 Welcome to Career Panel, Linguists and Naming. I am the host for today. My name is Laurel Sutton. I am a Namer. I have been working for my own company, Catchword for 20 plus years now. And I am delighted to welcome this panel of Namers today. So we have Will Laban, who is from Stanford and has worked at Lexicon for many years. We have Eric Jackson, who also worked at Lexicon and is now at Salt Branding. And our support person is Marcus Robinson. You can see him up there and he's also helping us in chat. So for today's topic, as I always like to say, it's true, developing brand names is a actual real job. And it's one for which linguists are really well suited. So in today's panel, we're gonna talk about career journeys, how we all use our linguistic training at work and discuss opportunities available in naming and branding for people who want to take this on as a career. So to get started, people seem super interested in everybody's career journeys. So I would love for you guys to talk about how you went from being a linguist in academia to actually going outside of it and finding this career in naming and maybe talk a little bit about your first job outside of academia that is and how you came to it. So Eric, why don't you go first? Sure, sure. My, so yeah, it's first it's great to be here with you all. And it's an honor to be invited as a panelist sitting alongside some serious heavy hitters in linguistics. And it is really such a small world. It's funny to see that actually my first job outside of academia was with Will, our fellow panelists here. So I went to Boston College. I was doing my masters in linguistics and then from there, I got really interested in just the world of advertising and business and where those two sort of things intersect language and marketing. And I found my way to the niche world of brand naming as a study in practice and encountered lots of research in my final semesters in my master's program that were actually conducted and presented by Will Laban and other team members at Lexicon Branding, one of the just most phenomenal agencies out there when it comes to brand naming. I mean, they, one of the first, you know, there are the big name and brand naming agencies specifically. So, and it was actually ahead of an LSA, I think it was LSA 2015 conference in Portland where I met Laurel and I met another team member at Lexicon who gave a similar presentation about careers outside of academia in linguistics. It was Greg Alger, a good friend and former colleague at Lexicon. He gave a presentation about Lexicon and the work that they do when it comes to linguistics and brand naming. And we chatted after the conference and then looking around at jobs that's, they had an opening and it happened to fit and it was great. It was, I was there for three years, I think and started as a linguistics intern doing research with Will and a couple other interns. And that was a really fun summer and then stayed on as transitioned more into the creative side of the business. And it was sort of one of those hybrid, linguist creatives that you see in brand naming agencies. And so that's sort of where I started. And it was a wonderful experience at Lexicon and just learning a ton. We'll probably get into this a bit later but just like the difference between how we sort of think about linguistics and language in the university and academia as opposed to how people in the marketing world think about language and how those skills sort of morph and transition and grow. And that was sort of my first experience as an intern there at Lexicon and learning about what does it mean to even create a brand name? You know what, there are agencies that do this and yeah, and it really was great. And it's an honor to be a colleague of Will's now. It's great to see you again, Will. And yeah, that was sort of my first foray into naming. Yeah, that's great. Will, you had, I mean, you've been doing this for so long and you still have an academic affiliation. So can you talk about that a little bit? How did you get into naming? Yeah, it was over 30 years ago that someone from Lexicon stopped at my office and asked whether I'd like to do some work for them. At the time I was a professor at Stanford in the linguistics department and really wasn't really wasn't prepared. Wasn't even looking for outside opportunities. But this, I could tell pretty much from the beginning that this was gonna be interesting and fun and it's surprising now to look back over all those years and see how right that was the, I don't think I need to talk about the problems of balancing an academic career with a career in industry because I think most of the people who are attending here are interested in a full-time job in industry. And so in that sense, my experience may not be typical but there are some things that I learned along the way that I'd like to pass along. Let me start with a couple of anecdotes. When Lexicon took me on as a consultant one of the first things I did was I gave a few short lectures on what linguistics could possibly have to offer to naming. And as a phonologist, I focused on phonology. And I remember at an early point in my first lecture I just talked about phonological analysis and phonological features. And of course, through a big distinction between obstruence and sonorance because those sounds have such different impacts on people in names and elsewhere. And so I said, well, among the sounds we have obstruence or sonorance. So sound is either one or the other. And all vowels are sonorance and but not all sonorance are vowels. And at that point, the president of the company interrupted me and said, someone write that down. And what that showed to me is the level of knowledge of language in an organization that was devoted to creating names. So I knew from that instant that there was a role for me at Lexicon. And the broader lesson there is that in what we pick up in linguistics, the things that are the most basic, the most every day are bits of information that are not generally known. And while that applies to phonology it just applies to every domain of language whether you're talking about attitudes towards correctness. If you're talking about how, talking about standards of politeness, dialects, whatever it is, the amount of knowledge that we acquire in our training as linguists is just vast compared to what even professionals know. And it's been to keep