just in columns and you could see if any of those makes sense. Occasionally I'll do an image search and just look at pictures, you know, on Google and see if those inspire other metaphors or ideas. Also I have some, we have some proprietary tools at Catchword. We have lists that have different like construction parts. So prefixes, suffixes, I made up a list, I call the phoneme swap list. So if you have a word that starts with an H and you leave the H off in English, everyone will still understand what it means. You know, substituting, I mean, this is all that for you guys, substituting, you know, B, F, P, V, you know, all those letters that, you know, kind of have the same function in various languages, you know, all that kind of stuff for English. So then I can play around if I'm doing coinages and just play around with some of those swap outs. And then we have themed lists that are, you know, of every kind of animal or types of transportation or mountain ranges. And so for example, if one of the messaging is superior eyesight or insight, you might look at birds of prey. So unfortunately, with those kind of metaphors with real English words available, you run into the availability problem. But when you're starting off, just type. You know, it's not a good idea to sense yourself too much as you're going along and be thinking, oh, this probably won't be available. Just type it anyway. You know, you'll be reviewing afterward. Now, the thing I think is very cool in my sort of amateur linguist status and semi-autocist, I guess, is grouping the messaging into vocabulary buckets. So if one of the main benefits of the product is to improve business growth, right? I'm like, well, what is business growth most basically growth? Okay, what is growth even more basically? Then I think about metaphors of motion. So growth is up or forward or out. So now all of a sudden you have all of these different kind of directions and physical words that connect with this idea of growth. Increased efficiency often is idea of moving faster, moving forward or moving more nimbly. So it's interesting to just connect all of these things into motion. And then the related ones like insight is a classic consultant especially, but as software everybody is like, we give our clients greater insight. I mean, that's every single value proposition. So that's seeing, it's discovering, it's finding, it's illuminating, so it's light. So light, sight, finding, you know, kind of all go together. So when I'm doing, I actually use a spreadsheet in columns and I put them next to each other because they're all related. Just like something, if you had something that was a cybersecurity platform. Well, the idea of safe or protect is very related to the idea of trust and rely. So, you know, I would group those things together. And then I will have another section in my vocab sheet with combinable word parts. So either to make those compounds that we were talking about. So I mean, there are compound words in English like tablecloth that are actual words. And then there's invented compounds like Facebook that didn't exist before somebody made that up. So when we say compound, we mean the coined ones, the invented ones. So, and you can have words or word parts and then, you know, you usually alphabetize them and kind of look at, see how they make sense together because alliteration is a tool for memorability. Rhyme is a tool for memorability. So this is where your inner poet starts to come out. And I mean, in my bio, I say that, so I, you know, I studied classics and I studied philosophy and I studied math and literature and some languages and stuff. I went to a broad lower school and then I also went to a music school and, you know, I like to write poetry. So I always thought of myself as this like poet, storyteller, linguist, musician, philosopher person. And naming kind of has all of that because you get to think about all of these different things and because it's project-based, you get to learn about new stuff all the time. So for people who are very curious about everything, it's a great job. One tip for company naming is to not just talk about the messaging of the brand in terms of, you know, we provide this or we care about this or we wanna build a world where, but also think about the personal interest of the principles and the story of the company founding. So for example, Asana, which Catchword named the productivity tool, the founders were very, very interested in yoga and they wanted to bring a kind of yoga mindset to workplace productivity. And so, and interestingly, you may think, well, but in yoga it's Asana, it's not Asana. That's okay. And actually the company says they don't mind if you pronounce it one way or the other. So Asana is a more natural pronunciation for an English speaker or probably for a romance language speaker, but we all know what that, well, any of us who've been exposed to yoga at all know that that is a yoga word. We would never have gotten to that idea if we hadn't explored the interests of the principles of the company. Sometimes it's story of company founding or where it's located. You know, if it's in Nashville or whatever, even if the company has something to do with music, you know, you might think about having some kind of music tie in. Then after you do all this creative, then you need to shortlist. So you go back and this is where your editor comes in. So then you look at the work and depending on the project, you know, pick a few hundred, maybe 150 that are just the top, because you're gonna have a lot of iterations of almost the same idea if you're doing coinages particularly. You know, they'll be different by one or two letters. So you don't wanna have every single version of that. You just pick the best one. And then you wanna select the ones for Google screening, because then that is going to knock out or hopefully won't, but usually it does knock out a whole bunch. You know, 20% at least, I would say is kind of the norm depending on the areas in and whether you're using real English words or coin words. I would say it's more like 50% these days. Well, the last couple of times we've done it was, I was expecting that and it was 30. So now I'm trying to say it's gonna be at least 25, but prepare for 50. Especially in the tech space. I mean, it kind of depends if it's some weird, like remember that worm farm company, you know, like that's not gonna have a lot of, I don't know if you remember that one, that's not gonna have the same kind of competition. But then as you're selecting the ones that the past Google screen to present to the client, you wanna make sure for your round one that you have a wide range. Cause a lot of the purpose of round one is to get the feedback from the client. Because, you know, you can do as many exercises as you want and talk about things and illicit feedback during the preparation and creation of the naming parameters, but until they actually see names for the most part, they're not gonna know, you know, they're not