AVOID SAFE NAMES

“Because in this business, and it's very counterintuitive, quantity leads to quality. Quantity leads to quality. Often, we will get a list from a client saying, you know, we're really stuck now. Uh-uh, and and I'll say, okay. Well, we how how many names do you generate? We will get back a list of 50 or a 100 names, and that's where and then got stuck and they stopped. Right? Hey. We we can't do that. We we're we're looking at maybe 2,000 names.”

“Yeah. Well, you're really talking about an area that we know a lot about, which is sound symbolism. And and so and you just said k, and that actually is one of the power letters. But but so the those letters that are strong, I mean, this is in many ways just intuitive, but think about in some you know, you can call them plosives. There's other technical terms, but you you talk about, p and k and b. Those sounds are if you want something reliable and fast, you you're gonna at least formulate that into your names.”

“Procter and Gamble came to us. Right? They said, you know, we we're really disappointed. We wanted pro mop. We can't have it legally, and we want you to work with us on on this. So so they sent out samples, to us. And the first thing we said was, first off, this isn't a mop. There's no stringy cotton on it. We did some research, and we found out it turns out whether you're a man or a woman, in housekeeping chores, there are things people really like to do. Nobody wants to mock. Almost the same time, the Clorox company came out with ReadyMop. Swiffer is a 5, a $5,000,000,000 brand. I think that Clorox's ReadyMop is a couple $100,000,000.”

“There's a little chart I'm gonna get or a little it's a just draw a line on it. And on one side, put bizarre, absurd illegal ideas. And on the other side, put safe, workable ideas. Right? In the middle, write the word approximate thinking. Right? And if you show that to your teams who are doing creative work for you and say, you know what? As we start this thing, you can move from bizarre through approximate, and then we'll let let's just stop there. And then if you give people permission to do that, you will see that your creativity will spike.”

“I will never forget. I I learned a lot from working with Andy Grove on the Pentium project and Xeon and, you know, other things. It was not not ProMop, but Prochip, the engineers at Intel, that they you know, hey. They're engineers, and they wanna look. What is this? It's a professional chip. And Andy, he gave he had me present, what we'd found and why Pentium worked. And he said, listen. This is a good name because it is so polarizing. That means it has energy to it. There's energy inside.”

“Well, first off, you have, you know, in the classic ones, you you have peer pressure. Right? So so and then that you the stopping that cascade of evaluation when you have, you know, four, five, or six people, let alone 10 people, It's just it's it's a slow, slow grind. And we really documented that, and this is going back now thirty years ago doing research. And so the combination of that and over an eighteen month period we said, this is really interesting. First off, it doesn't come from freelancers. Not because they're not creative. It's just they're not inside. It's coming from individuals or people working in two person teams. And so we stopped all that brainstorming, never hired a freelancer again.”

“First off, you have to get attention. I mean, you had to get attention fifty years ago, but now it's almost impossible to do that. Secondly, you gotta hold their attention. Here's a kind of a $10 phrase. It has to be processing fluent. In other words, not only can I sort of pronounce it, but there's something in it that I can understand? And the third thing is and this is what most people get wrong and why we have so many poor or okay names, has to be surprising. Not comfortable, not popular. There's something unexpected about it.”

“I'll coach people to say, listen. When you have trouble when you feel yourself leaning into the urge to say, that's too expensive or that'll never pass legal, say something like, I wish we could make that so it wasn't expensive, or how do we how do we modify that word so it's legally available? What you've done there is you've given someone a problem solving proposition. You haven't slammed it an a name down. You're getting people to think about, okay. Well, let let me think about because humans love to solve problems. We do. That that's it's in our DNA.”

“So so, when we name Blackberry, we so so we're in Sausalito, and you may or may not know this, but during World War two, Sausalito was a shipbuilding area. And we were in an another naval building built by the US Navy, and part of our office was in a vault where they stored the plans for these ships. So these Canadians come from Waterloo, Canada, and they're sitting down in a vault. And then we present to them Blackberry. I said, your current competitors, who are all big companies, would never have the courage to put BlackBerry on a device. Then the arms dropped, and you could see people going, okay. Maybe this guy knows something I don't know.”

“And here is this is really counterintuitive because the biggest the biggest reason people don't change their name is they think they're gonna lose whatever equities they have, and they're gonna lose momentum. We have never seen that as evidence in the marketplace. Never. I wanna emphasize that. Provided provided that their launch is done with enthusiasm, and they and they have a story to tell that we were here, and now we're going this way. And so, rather than struggle with something, bad names create friction. Right? They just do.”