that in mind. Another thought that I have along those lines is that my time as a graduate student was divided between learning material and figuring it out, developing analyses and theories of the material. And I have to say that most of the knowledge of language that I've been able to apply successfully at Lexicon is the substantive stuff about how languages can differ, the history of languages, how people's different attitudes towards language. And the things that I spent the other half of my time on analysis and theory, those have played some role but it's just the kind of role in phonology we talk about underlying forms and surface forms and none of that makes any sense to anybody outside of the existence. But field of concepts like how to make a sound argument, how to criticize an argument that's flawed, those kinds of talents that are skills that we get training in as linguists, those kind of abstract reasoning skills are very, very useful. And then another little anecdote that shortly after my lecture on phonology, Lexicon had developed, it had a project for General Mills, General Mills which makes Rice Krispies and Cheerios. They came out with a new cereal around 1990 or so. I'm sure no one here has ever heard of it but Lexicon named it Triples. And the reason for Triples was the cereal was it contained Rice Krispies. And then that was one of the three ingredients but also shaped like Rice Krispies, there were things that were made out of wheat and there were things that were made out of oats. So it was three different grades that entered into the things. It was really nice that at any rate the president of Lexicon asked me what I thought of the name Triples. And I said, well, what I really like about it is that it sounds crunchy. And he looked at me as if I had forgotten to comb my hair that day or something. It's just what? And so I explained and that led to many years of research at Lexicon on the uses of sound symbolism. And so what I learned from that is that things that occur to us very naturally that just seems so obvious will be much less so to those who haven't had the opportunity to study sound systems in detail and just ask questions about what's the relationship between this sound and that sound. So again, this is going on and on and Laurel, you'll just have to stop me but let me try to stop myself. I think the value of our training in linguistics is we learn a pile of information about language that is very, very relevant to naming and to other pursuits in industry. We have no idea how valuable it is but we should just be, should have some, I think just from talking to relatives over Thanksgiving dinner. We get an impression that yeah, there's stuff there that we know that no one else is gonna be interested in. We can't really talk about it but the fact is to let that stuff out in some way, it will be useful in the right context that just have confidence that the material that we have spent so much time acquiring is not just esoteric, it really has a utility to people and you just have to find the right occasion to make use of it. I couldn't agree more. I say this when people ask me about how I use linguistics in my job and I use it every day all the time and it's not just looking at names and analyzing their sound patterns or figuring out if they've got stop consonants but it's also in the way that I communicate with clients. It's in the way I put presentations together. It's how I communicate what I'm trying to communicate and one of the, I wanted to ask you both, one of the things I really had to learn in moving from academia to industry was how to take those linguistic concepts that you're just talking about and express them in a way that people can actually understand them. People who don't have any linguistic training for whom these things are not obvious. So I often find myself doing a lot of parenthetical explanations. So if I'm saying to a client, this name doesn't have any obstruents in it and then I have to pause and go and obstruent is and then give some examples so that they can understand it. And I have found, and Eric, you tell me if this is true, clients love that stuff, right? Like when you pull out these linguistic terms as long as you can get them to understand what you're talking about, they feel like you're giving them some kind of secret information but you have to be careful not to slip into linguistics jargon mode or else they won't understand and then they feel like you're lecturing to them. So what do you think, Eric? Did you have to learn how to do that too? Yes, absolutely. This was like the biggest transition from academia to just say any modern business situation, marketing. The way you communicate your ideas as a linguist in academia, you sort of have like this deck of cards of like special terms and information and things that you sort of store away and you can kind of flash these cards every once in a while with clients and using terms and concepts that you know and you know that they apply. Take one, for example, I got really into the study of phonesthetics, which is like a sub-tech of phonetics or phonology, also called sound symbolism. It's the idea that there's sounds that convey non-arbitrary meaning and that's kind of like up for debate in the linguistics world for sure and how far that extends. But it's a really compelling idea when you're trying to sell something like a brand name that certain sounds have certain meanings and to give examples of how that's the case. And so you can kind of go, you can go into the sort of the science of that, but then you kind of have to, yeah, like you said, pull back a little bit and explain it in sort of everyday language about using examples of other brands or brand names or other words that sort of show whatever concept you're trying to express or convey. And yeah, there is that sense of when you use your special knowledge of linguistics, it shows, it gives your clients a sense of trust and credibility that you know what you're talking about. You are sort of like, you're really a scientist and that has a sense of authority to it. And so, but as any good scientist, you have to also be able to explain those concepts to people who may not have the same background as you or the same training as you. And that's really the skills you develop, I think, in the business world is how to communicate that because the way I talked about language and words when