gonna know about tonality. You know, they'll say, oh, we want it to sound what we formally described as feminine. And then when they actually see it, oh, that's that looks too soft or whatever. So that's why it's important to have the first round, you develop wide, but not so deep. Second round is deep, but not so wide. And this short list, you wanna have a range of tones and constructions and styles. And by styles, I mean that suggestive descriptive thing. Cause most companies or most brands wanna have a name that's somewhere in the suggestive range. It could be suggestive toward descriptive or suggestive toward abstract, but once they actually see samples and hear the sounds, they're gonna have much more useful feedback. And my last thing I say before making a final decision on short listing, say the names out loud and make sure that other people hear them and not just you solo, if possible. Also, look at the word in a sans serif font because you can have legibility issues if you're using a serif font, like L, you know, L and one having I, capital I, and then followed by lowercase Ls in sans serif can be very hard to read. So you wanna keep that in mind. Okay, that's all my stuff. Thank you, that was amazing. That was great. That is how they do it, folks. And, you know, it reminds me in the early days of catchword 20 years ago, our office had a lot of books that we used constantly. And I think we still have some books. We got rid of quite a few because most resources are online now. And it's a lot easier to use an online Swahili dictionary than it is to use the book one that you have where you have to open it up. That said, I still have some books that I use all the time, even when I'm doing it, this Synonym Finder, this thing is invaluable. I love this thing. It's more useful in some ways to me than a thesaurus because it just lists like hundreds and hundreds of actual synonyms, some slangy, some a little more technical. So your reference materials will be invaluable to you. One more thing that I found that's cool for certain projects has been invaluable is there's an online co-location finder. So it, you know, take your keyword and then it shows, it crawls the whole internet and it shows the top words that appear with it. So anyway, it's unexpected but very cool resource. Yeah, there's a lot of really good things that people have invented out there. That said, all of our creative is done by hand. We don't have any software that spits out names. We don't do it by computer. I know that there have been companies that did it that way in the past, but every single thing that we do is by hand at some point. I wanted to answer Jyoti's question appeared, does Catward have a huge master list of every name we've ever found to be unavailable or already in use? And the answer is no, because like we were saying at the beginning, even though a name might be unavailable in one category, it could very well be available in a different category. That's the Explorer Explorer thing. So you can have a name that's in use as long as it's not a famous brand. Google's a good example. You would never name anything ever again Google in the world because they're just too big and too famous. You couldn't get away with it and you wouldn't want to anyway because the brand is already so big and so well known by everybody. So you wouldn't do that. I think we as namers tend to have a short list in our head of names that maybe we've tried to use and failed because they wouldn't pass trademark in so many different categories, but no, we don't have a list like that on our server, for example. Okay, so moving along, once the creative team has done this amazing work, we have a short list that's been Google screened that we want to present to the client. We typically present 40 to 50 names to them and we generally present them in a nice deck grouped by messaging or style and it's a very collaborative discussion. So we don't just show names and say, here's your names. We have a meeting where we discuss pretty much each and every name that we show them and find out why they're working or why they're not and what word parts are interesting or not interesting. This is really where the rubber hits the road, as we say. And I am reminded, as Erin was talking, I often compare naming in a way to a house. Like you can say, I want a house that has two bedrooms and two and a half baths and a kitchen and this and that. Great, but until you walk into that house and see it and feel it and experience it, you don't know if you want it or not or if it's even what you've been looking for. So it's very, very hard for clients, for anybody really, to just have this abstract list of messages and know that those are the right things. You have to see the names in order to figure out if they're the right name or not. So sometimes when we have this round one name presentation, there's some retrenching or the client decides, you know what, we thought that those two messages were gonna work and they totally don't, let's dump them. Maybe there's a new message that sort of arises organically from the work that we've done and they say, that's more interesting. That's what we really want the name to focus on. So we're always trying to be flexible and ready to change course a little bit as we go through from round one to round two. So following that, we go into round two and basically do the same thing all over again, except now it's far more focused on what the client is really interested in, the word parts, the messages, the styles that they've identified as the ones that really hit home for them really are something that you can build a brand around. Again, we do some screening, typically for round two, we'll do Google screening. Sometimes we do trademark screening before round two. It depends on the client. We look at domain names especially for a company and it can be .com, but it can also be other companies, sorry, other countries. Sometimes we have clients in other countries, UK, Europe, China, Japan, where we need to check out those domains as well. And often we'll select a group of maybe 15, maybe fewer names that we just really like out of all of the names that we create and screen and have ready to present to the client. There are usually some that as a company we feel just are better for lots of reasons. They hit the messaging better, they're more euphonic, they sound really nice, maybe they look really good from an availability point of view, they're different, they're fresh, they're modern. There can be a lot of somewhat subjective reasons that we will tell the client about as the experts here. We're allowed to have preferences. And then we'll present rounds round two. So again, another 40 to 50 names, but with 10 or 15 of them elevated to recommended status. We try to dress it up a little bit, maybe drop it into a fake webpage, or if it's a product, it might be a product mockup where we just see what it might look like. And we provide rationale for why we think these are good names. At this point, we're