What's in a namer?

It's ironic. I spend my days helping clients exercise discipline and economy in their brand expressions, but can't do that myself once I get talking about naming. Really, it's hard to shut me up. 

Case in point: What should have been a quick little interview for Grasp, a Spanish naming blog, I turned into diatribe so long that it couldn't fit into a single post.

Iberian blogger and namer Irene Gil faithfully translated my responses in their entirety. She must know what it feels like when fingers beg for mercy.  

My English answers to Irene's first two questions are below. Her painstaking Spanish translation can be read here. 

Q: Anthony, from your long experience, what is the best profile for a good namer? It's an MBA specialised in brand strategy? It's a linguistic with a sound knowledge of different languages? It's a very cultivated person with a broad vocabulary?...

Eleven years ago, a veteran namer told me the best namers are linguists with an MBA. That captures 2 dimensions of a good namer, but I believe that characterization is incomplete.   

Good namers are specialists who, paradoxically, are often the best generalists.

A namer must be a good:

Account manager
Listening to clients, building their trust, reading non-verbal cues from a room of executives, responding positively and not defensively to client concerns and building consensus are all vital naming skills, just as they are good skills in account managers.

Strategist/Account planner
A namer must think strategically to ensure their names support client's business objectives. Strategic thinking and rationale build the namer's credibility and make them more persuasive. Good namers, like good planners, always consider the customer perspective.

Creative
Creating good names requires looking at a client's business from many perspectives. Namers must be creatively prolific and fearless. And as fellow "grizzled veteran" namer Mark Gunnion said in this interview,

"You have to be thick-skinned -- 99.9% of what you create is rejected, usually without a second glance or explanation."

Storyteller
Engendering client trust and helping a client see how a word could become their brand requires great storytelling. Your name story and rationale must be persuasive and pass the "sniff test". An effective name presentation brings together the right blend of emotion and logic.

"Sprachgefuhl"
It's a German word that means "a feeling for speech". Good namers understand the nuances of words and meanings. Good namers are articulate. And only a person madly in love with words could become a namer. But love and knowledge of words is not enough. As I wrote in Knowledge vs. Naivete, linguistic expertise is helpful for naming but so is the ability to "turn off" that knowledge and imagine how names would be perceived by a typical customer.

Marketing communicator
Good namers must consider how their names might come to life across all communications: Visual identity, advertising, messaging, PR, merchandising, etc. Although namers typically don't design logos or advertising campaigns, their ability to communicate their names' potential helps identify and persuade the client of the best ones.

Q: If everybody is able to create a brand, why subcontract this task to a namer? What is the added value?

I honestly believe that great names can come from anyone; founder-created names like Apple, Virgin, Amazon and Google prove this. But involving an expert namer can help in ways tangible and intangible:

Make clients money
A great name has the right sound and meaning, making it more likely to be shared by others through word-of-mouth. A great name inspires merchandising that becomes a new revenue source. Great names that can accomplish these bottom-line benefits (and clear trademark hurdles) are more likely to be created by an expert namer than a client who is not an experienced namer.        

Save clients money
A great name is intrinsically memorable so it needs less marketing to be remembered. By giving good advice, an expert namer can help clients' avoid trademark infringement and other costly problems. For example, in 1997 Reebok launched -- and then recalled -- a women's running shoe called Incubus. A good namer with a good liberal arts background would have advised Reebok against this name: an Incubus is a demon who attacks women in their sleep.

Build consensus
A namer is a neutral, disinterested party who can build client consensus and trust because they are insulated from their client's internal politics.      

Accelerate timing
A good namer helps clients avoid problems that can delay naming programs. Pro namers maintain forward momentum by managing expectations, building client consensus, developing a breadth and depth of unique names, and weeding out obviously problematic names in trademark and international linguistic assessment.

Build confidence
A good range of naming creative, logical rationale, name launch strategies and marketing approaches builds client confidence in their name choice. 

Ease client workloads
Clients already have a job to do, and it's probably not naming. An outside namer removes this burden from their client and shields them from the emotional perils of moderating a naming discussion. It's better if an outside expert rejects a [terrible] client-created name than a colleague.

After Irene's fingers recover, she'll translate and post more of my interview.

Knowledge vs. naivete

A Linguistics student asked namers on LinkedIn a simple question: Is linguistic analysis of candidate brand names helpful?

As a brand namer, my background in Linguistics and cognitive psychology has been wildly useful. A deep understanding of language and creativity informs naming briefs that inspire both me and my team. I am able to create objectives for candidate names that facilitate their evaluation, fit with strategy and assure customer appeal. And metaphor expertise fuels my creative generation, resulting in exceptionally long lists of prospective names that are relevant and have a shot at trademark clearance.

If a client wants to consider a coined brand name, as they often do in non-English speaking markets, understanding morphology, phonology and sound symbolism is essential. The same holds true for pharmaceutical naming.

For some clients, the detailed, linguistic analysis of a candidate name helps build consensus. For large companies and their large decision-making teams, this analysis grounds them in logical rationale, bringing solid objectivity to an essentially emotional and subjective exercise.

But I am also mindful of The Curse of Knowledge. When you know a lot about something like language, it’s easy to magnify the importance of details that are actually academic or esoteric. Brand names should help sell products or services to people who don’t know nearly as much about language. Consumers are not enamored nor won over by linguistic minutiae. Linguist-namers should never think that what they find fascinating in a name will be shared or recognized by the people who really matter: Customers.

The importance of empathy cannot be overstated.

Some of the very best brand namers I know have not been to college. They wouldn’t know a phoneme from a phone booth. But they have a gift. They have the ability to create names without breaking down sounds and syllables. They see names as a consumer would. No smoke. No mirrors. No academic bull.

My linguistic knowledge and analytic inclinations have certainly been valuable. But at least as important is the ability to that turn off. Training myself to become naive and forget what I know, at least temporarily, has helped me create ever-better product and company names intended for real customers in real world.

The linguist in me wants to call this quality, ‘ambilextrous’.

But then again, no.