I first started is way different than the way I talk now about it. And trying to be really sensitive to not just overwhelming someone with these lofty terms or very specific terms about things that we may be familiar with, but your average person just hasn't studied those things. So being really aware, socially aware really of how you're coming across, you wanna be credible, you wanna show, there are certain words and terms for certain concepts that are applicable, but also be able to explain them in sort of a casual colloquial way is a super important skill to learn. Yeah, for sure. Laurel, can I add something to what Eric just said? I couldn't agree more. And what I'd like to add is what that, how, what Eric just said, can help people who are applying for jobs in industry. Anyone who is getting a PhD in linguistics nowadays probably has to do some work as a TA somewhere along the line in their PhD program. And one of the things that a TA experience gives you experience in is expressing complex ideas to a set of people who are not always 100% interested in what you have to say. And so making those ideas intelligible and relevant and fun. And if you're a person looking for a job in industry, you can help your chances, I think, by showing the relevance of your experience to your graduate student teaching experience to working with the company and working with clients in explaining, in sorting out which linguistic concepts really are relevant and which ones are just too crazy to bother with, but also just developing a sense of when people are following you, what will really make a difference to them. So for me, the trip is always to find a contrast, to find something where there's a difference that people can perceive, but they don't know where that difference is coming from. Like Laurel's example of obstuant versus non-obstuant, just something that explains a difference that every speaker of the language can feel, but they don't understand where it's coming from. Something like that says, wow, this person knows something that I don't know and it's relevant to me, but in job applications and in job interviews, it's really helpful to be able to say, well, I have experience, I just don't do this esoteric stuff. I actually have experience in bringing this to the level of people who need to understand it, but don't know what exactly to expect. So what Eric said, I think is just very, very helpful to keep in mind when you are applying for a job, writing a cover letter or doing an interview and talking about your special skills. I agree. I think my teaching experience when I was in grad school which is invaluable, that place where you're having to explain these complicated concepts to people who might not really be grasping it. As you say, reading the room, figuring out where people are getting lost. Running, for me, running a client meeting is like teaching. You're up in front of a group of people and you're trying to sell them on whatever you're talking about. It's super helpful. I wanted to pick up on something that I have talked about in other places, but which you are all highlighting and there's different parts of naming. I think this is interesting to people who don't know a lot about naming and marketing. So for example, in my company, there's a clear divide between the project management part and the creative part. And to be a namer, like I don't do a lot of creative work myself. I'm not a very creative person. I can't sit down and come up with a list of 500 names. But where my skills are is in the project management, communicating with clients and looking at that list of 500 names and being able to select the right names off of it, which I think is just a whole different skill. So naming is part art, right? The creativity, but it's also part science where you're bringing all those analytical skills to bear on what you're doing. And so I'm interested to hear from you guys how you feel that plays in. I mean, what about you? How does your job break down? Gosh, yeah. Everything you guys are saying is exactly the same experience that there's the creativity element of it, say a naming project. Typically, Ballpark would be maybe two months long of meetings and creativity. Of that two months, I probably spend, I don't know, three days worth of work in those two months of actually creating and generating lists of names. And the rest of that is really about evaluating, choosing what names are actually worth, first of all, putting through trademark screening, which is another hurdle altogether. And then how these names will, because it really is a quantity thing, which I found. And then it's really how to explain what merit these names have to the client in a way that's, how does it help support the message they wanna go to the market with? The name is really just a tool at the end of the day. It's a marketing tool to help support their business and support their positioning or their message and really act as that vessel into the marketplace. And that's a scary thing for new businesses or people who are rebranding because it's just new. And as humans, we're like hesitant when something's new and it's hard to imagine. So I think that's one of the key, really what you encounter is helping people imagine, imagine what the brand could become. It doesn't exist yet out there. It's not like you can point to it in a store and you have, people point to a name like Apple and they love it, for example, but imagine that Apple didn't exist. And then imagine you presented that as a name and people would be like, well, I don't get it. It's a fruit. What does that do? But so it's like, you really have to help them and really hold their hand and walk with them and constantly reassuring that explain it to them in ways that are helpful and how this name can support their building a brand, helping them imagine the brand that could be built around the name because at the end of the day, a name can only do so much. It's not gonna do everything for the brand. It's not going to, I'm probably saying all of the talking points that you guys all say every day, but it's part of the brand. It's not the entire brand, right? And so really it is, there's the creative of coming up with a name, but then there's all of the rationale behind it. How does it help? What is this gonna do for them and their business? And then also all of the just really tactical things like is there an available trademark for it? It might be a great idea, but that's where the science sort of comes in and is it available? And then again, linguistics comes back in, is it linguistically appropriate in other languages, say, if it's a global trademark? Is it appropriate culturally? And so all those things come together and then yeah, it's the client management, really trying to walk with them in that process of creating a new brand or rebranding that there's a lot more to it than just writing names on a page. I personally hate the word brainstorming because I feel like it implies this sort of just shotgun approach, throwing stuff against the wall, seeing what sticks and that is not the way to do it. And one thing that I feel like my linguistics training really helped me with was understanding that naming is a process, right? Like anything that you would do in academics, it's a process. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you don't follow the process, you're not gonna succeed and the process needs to be fairly regimented and it needs to be specific. So I think the first thing that everybody in naming does when you meet with a client to find out their name, you gather all this information about what they're trying to do and what the benefit is to the customers and how this product needs to stand out from the competition. And from that, you write a creative brief which distills all that down to maybe four or five messages and then perhaps some specifications like needs to be available as a trademark needs to have the dot-com domain needs to be six letters because it has to fit on something, some UI thing or used to be a bezel when people manufactured things. And you have to create to the brief. You can't just create anything because you like the way it sounds. It has to fit what's in that brief which then has the advantage as you're showing them names later on, you go back to the brief and say, remember, we agreed on these messages. Here's how these names actually execute on all the messages that we came up with. You're talking to them about why these are the right names not just because you like them. It's do they serve a strategic function and are they gonna be the place where you can build your brand? And for me, that's all linguistics like expressing that, talking about that, narrowing the brief, all of that stuff. It's all of my linguistic training coming into play there. I'd like to add something to what Laurel just said. Again, what Eric and Laurel described is also my experience in terms of the creativity having taking less portion of one's time than project management. What I would add to what's already been said is that in linguistics, if we're analyzing languages, we can't analyze a language without data from that language and learn that lesson very early. And as project managers in talking with clients, we also really can't be credible unless we have data. So actual cases that prove something or another. So when we're talking about the value of a particular name on a list of dozens or hundreds of names, one of the useful things is to have knowledge of past naming experiences, not only our own, but what did Apple do when it came out with Macintosh or the iPod? What were the successful names? What were the problems that were raised with those names? I remember when Lexicon developed Pentium, there was pushback because it just sounded so, I don't know, mechanical. I don't know exactly what to say. So just lacking human qualities. It was a surprising, chips at that time were named things like 8088. So I guess Pentium was an advance to some extent. But to know case studies and know what the first reaction was to a name, the famous false story about Chevy Nova allegedly not succeeding because in Spanish-speaking countries because it said Nova, but just totally fabricated and in fact, it wasn't unsuccessful. But just knowing lots about the history of past names and then applying those histories to the past names, and then applying those historical lessons to the present project. That again is something that no client is gonna be aware of. The client at best will know what they read in the newspapers, half of which was probably false or exaggerated. And so one of the skills that we pick up in graduate school, massing quantities of experience and past experiences that we can learn from, that's something that can be very, very helpful in project management. Great. I'm looking at the chat. There's a couple of questions. One question here. Interesting. Do you work with naming in all domains or is it better easier to focus on a specific domain? I think, do you mean industry or product names or company names? Because the answers are sort of similar. One thing that happens to me, I'm curious if it happens to you guys as well, when clients come, they say, have you ever named one of these before? This chip, this brand of water, this whatever. And often the answer is no, but that doesn't mean I can't name yours because you don't have to have the specific experience for the specific name. The naming process is the same, regardless of whether it's a chip or bottled water or a catheter or whatever. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you follow the process to come up with a good name. My company has been naming in all sorts of industries. We've done startups. We've done big companies. Lexicon has done everything, right? Billion dollar brands and it's the same. So you don't need to have specific experience in a specific industry or area or type of thing that you're naming. I don't think unless you guys disagree with that. I don't know. In my experience, I mean, you don't really, I mean, you need like a service level. I think and you sort of gather that with client interaction. You start to get to know their business a little bit, but not to the extent where you need, you know, in depth in a background research. I mean, the naming process is exactly like you said. It's the same no matter what the industry is really. And I wanted to also go back to, because this is relevant. One of the comments above that, which was about, do you sort of compare your name with the products that compete with the product you're naming? And that's true there too. So that's one thing that you would want to learn. When you're working with a new project, a new client is what are the, what are their competitors named, you know, what are the names in the, in the