sort of handing it off to the client. We do, as I said, some trademark screening on it. I'll show you what that's like. It's complicated, but for people who are really into research, it's something you can really get your teeth into because it's all about learning and experience and finding out what the lay of the land is here. And trademarks are assigned risk. So we are not attorneys. We can never say that a name is clear to use or that it's definitely out, but we can look and see what trademarks exist and figure out what the risk level of that name might be. Typically with our clients, we only share the names that are sort of low risk or low medium risk. We don't show them high risk names because they can't have them. And honestly, showing a client a high risk name that they can't have is emotionally unsettling for them because they tend to want those names and they can't have those names and then they feel bad about everything. So one of the things always with customer service is that even if the bad outcome is completely the client's fault, you're the one who's not gonna get a job again from them. So you've got to try to anticipate their emotional needs and all of the things, all of their possible missteps and prevent them if possible. Yeah, we talked about this a bit yesterday. Excuse me, in the naming panel that a lot of what we do as clients is walking with them on their journey, right? And holding their hand and providing some talk therapy and making them understand the realities of trying to find a name, but also the possibilities of the name. And this is where sort of the selling part comes in when you're presenting a name to a client, you wanna talk about why this name is gonna be so good for them. Here's what it can mean. Here's what your brand can be. Here's how you could extend it to cover other products. Here's how it can last a long time. Here's how beautiful it sounds or looks. Maybe it's a name like Asana that doesn't have ascenders or descenders. It's all on the same line. So there's something beautifully graphic about that that you can talk about. As I mentioned, we do linguistics and that's not on every project, but it's on a lot of projects. We look for spelling, pronunciation issues, negative meanings, and we can do this basically in any non-English, in English of course, but languages other than English around the world. And we try to produce a report for the client that is we call it actionable. There's a good business word for you, actionable. It means you can put everything into a report. There's one page that has what's called an executive summary. Like here are the main points that you need to know. You can make your decision based on this one page. You can look at the other pages that have all of the other details in it, but really that one executive summary is enough for the customer to take action, to say, yep, here's what I need. And that's incredibly valuable to put it into a context that they can grasp really easily. Bullet points are your friend. People don't have time to read. Bullet pointing things is such a cliche in business, but honestly, you have to because people won't get it. They're busy, they don't have time. I was having a chat with someone the other day about people not reading emails. You can't ask people more than two questions in an email because they will not answer the third question. They stop reading. They answer question one, question two, boom, it's sent off and you're never gonna get an answer to the third one. So you have to manage the way you talk with people. Maryam asks, how did you come to understand that 750 was needed? That's kind of an approximation. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's a lot more. We did a project recently where Maria Seifer, one of the other co-founders, I think the total number of names was 2,200 because the client was in a very difficult space and they wanted several different word parts extremely thoroughly explored. So she had to look at every iteration of those words that you could find in English, but also coined, but also combined with composite names and it was just a huge, huge list of names. So it varies depending on what the assignment is and also where the creative person thinks it should go. Like at some point you just kind of run out of options. You can't go forever. You can't generate names forever. There comes a point where you just need to stop. And then finally, hopefully the client will turn over the results to their attorneys. They do a full legal search and then they get to choose a name. And for some clients, this is actually the hardest part. We've gone through this eight week process. They've looked at 100 plus names. Their attorneys have evaluated it and said, great, out of the 10 you liked, these three are available and now they have to choose and they get decision paralysis. So we often come in at that point to help them understand which might be the better of the three names or just the one that's gonna serve them best over time. And then we are always extremely happy when a new name is chosen and announced because then we get to talk about it, which is great. And sometimes we have helped them because occasionally they want to do some kind of a focus group or something to not to have the client, the customer choose the name, but just to get feedback about if there's a certain demographic they're trying to reach and one name maybe is more familiar, one word is more familiar to them because of their age or whatever it is that can be somewhat helpful. And we will help, sometimes we will guide them through that. Janice asks, given how extensive the process is, do you only work on one naming project at a time? No, we have to have multiple. Yeah, I wish, oh my God, that would be amazing. I feel like I am managing probably five projects at any given time, but they're all in different states. So some are just starting, some are just finishing, some are right in the middle, but at different stages of being in the middle. And at the same time, I'm also fielding new business inquiries to try to win new projects because we always have to have new projects, right? Project finishes, now you need to have something else in order to pay the bills. Erin, how many projects do you think you're working on at any given time? It also varies because I don't only create names, I also manage a number of internal, I write the blog, I do a lot of other things for the company. So if you include it all that, there's at least 10 plates in the air at a time. But in terms of the actual naming and naming strategy projects, I try not to have more than four things. Maybe a couple of them could be almost done or kind of in the background, but it can get a little tricky when, especially when two of them are sort of similar or in similar spaces, you get too much bleed. So I try to separate that and it's better if we assign different creatives, if we could get two projects that are in a similar space. But I came to this, well, I was in publishing for many years and it's the same thing there. And I was in advertising, it's the same thing there. You're working on multiple projects at once, but they're all at different stages of the process. From a project management point of view, we tend to have two project managers on most projects to share the load a bit and also because it's better when you have someone to work with. And that's good because it's not all on you all the time. Aaron and I worked on a project for a financial services client that lasted six months. Well, because it was strategy, that's always the, the strategy ones are so squishy. Yeah, so naming strategy, I didn't wanna spend too much time talking about it, but it's basically when a company has, say a good company name and then a lot of product names underneath it, they need help figuring out how those product names should relate to each other, whether there should be other branded names underneath their big brand. If they're descriptively named, what are those names like, so that they look like they come from the same company, that they make sense to their customers. This particular client has been around for 40 years and they had a ton of different offerings, plus they were sort of changing their business model. So we were working on getting them from one point A to point B and deciding which names were gonna stay and which names were gonna go, which names needed to be revamped in terms of our new paradigm for them. So it's all taxonomy stuff, which is not rocket science, but it requires a certain mindset to do it. Like you have to be very analytical and look at this great big picture. For clients, it's hard for them to do it because they're in it, like they're living within this architecture and you as the third party are outside of it, so you can see it a little more clearly than they can. Yeah, I mean, it's actually, I found a lot of it was similar to being an editor, you know, when I edited books and the author is right there and it's hard for them to get any perspective. Yes, we call it naming strategy, the actual taxonomy is the architecture, the approach to it we often refer to as naming strategy. And with that, especially, you get the problem of lack of alignment internally. And sometimes that can be a problem in project naming projects as well. And so, again, this is where your wrangling skills, you know, come into play if you are the project manager. If you're the creative and you're just supplying the creative to somebody else who's like the account person, you don't have to worry about it so much, but you kind of wanna, you'll have to save them from themselves far too often. Yeah, there is always the case, this happens more often than not that you're working with, say it's a large company and you're working with some product managers or perhaps the VP of marketing and you say to them, who gets to decide on this name? Who has veto power on this name? And of course it's gonna be the CEO at the end because it's their company. And so you say, great, can we talk with them? And they say, don't worry, whatever name we choose, they're gonna sign off on it, absolutely, positively. This never happens. This has never happened to me in the course. And Erin, I'm sure it's never happened to you either. They never do. And this is a huge stumbling block when people who have power over the name are not included in the process, it will fail, it just will. So those people have to be brought in early. If it's the CEO of Corning, he's got 10 minutes, great. I can make those 10 minutes maximally effective to get his opinion on what this name should be, but you have to, you just have to include these people. So that's part of the project management that Erin was just mentioning. Like there's a lot of little tricks that you need to have as a project manager, not just in terms of managing your data and process, but managing the people who are part of the company in a way so they don't feel managed, but you are getting them to kind of go along with what you need to do. A couple other questions Layla asks, how common is it for naming companies to use word generation software? I don't think a lot of them do. There was a company called NameLab. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. This is like 10 years ago and they were using name generation software for their names. You can never rely on an algorithm. I mean, if you were just trying to randomly put together word parts, sure, you could create an algorithm, but then you're spending all that time reading through and when picking out the ones that have legs. So it's often just better to do it yourself. Yeah, I agree. Alita says, do you ever offer a particular name to a new client, even if that same name was on the shortlist for a previous client, but they didn't pick it? Yeah, it happens. There's no rule against that. If a client saw the name and they rejected it, there's no reason why you couldn't offer it to someone else if it was an appropriate name and it worked for the same messaging. We work very hard because we've got so many projects in-house at the same time, not to be showing the same names to different clients at the same time. Because sometimes, like Erin was saying, you'll have projects that actually have very similar messaging. So you wanna make sure, even if different creative managers are working on it, that they're not elevating the finalist names that are the same or similar for different clients. So we have an internal spreadsheet where it's the names that are under consideration. So we all know, here's what we're showing. Yeah, we also do a lot of check-ins with each other. Yep, you have to stay on top of that, definitely. Okay, I'm gonna go on. So I wanted to show you guys how this worked. Do a little case study. So I want to invite the audience to participate in this. So this is based on a real project that we did some years ago. And I hope that nobody knows what the new name is. If you do know what the final name was, don't tell people, don't Google it. I'm telling you right now, stop it, stop Googling. I don't want you to do that. That's my manager, business manager coming out of here. Okay, so this was a company that came to us that was called Leads 360. And they were a software company. Look at all this business speak here, okay? This is what you get when you meet with these companies. They'll just throw this at you and go, we're a cutting edge provider of cloud-based lead management solutions. Okay, what does that mean? It means that they have software that companies use to manage their leads. So a sales company, right? They have sales people that they have to set out to get new customers or they get leads on whatever it is they're selling. And it could be vacuum cleaners or it could be software. It could be anything. So you need software that manages. Can you say that one more? Sorry, I thought I heard someone talking. They, so they focus on managing leads for sales people. That's why they're called Leads 360 because that's what they did. They were