competitive set? Because that'll start to give you a sense of what, what the white space is, what's, what's not really out there already. And so I would say you, you don't really have to detach yourself from, from names or that inspiration, you know, you can always have great, it's great to have examples of names you're inspired by or things that, brand names out there that you think are great and, and why. And because then you can kind of start to, you know, show how, you know, I can create something like this for you because I know why it works here. And so there's that, that credibility there. You definitely do want it. You mentioned you decontaminate or detach yourself of all names. There is a sense of that when this is a, this is a, this is yet another point of you don't want to be completely like married to one, one name. You want to sort of be a little bit objective. You don't want to fall in love with that because, or you don't want your clients to because of all the hurdles that may come up, you know, in the end, that's why we typically will show a client a set of names. We never really just show, you know, here's, here's your one name, but it'll be probably like 20 to 50, you know, for a project, something like that. So that then they can have a shortlist to choose from and then work those through all of those, the process that, that Laurel mentioned the steps, you know, trademark and, you know, linguistic screening. And so you do kind of want to step back a little bit. Don't, don't get too attached to one name in particular, but definitely to have names that you like and why. And then how they compete against the names that are out there is really valuable skill to learn. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that clients often don't choose the best name in my opinion. You might present them with 10 names. And I of course will have a favorite and they choose something else and that's fine. They're the client. They're allowed to do that. But you can't get upset about that. You can't get angry at them. They will choose what they choose. That's their prerogative as, as the client and it's heartbreaking sometimes when you present a lot of great work and they will choose the most, you know, inoffensive or lowest common denominator type name rather than one that's bold. But it's part of the business and you just get used to it. I wanted to address Alex's question really quickly here in the chat. There is a couple, there are a couple of companies that focus on pharmaceutical naming. Brand Institute is one of them. And the reason for that is that pharma naming is different because not only do the names have to clear trademark, there are a whole slew of other hurdles that those names need to clear from the FDA in order to be approved. And it's just gotten so difficult with pharma names to come up with things that are available that don't break the FDA rules. It's very, very specialized and difficult. And I, I did a couple of those early on. I would never do them again. I don't know how you all feel about that. But I think it's really important that the FDA is working on a brand for a CBD product, which comes with a whole extra set of issues and along with the FDA, you know, the, the importance of it not conveying what it does and not making any claims. And then also just the, the restrictions of it having CBD in it. So that was a, that was an interesting one to come up with a name for. I think it was a really interesting one. So I think those are what we'll talk about in the course of our presentation. We looked at Cole's question about cross cultural communication. And how does that play into naming clients from different backgrounds? That definitely comes up. I mean, it depends on what kind of projects you take on. Last year I worked on one. For. and they were creating a new building on their property for ultra luxury where the high rollers would go. And it was interesting because they wanted the name of the building or they wanted to create a new brand for that, just that building with its own name and visual identity and style. And they wanted the name to be from Chinese, like they wanted it to be a Chinese word. And it was such an interesting project because well, I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese or anything. And I was working with a team of Chinese linguists trying to come up with what the brief was very specific. It was to come up with a word from Chinese from either culturally or linguistically, but then was also pronounceable by people who speak English and the client team were all English speakers. But the customers were all strictly Mandarin speakers. And so it was interesting. But I thought what I liked about it was that it was something new. It was an interesting challenge and really cool to see how there was sort of a movement. And I think this is the case in Asia now generally of moving away from like European and American words, English words to express a sense of luxury over there and really owning their heritage and culture. And so that was really cool to be a part of and definitely out of my comfort zone of trying to present names to the client that were from that I don't even know if I was pronouncing, right? Oh, he said, can I show the answer? Well, sadly, COVID struck right in the middle of our project. And so the project kind of winded down. I don't know if it's going to spin back up. But it was a fun one. I really liked some of the words that the linguists came up with. So much rich layers of meaning in the language. So to add on to that a little bit, you mentioned something that I think is important for people to understand is that as I like to describe it, you know, marketing is big, branding is smaller, naming is like a tiny little piece of it. But then even within naming, there are very specific disciplines that we don't always cover. So doing transliteration or translation, there are firms that specifically do just that. And there are some that do it very specifically for Asian languages, for Chinese, there are some that do it for languages in Latin America or in Europe. And it's great to have experts that you can call on to help deal with these other aspects of how the name is going to be rolled out. Not every name goes out into the world as the name, especially in countries where there's a different writing system or in Asian countries. So somebody has to figure out how to take this name and transliterate it into the local language that's understood and you really, really need experts for that. Often names aren't translated. Sometimes they are. It depends again on the company and what the product is. And there are people who specialize in that. There are people who specialize in providing the supporting copy perhaps that goes on a website in France or Germany to explain what the name means. So that's another area like I would never do that. I want the people who are the experts to do that to make it as clear as possible. So there's all these little satellite businesses I think that go around naming and it's super fun to work with those people. And of course my company doesn't do any graphic design either. So at some point the name gets handed off to a designer to do a logo or a wordmark or develop the colors that are going to go with it. And that's a whole other area of creativity that is naming adjacent, but different people who do that generally speaking. Let's see. Oh, so Emily points out we have a panel next Thursday about localization and translation, which is cool. And I would also like to put in a plug. I'm actually having a naming workshop tomorrow afternoon that goes over some of the ways in which you do this. It's a little it's more nitty gritty than this conversation we're having now. I'm going to lead people through what a naming process is like. No trade secrets. It's the stuff that everybody knows. We all do it the same way. But it'll give some answers to like how do you come up with things literally? How do you sit down with a list or a blank piece of paper or an open word doc? Where do you start? So we'll talk about that a little bit too. It's coming up on 10 o'clock. I want to make sure that we get in all the questions that people have. So before we turn to the things in the chat because I see there's questions coming. Did any of you want to get in some more points based on your experience or talk about maybe things that you're working on now that might be interesting? I'd like to say something about a topic that we haven't covered that might be of interest to some people. It's about the differences between working for a company and working in academia. Yeah. Stanford has just a wonderful linguistics department. I started out there in 1972. It's really no and loved the place well. But one thing I noticed almost as soon as I started consulting for lexicon is that because of the nature of the business, this has come out in people's presentations and answers to questions today. There are many, many different facets to naming and in a company at least the size of lexicon. Lexicon's about the size of average linguistics department. It's really not that different. There are probably 15 full-time people there. You have different people doing different stages of the operation and unless those people work closely together, everything breaks down. So teamwork is very, very important. More time goes probably by a factor of 20. More times goes into team building at lexicon than it ever did in Stanford linguistics. You really, if you like playing on a team, it's one of the wonderful features of working in industry is that you're part of a team. The other thing that I want to mention is that when in academia, when we're evaluated for a job, when we apply for a position, what are the criteria? Well, you come and give a job talk. So they evaluate your performance. You have a work that you've done. You have a CV and people look at that. And that's just about all. In industry, it matters more, it seems to me, that other people may disagree. What kind of person you are, as shown by your outside interests. So if you like rollerblading or swimming or jogging or whatever, that's actually relevant in some cases to whether you'll be hired or not. If you're selecting someone not just to do a job, but also to be a member of a team, someone who can understand other people, get along with them, contribute to them, support them, and so on. Personal qualities are just as important as what's on your CV. So that can be a key factor in how you present yourself when you apply for a job is probably quite different in industry than it is in academia, at least that's my take on it. Yeah, I think that goes for individuals too. Connecting with clients is extremely important. If they don't connect with you in some way, they won't trust you. Even if you bring all that academic experience, they want to know who you are as a person, that they can feel comfortable working with you. Yeah, the human relationship element, we actually just lost a job actually due to, you know, we were positioned totally well to answer all of the client's needs. But at the end of it, it came down to they had worked with another, or they got a referral from an agency that they had worked with to another agency that that agency knew. And so just based on that connection, you know, even though they really liked our presentation, it was they came, I think it really just came down to, you know, they trust the word of the person they already know. And so you can't really, you can't really beat that. Yeah, totally agree. I think we find that so much of our work is word of mouth, right? As you were just saying, people who have worked with us or know somebody who worked with us or had a good experience, they make the referral. There's still a lot of cold call business that comes in. But really, it's that trusting the word of someone else that is responsible for a lot of the business that goes on. And that's all about networking. I mean, we've saying this over and over during the LCL is that your best chance of meeting someone or finding a job or making a connection is through networking as uncomfortable as that can be sometimes. You absolutely have to do it. It's incredible how emotional people get about it. I often say that a lot of the work that we do with clients, as you all were talking about, it's like therapy for them. It really is. It's like talk therapy where they have to talk about their emotions and the connections. And sometimes it even becomes therapy for the company that you're working with, right? These are people who maybe haven't talked about how they feel about the company or the name or the brand that it's representing. This might be the first time where they all get in a room together. It's like an intervention where they have to actually talk about their