founded in 2004. They focused on an aspect of it, which was buying leads, so buying mailing lists and things like that. But they've moved far beyond that and now they have this great software in lots of different markets. They've had a lot of success in financial services, insurance and higher education. Their management solutions complement CRM. That's customer relationship management. That's an acronym or initialism you need to learn. And marketing automation. They do a lot of stuff automatically that would be very difficult for you to keep track of as an individual or as a company when you're tracking all these leads. So this is what they do. They don't like the name anymore because it suggests that they in fact sell or generate leads. It's two leads focused. It doesn't sound very sophisticated, right? It's a very kind of straightforward name, Leads 360. Doesn't sound modern, doesn't sound sophisticated. It's really narrow because it focuses just on leads. And they wanna of course expand their business beyond just leads and sales automation because they could be doing lots of other things. So the name just didn't fit anymore. So in talking with them and looking at all their materials, we identified several messages and here they are. So one thing is that their software operates in real time. It does it automatically. So you don't have to wait for it to churn information back at you. It's just like live online all the time. It's adaptive and responsive and it learns. So it does have some algorithms that help you manage all those sales leads. It's really good with accuracy. So it's not just throwing a bunch of leads back at you that aren't appropriate for whatever your business is. It's pretty targeted. And of course the benefit is that it optimizes what you're doing, your job. Makes you do it faster. Everything goes a lot faster. And like Erin was saying, of course, it gives you insight and vision and precious and lets you see what's going on, okay? So those are fairly standard business-y type messaging. I've probably done a hundred projects that have very similar messaging to this. They wanted names that were suggestive. So remember that spectrum? We looked at names that were sort of in the middle. They suggest something about it without being so direct as a name like Leeds 360 or a Kodak or an Apple type name. Should sound modern and sophisticated, kind of established, but kind of innovative, not boring. They wanted something that was gender-neutral in tone. This occasionally comes up with clients. They don't want it to sound feminine. They don't want it to sound masculine. Those are completely subjective things, but they exist in our culture. So you have to be sensitive to them. And the name didn't need to communicate what they do. So again, getting away from the Leeds thing, it needed to suggest some benefit or the way that they do it rather than saying explicitly what they do. So they said, sure, real words, fine. Lightly coined words, fine. Compounds, fine. They were open to lots of different things. And they also said, sure, we could look at some non-English names, especially if they were Greek or Latin, which plays into that idea of being sophisticated. Especially in the US, I think we have a sense that names that are drawn from Greek or Latin roots sound sophisticated and educated rather than names that are drawn from Germanic roots like Leeds, which tend to sound a lot more straightforward. So this is just a cultural bias that names that come from Latin and Greek, this includes words in romance languages, just sound more elevated somehow. Again, completely subjective, just built over time. Okay. So I'm gonna leave this up here for a minute. And I want you, the audience, the 30 people who are here, to think of some words and some names that might be appropriate for this. Like, where does your mind go? What kinds of names would you come up with for this company? Putting aside the availability part of it, let's not think about that for now. Like Erin was saying, don't censor yourself as you're writing stuff down. I would love it if some people could drop vocabulary and names in the chat, and then I'm gonna actually transfer it to the document on the next page, but I wanna leave this page up for the moment so you can think about it. Yeah, I want you to do it right now. Go. Oh, so you want now as a name? I get it. Kinetic, okay, interesting. I will put these on the dock. I'm just leaving this up so you can sort of absorb the messaging that's here. Yep, those are good. Those are good. How about some coined words? Oh, there's one. Okay. Yep, yep. Escalate, escalator, interesting. Yep. Mindsight, nice. Nice compound. Yep. There is no judgment here, by the way. We're not gonna be criticizing these names. We just wanna see what you can come up with. Dynamic, Velocity, Rise, Burner, that's interesting. Outcome, yep. Telos, yep. Seer, interesting. Focus, yep. You are allowed to use an online resource as long as you don't Google leads 360. Lately I've been preferring power thesaurus as my online thesaurus, although I have various that I look at it. One thing that's interesting about doing this too is that you can build on what other people are doing, right? So you might see a name and go, oh, that sort of sparks something in me. And we do a lot of that. We call it a creative relay where the creative team sort of trades the work that they're doing. Yeah, we typically have one creative who's the lead and then others contribute. And then the lead, and we have Whimsically named the List Master, looks at the other creations and kind of coordinates the short listing and all of that. So why can't you make two columns in Google Slides? I don't know. I've tried a million times. I have too. Do it. It's a failure. Thank you, Layla. Oh, what was the answer? Because Google Slides hates us all. Oh, I agree with that. At least it's not just me. It's not my being a Gen Xer. It's also like in Google Docs, you can't do word count, I think. Oh, I haven't tried to do it. There's some basic function that is not enabled in Google Docs. It makes me insane every time I use it. These are good names, you guys. Laura, could we go back to the prompts slide? Yes. Let me just put a couple more in here. I think we're almost done. Hold on. I guess there's no way to do a split screen to have two slides up at once. Maybe there is, but I don't know how to do it. Yeah. There you go. Thank you. Control Shift C for word count on Google Docs. Ooh, I'm writing that down. Secret knowledge. I'll give you two more minutes and we'll stop at like 10 after. I'm just scrolling back through these. Oh, there's some really good things in here. Delphi, I like that. Whitquick, that's quite good. There was a question earlier was something about judging whether a name is just, just two out of left field and too much of a non sequitur or is like edgy and standout. And that's can be quite subjective. And that's why it's important to have a team review and to try to immerse yourself in all of the