feelings. It's not a thing that happens in business often where you can talk about feelings that you have and have it be heard and respected. And that's part of the, I think, what we serve as is a good sounding board for that. Plus, it helps us develop better names in the end. Here's a good question. How big is the naming industry? What a good question. Thoughts on that? What do you guys think? I mean, you could just look at the USPTO trademark database. It just keeps growing, especially in the last year. It might be good just to talk about the landscape. So there are big companies, I mean, big big companies that are multi-dimensional like Interbrand or Segal Gale or Lippincott that do lots of different things. So they, at Landor, they do naming. They do other brand strategy work. They do graphic design. They might do PR or advertising. So they have a division that's devoted to naming. And there are often spaces there. There's good opportunities. They do internships. There's a lot of turnover because the work is very hard and a lot of hours that you put in, but excellent training. Then there are the more mid-sized companies. Lexicon is probably one of the bigger ones. My company is pretty small. We have six people that are very strong. There's a lot of them. The job opportunities don't come up as often because we're so small. We don't hire people often. Lexicon hires people on a fairly regular basis. We have two openings right now, I think. Yes, I looked on the website. So I put that in one of our Slack channels. So yes, you guys should go over there if you're interested. And then there's loads of people who just do it on their own who have either industry experience, they've worked for a marketing company, they're coming out of academia with a really good specialty and have this knowledge. So you can go different ways. There are different opportunities for you depending how you want to work or where you want to get your start. And yeah, everything needs a name. So there's never going to be a lack of work. There's a lot of work. And there's a lot of naming companies. And we all kind of peacefully coexist. And there's enough, I perceive it as enough work to go around right now. Let's see, here's another question. Any information you can share about salary ranges or compensation for naming projects? Also a really good question. Hard to say. I think it varies quite a lot depending on where you're working and who you're working with. At Lexicon, my experience with Linguist is the salaries are at about the level of academic salaries. If you come into the company, the salary is very close to beginning assistant professor, for example. The flexibility of who's the client? I mean, even at the agency level, we sort of adjust our fees accordingly and based on really the scope. Because there's naming, but not all naming projects are equal in size or scope. And as far as if we want to put specific numbers to it, entry level, if you're starting out as like on the account or creative team in the San Francisco area, your ballpark maybe 45 to 65,000 a year, somewhere around there. And then it's just based on your skills, your experience, what the company you're working at is like. And that can all completely change and vary and what town, what city you live in. Exactly. For people who have a lot of experience who have been doing this for a while, if you were going into work for a larger company, say you had 10 years of experience managing projects and doing creative, your starting salary might be between 80 and 100k plus benefits. So it is entirely parallel with what you've been doing and what your areas of expertise are. This is regardless of whether you have a PhD. You don't have to have a PhD in order to get that kind of salary. It's entirely dependent on what your experience has been and how successful you've been doing it. To give people an idea of how projects are priced, typically it's a project basis. Like my company does it this way. I think Lexicon does it this way. We don't break it down hourly and bill the client hourly for it the way perhaps a lawyer would do it. It's more, let's look at the scope, how much work we're going to have to do, what's the screening involved and we give them a number. There might be some line items added to it but there is a big number and that number could be 50k for a naming project, could be less, could be 30k if it's less work, could be more. If it's a big multinational project, there's a lot of stakeholder interviews, could be 70k. Now we don't get that as employees, that goes to the company and then your salary gets paid out of it. For individuals, it can be less. I know some folks who do naming projects for 10k and that's some creative and then some screening that goes along with it. But individuals can certainly charge more than that. Again, if they have the experience, if they've got a good portfolio. But it's a lot of work, right? When you're a one-person show, to charge 10k for a project sounds like, wow, that's a big chunk of money but when you think of how much work you actually put into it, it works out pretty well on an hourly for you basis and how much blood, sweat, and tears actually go into it. Naming is hard. This is why people hire naming companies. It's not, as clients seem to think sometimes, people sitting around in a bar having a couple of beers and writing words on cocktail napkins. Maybe it was that way in the 50s, it is not that way anymore. It is a huge amount of work to find names that are appropriate for the client and available. Doing all this availability checking is a ton of work and then you have to evaluate what's left after the screening to present to the client what is going to be the best name for them given everything that you've learned. So there was a question that was posted in the chat a few minutes ago, asking for names of entry-level positions for people that are interested in getting into the branding space. So are there any suggestions for that? Yeah, so Will was saying that Lexicon actually has some job postings open and they have the word linguist in the title which actually seems a little unusual to me. Typically you don't see linguist in that. What do they say at Salt, Eric? You would probably more likely see account manager or account executive or something with the word account. Creative strategist, those types of words are more often used than linguist. Lexicon really has