client documents so you can get a sense of what they would think because it's their name. So we wanna advise them if we based on our audit of the competitor's names and the general sort of verbiage in the space whether something is gonna seem just wackadoodle or hmm, that's interesting. Like something like when Oscar came out the insurance company as opposed to and a lot of first name brands have come out in the past five years or so, such a departure from your typical health insurance name or financial institutions generally a very buttoned up names and then somebody in an orange bank comes out. I'm sure that a lot of people said that's ridiculous. Orange, what does that mean? What does that have to do with anything? So with that you have to decide is it part of the brand of the company? I was working with a company recently in the audio visual space. They make audio visual equipment. They said they wanted to be really edgy but after talking with them and getting a read on some proxy names I realized that wasn't their personality. They were more conservative than that. And they kind of like to think. Sometimes what the client thinks their brand is isn't exactly what their brand is. So you wanna have something that they can live with and be comfortable with. So it really is a judgment call that requires experience and a team. Now I see you have this TALPA which I think is very cool. Latin for chameleon it says from GOT. Now I especially love names like that because I also then I learned something and you will have clients who think that's the coolest thing ever and others because there's a deep story and then if you have a chameleon as your logo then it all makes sense. Others especially goes a product name might be oh I need it to be more telegraphic. I need people to know exactly what it means right off. So a lot of that again is trying to read what your client wants with the space they're in, what their audience is like with their clients client. Are they buttoned up or do they wear a suit to work? Or what do they like? Okay, all right cool. I'm gonna, you can keep typing stuff if you want but I wanna keep things moving. These are really good names you guys. Like good effort, good work here. Some real words, some coined words, some words from languages other than English. Some nice coinages, really pretty good here. And I think these all really fit the brief pretty well. I think we probably showed names that were quite close to this at least in round one and there's at least one name in round two that's pretty close to what you guys have here. So you can think about presenting these names to a client. What would you say if you were telling them we think you should choose Tapa and here's why. It's a Latin name. People aren't gonna know what it means but it has a great story behind it that you can tell, you can build it into your messaging. Maybe you have a little guy, a little chameleon guy that sits up at the top of the webpage that's your new mascot. That's the kind of thing that you want to say as you are convincing a client that these are good names for them to have. You know, like Aaron was saying, you want to say things out loud. You want to make sure that they're easy to spell and pronounce, that they don't have an unintended negative meaning or they sound like something else. I think most of these are pretty good. You know, something like fested. I think maybe not, I'm not trying to pick on it but I say it out loud and I'm like, how would I spell it? Would I spell it that way? I'm not sure or alignment, right? Maybe that's a little bit too close to the real word alignment where if someone heard it they wouldn't be able to say it correctly. Sometimes that's a thing that clients really need because they do a lot of business by word of mouth or their salespeople are on the phone all the time and if you can't hear it clearly on the phone it's not gonna work. So that can be a criteria. Yeah, and there are others though that there could be a couple of different pronunciations. The thing that I probably run into the most is do I emphasize the first syllable or the second syllable? And for many company and product names that doesn't matter so much because the client or customer of their customer I should say is going to hear it before they have to say it. And so they'll very easily get used to it being is it record or record? I mean those kind of distinctions. Is it avala or avala? And once they hear it then it becomes intuitive. Exactly. So looking at these names my instinct is to say well, half of them are gonna be available. They just aren't, they are in use. People have them, they are probably in use in the space. I see Jyoti saying that she likes alignment for that reason. Yeah, I think it's really good but I also know that that is the very first thing that the client is gonna say to me. They're gonna go, sounds too much like the real word alignment, like oh, okay, well. And sometimes there isn't a comeback to that. If the client says it sounds too much like the real word alignment and that's confusing to me. No amount of you talking to them is gonna make them change their minds. You just can't, it won't happen. Although it's good to anticipate the criticisms and either not present because of it or come up with a whole lot of reasons why that particular criticism is not a deal breaker. Yeah, there are names that we've presented or have considered over time that I just know are never gonna fly because I've presented them already like a hundred times. One of them I flagged on a recent list was the word Avista, A-V-I-S-T-A which is one letter off from the osteoporosis drug E-Vista. And I hear that in every meeting that I present Avista and so I don't even bother anymore. It's great name, I love it, it's beautiful but nobody is ever gonna select it so I'm not gonna do it. Okay, really quickly I am going to stop sharing this and I'm going to share a different screen where I'm gonna show you what trademark screening looks like. Doing this in a different browser. So trademark screening, you can do that for free in the US at this website which is at the US Patent and Trademark Office. The short version is called TESS, Trademark Electronic Search System and anybody can go in and search for trademarks for free at any time. It uses Boolean logic to do the searching so you have to read up a little bit on how to do the searches. They do have a somewhat easier interface so I'll just show you. So let's say we were gonna look for WitQuick which was one of the names that was on the list. So here it's saying you put in your search term. So I'm gonna put in WitQuick as the name. Then I say what field is this gonna be? And the field is what's called the basic index for searching trademarks. That means it's the mark, the trademark that you're searching for. And I'm gonna use Boolean and because I only wanna look at marks that are active, right? There are lots and lots of trademarks that are dead. That means they've been abandoned, nobody's using them anymore. So