a commitment to that linguistics rigor and so they'll have linguists on staff who may or may not even do creative. They probably do creative but that is its own role there and I don't know if I've seen that in other agencies. But yeah, something with creative in their account, manager, strategist, sometimes it'll just be naming, you know, naming specialist or something like that at like a land or a seagull and gale type of agency. Absolutely. That's such a good point. I'd forgotten about that but it's so true and those people, they might be in charge of branding like managing brands. They work with naming companies because they can't possibly handle it all themselves all the time. They will often reach out and put a company on retainer to handle all the naming that happens at that particular company. I know Cisco's done that in the past. We work with PWC in New York. We're on retainer with them. Wells Fargo does it. Lots and lots of big companies and in those positions you're not often developing, you know, exciting product names that are customer facing but there's a ton of work to be done just naming things clearly and descriptively either for the benefit of the people who work at the company or sometimes they're customer facing things. Descriptive naming is also extremely hard. Not coming up with cool creative fun names but just the labels for things that people can understand and that differentiate them from other offerings that might exist even just internally. It's a whole other area. I like doing that because I'm not creative. So I like putting words in order like little algebraic equations. Word one, word two and word three. How can we mix these up so that they express something real and convey a good idea to the consumer? Yeah. That's a great point about descriptive naming. That's a lot of what we do as well. And I find that harder than trademark naming sometimes. I mean really because then you almost have to know the business even more because you have to know what terms people use and what would make sense to their customers or what would make sense internally in their company. And so yeah, there's a lot of, there's a huge opportunity in B2B business to business descriptive naming. It can get a little dry sometimes but it's there. Yep. And go ahead. Oh, sorry. I just saw the comment come in. What is descriptive naming? Well, so there are different types of names, right? There's trademark brand names like Apple, Google and then there's things like, you know, what smartphone, you know, that's like a descriptive name for what this is. And so companies will have products or features or technologies that sometimes they don't want a trademark for. They don't want to defend a trademark on or it's not really worth applying for a trademark for. It's not that. And so they just, but they still need to put a term on it. And so what do you call that? And and so that's often a really, you know, a really challenging exercise because you have to know, you know, what is there an industry standard term for what that is, what this product is. And and so sometimes that's those are the projects that we get handed. Hey, Nancy, you have a question. I do. Well, it's not a question. It's a comment to add to this piece of the discussion. I was at Apple when the Newton products came out and I was part of that team. And the thing we got criticized for later by Steve, who was not there when this happened, that Steve Jobs in case some people don't know was that we didn't name the category. So intelligent assistant or personal intelligent assistant was supposed to be the name of that category. And we used it descriptively all over the place, but never trademarked it. And it, you know, it went out and somebody else, whether it was Hans Spring or one of those other companies that was also creating small devices before the iPhones were available and portable, the mobile phones that were not flip phones were available. So that was kind of a lost opportunity. And why descriptive naming sometimes turns out to be really important. And everybody's rushing to be first to market, you know. I also wanted to mention that naming comes into play in UX stuff as well. I give a talk at Bay Kai Nancy's organization a couple of years ago that was talking about the verb that you use when you're using a device, right? When there's a button on here, what do you do when you do that? Are you pressing a button? Are you tapping it? Are you selecting it? What's the word that goes there? People use different words for that. And it's a very non-intuitive thing like some people think it's tap. Some people think it's press or push or select, you know, Nancy or unmute. Yeah, they'd still extend the word click. Oh, click, right. Like you're not clicking your mouse because there's no mouse. It's your finger that you're using to do this. So somebody somewhere has to decide what gets used because it has to go in the documentation. It has to go in the instructions. It has to go perhaps in the marketing. If you are putting it out in an ad and you're saying how easy it is to use this thing, what's the verb that you use to describe what you're doing there? So that part of naming is partly linguistics-based, but also research-based like Will was talking about earlier. That's something where you could go out and survey people and test different words with them to see which seems to make the most sense and maybe do it based on an actual bunch of data that you collect. Okay, we are coming up to the end of the hour. We're actually a little bit over, but that's okay because nobody's using this room right after us. So I wanted to say we're going to, well, I am anyway and hopefully some of our panel can hop over to gather. We could continue the conversation for a little bit. I will be there for the next half hour or so. There is a naming workshop tomorrow that I'm holding. There's the translation-transliteration thing that's happening next week. There's also a consulting panel that's happening later this week, which talks about what it is to be a consultant or a contractor as opposed to working in a firm. So if that's something that appeals to you, you might want to attend that as well. Okay, well, I think that's it. Thank you all for attending and thank you so much panelists for giving us your time. This was so interesting and I just love talking naming when neighbors get together, right? It's fun to talk shop.