I use live marks and there's a field for live, live data. And that's another reason why we don't keep a database of our own is because things come and go. Really quickly. Now this is a pretty unusual name. I'd be surprised if we found something but you don't know. So here we go. We're gonna hit the button, submit query. Now records. Wow, that's amazing. We did not find anything. How incredibly unusual. I could do a little follow up on it again because this is Boolean searches. You can search the two words not next to each other. So if I put in an and, it will turn up quick wit as well as WitQuick. So let's see if we get that. Okay, so we find two marks for quick wit. Now legally, how close is that? Kinda close. You know, if you had quick wit and WitQuick, you might think that they come from the same company and that's where you wouldn't be able to use it. So let's look at these marks. What's this one for? Oh, it's for game cards. Fine, different category, doesn't matter. That's okay. Let's look at the second one. Beer, okay, better. Two wildly different categories. So that actually looks pretty good. So I would say that would be a viable candidate. Let's look at something like escalate, which was another name. And of course this is US only right now. Yes, yeah. So let's look at escalate. Okay, 20 records. So there are 20 different trademarks for the word escalate. I haven't even restricted this by the class. So the class is what tells you what you're doing. Like what is the trademark gonna apply to? Is it medical goods? Is it beer? Is it software? Is it anything? So I could do that, but I could also just look at all these 20 different marks and see what they are. And there's all kinds of things. Seat coatings, lighting fixtures, strategic marketing analysis services. That's actually pretty close. Market research trend forecasting services, that's bad. That's close to what these guys do. They're a business service provider. So I would have to mark that down. Like I take a note to say, oh, there's a company called escalate. Leasing of office space, not too close. Oil tools, drilling, not good. Biological reagents, that's okay. Computer education training services, probably okay. Escalate English, probably English language training stuff. Same one, again. Yes, escalate, yeah. Consulting in the field of sales methods, that's it. It's out. Can't use escalate. Escalate is too close, it's only one letter off. So you never know what you're gonna find. And this is why you have to screen 100 names to get to 40 that you can actually share with the client. And you see how long it takes to look through these marks. This is what we do when we're screening names. We don't just look at that list, right? And go, eh, it won't go. We look at each and every mark that's there to see what it's for, who it's registered by, because there are some companies that are extremely litigious, like they will sue you even if the mark isn't even close to what they do. Disney is one, Samsung is another, LG is another. You don't even wanna look at stuff that they happen to own a mark for, even if it's not the same thing. Okay. Yeah, and people have the mistaken idea that if you just change a letter that suddenly it's available. But the point of trademark is so that customers won't be confused and spelling escalate with a C or K is gonna create confusion. It doesn't matter whether it's a C or K. So we haven't even looked at domain or Google screening yet. I just wanted to show you trademark because you have to know how to use trademark. So here's a bunch of names that we came up with. You can see we were playing on the same sorts of ideas that you guys had, right? There's some things here that are very close to what you were looking at, Excelist, caffeine, right? That's like that burn feeling seer. Game change, power surge, tectonic, intelligence, philosophy, steam point, sense seven, farsight, all of these are that sort of forward moving, getting things going. When we did the trademark screening, here's what fell out. The ones with the strikers, not available. So there were very few names left to show to this client. It's a crowded field. And we knew that going in. So we screened a lot of names for it. Alita says, to catch word due trademark screening in this way, or is this just an example? No, this is literally how we do it. Like I spend a lot of my time sitting at the computer going to tests, looking up names, reading all these marks, taking notes on it. It's hugely time consuming. We have outsourced it occasionally. There are paralegal people who do this, but we found that they're not as careful as we would prefer them to be. And we, over the 20 years we've been doing this, I've really gotten familiar with the ins and outs of trademarks, so we don't really trust it to her other perspective. Yeah, and there was that one person who was too careful. And then you left with absolutely nothing. There are some aggregate tools. And occasionally we look into those where you subscribe to a thing and then they give you a report and everything. But again, you're not the one making the judgment. So you have to rely on the judgment of whoever created this algorithm. And so that's too much of a mystery. Yep, so here's the name they chose. Philosophie. They were super happy with this name. I thought it was a good name for them. It really got at this feeling of speed, moving things forward, you know? It sounds very active. It has that IFY ending on it to make it a verb, you know? And they love that like, oh, it's a verb. We can use it as a verb. You can philosophize your business, which they did. And it was all over their branding. And it's kind of cool, right? It sounds techy in a way. I'm not sure why it does. Velo is a word part that's pretty well understood in English, but also romance languages because it gets back to the Latin root again, which sounds kind of sophisticated. So it was a really, really good name for them. And they were happy. Can you go back one slide for a sec? So notice that all of the real English words, and there weren't even that many, fell out. And even a lot of the coinages fell out. And you also see there is another style there, which is word and number, which, you know, for a lot of brands, it's not appropriate. But that can be an avenue to explore as well. But for in this space, real English words are just not going to be available. And something like steam point, for example, that's like a more abstract kind of name. You get the meaning, right? It's the point at which water boils. And you get steam, which is a propellant. You think of steam engines and things like that. So it has that forward motion. But it's one step removed semantically. And for them, it was like just a step too far. They wanted something that was a little bit closer in. So Nicole asked, if velocity was taken, would philosophy still be OK? That's an excellent question. And the answer is maybe. You need a lawyer to look at that, to see if people do have the word velocity, the real English word. What do they do? What is their business? And could this one also coexist, and they not sue each other? And lawyers are the ones who decide that. We have intuitions, but we always let the lawyers make up their minds. But we would have labeled that as high risk. Higher risk, yeah, for sure. How much did this particular project cost? We did this. This is like eight years ago, I'm thinking. And this was probably a 35K project, which at that time was standard. Our fees have gone up a little bit since then. I don't take home 35K. It's what the company charges. And our prices range from at the low end, probably 20K to at the high end 50K, depending on the amount of work that we're doing and how hard it's going to be and how many people we need to interview and how many countries we need to screen in. There's a lot of variables that play into it. I was saying yesterday, when we were talking that people naming companies generally charge about the same. So we know that companies like Lexicon and WANT and the other folks, we all charge pretty much the same for this same service, more or less. Individuals who do naming, like Lynn Nichols, who was one of our presenters yesterday, she might charge a little bit less because she's a single person operation. And she has just less resources. Not that her work isn't good. It is good. But she has less fixed costs also. So there's an opportunity for her to work with companies like startups who might not have 50K to spend on a naming project, as opposed to Intel, who they don't care. Just whatever it is, they'll pay what it is. Well, and also the thing that the company can give you that an individual generally can't is the level of project management and client hand-holding and all the other resources of our part. We have design partners and other people who can handle the other aspects. And so we can offer it as an entire brand identity package. Joti asks, are there royalties or something for the names that are chosen and used? Oh, I wish. Nope. Once we create the name, that's it. They pay for the project. They get one name, and that's it. We say goodbye, and they get to do whatever they want with it. In this sense, it's the same as any kind of copywriting that you would do. So you're writing a tagline, or you're writing an ad, or whatever it is. The person who paid you, I mean, it's in the contract. They own it, and they own it as intellectual property. Now, in our catchword contracts, it states that they get to choose either the one name, and they're paying for the one name at the end of the day. Some clients say we want to reserve our top five for one year or something like that. So then they own that. Everything else reverts to us as it becomes catchword's intellectual property again. So I just want to wrap up here because we're coming to the end of our time. We talked about this, again, yesterday at the panel. So you should definitely watch that recording if this is something you're interested in. How do you get a job in naming well? Internships, do some free work for a large naming and branding firm. There are quite a number of them who are often looking for people. Lots of namers are freelancers. They work for more than one firm. If you want a freelance, you need to get your name out there. So set up a website. Do some thought experiment naming projects to show that you're creative. Open an Upwork account and hold yourself out. As a namer, if you have some naming experience, like even things that you do for yourself to show that you can actually do this, send out samples. Lots of those big firms are open to employing freelancers. If you do a little free work for them so they can see that you're talented, they might offer you some work, which could be really good. Establish a social media presence. This is important. Be someone online who can express yourself that people can see that you can write. You can say things that you understand marketing and the ad world that's out there. That's a really important part of it. Write a lot. Do think pieces. Write on your blog. Publish something on medium. Write essays on Facebook, whatever. Writing and naming really go hand in hand. Erin is a great example of that. The more you write, the better your skills will be and the sharper you'll be at actually coming up with names. And employers absolutely look at your writing skills when they are deciding if they're gonna hire you to be a namer. It's super important. And say yes to a lot of things. Starting out can be hard. You're gonna maybe send your free offer of naming to 10 places and only two will bite. That's okay. Just keep doing it. Keep trying. Keep pushing to do it. And the last part is, as we've been saying, I think this whole LCL, it's all about networking, right? Call calling is great, but if you know somebody, contact them, link them to them. Join groups on our Facebook group for our SIG, the Nguestix Beyond Academia. We post job offers there all the time and we can point people to the right places. Networking is the best way to find a job opportunity. It absolutely is. It's sort of unfair that you can't do it in other ways, but that's just the way it is. Honestly, a lot of our work to catch word comes by word of mouth. It's referrals, it's networking. We do get cold calls and people who fill out the form on our website, but a lot of it is just one person saying, I had a great experience with Catchword. You should hire them to their friend who's the VP of marketing at some other firm. And that's how we get a job. Yeah, and as Laura was saying and I'm on the first point, make a spec portfolio. I mean, that's the same thing if you were trying to get a copywriter job or a design job, make a spec portfolio either for a product that exists or one that you think should exist, come up with a name. And if you can, put it in context, make a little logo, whatever, and put it on your website. Yep. I just wanted to leave you with this very last point which is a particular pet peeve of mine which people always bring up when they talk about naming. Oh, Chevy Nova, it did poorly in Latin America because Nova means no go in Spanish, completely busted. They're different. The words Nova and Nova are pronounced differently. Nova would be a really weird way for a Spanish speaker to describe a car that doesn't run. Nova gasoline was sold in Mexico for like really long time, bossa nova. They never renamed it for the Latin American market. It sold well in those Spanish speaking countries. It exceeded sales projections in Venezuela and GM was very well aware that there might be this association but they did testing and they found out that for Spanish speakers it was not a problem. So if anybody ever brings this up to you, point that I got this from Snopes. You can go to Snopes and go, no, it's not true. And now you have the secret piece of information. Thank you all for being part of today's workshop. I hope you got something interesting out of it. So I hope you all enjoyed it. It was really great to share this time with you all.