This guy names billion dollar brands for a living, here’s his exact 3-step formula.

so listen david here's the deal i don't believe that naming your company is that important and over the next hour i want you to convince me why i'm incredibly wrong why picking a good name is gonna help me build a billion dollar startup up and how to name it start up effectively i feel like i could rude where them know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on on road i love right behind you you have for people who are just listening on audio they can't see this but from on youtube see this right behind you you have a a bunch of almost like a music artist would have platinum records you have platinum records of names that you've created and so the impossible burger blackberry sw ver wins you've had the i remember the intel pent processor fabric breeze son just crazy with the hits go on and on slim fast oh my god slim fast that is one of the greatest names ever you know microsoft azure you've done all these incredible names and so how lucky here are we we get to hear from you today because i suck at naming i've always sucked at naming and it's bothered me because if you're gonna pour your sweat and you know tears into something for five years you kinda wanna have a name that you that you like that you feel proud of that gives you the best shot of success and so i guess to sam's initial question we were what you said at the beginning here which is he's like i'm not sure that names are that important and couldn't you know change my mind tell me i'm wrong well let me start off with this first off nothing that you will do in your in your brand will be used more often or for longer than your name and it's not so much you know is one good name better than another good name it's getting the right name and that's really what our success has been built on or based on is you gotta think through what the right name can do for you because if you get it right first off it's the highest frequency a leverage you know something that happens all the time that's leverage for you and the name compounds over time alright so the difference between an okay name and the right name that actually creates a strategic advantage we our goal is to always create asymmetric advantage impossible does that sw does that may i'll give you a very recent example we changed podium to winds now nobody knew about podium really no one knew how to spell it they couldn't search it their seo was bad we worked with him over a six week period changed it to winds surf i mean there's a story behind that but we don't need to get into that now and boom that brand took off now that that's an example of the power of a name it doesn't do everything but the the right name can launch something it does really three things for you 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 ten dollar 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 wanna ask you about the comfort thing because that's amazing but can you set the stakes here can you give an example like you know i it's crazy you have for breeze up here so like you've been doing this for a long time and you've had some amazing outcomes at seems like are there examples can you kinda give us like the price of success here where the product was the same the team was the same and you change the name and there was a different outcome look pro gamble came to us right they said you know we we're really disappointed we wanted pro mo we can't have it legally and we want you to work with us on one on this they had a a a mop i guess and they wanted to call pro mo that's exactly right okay okay 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 string e cotton on it it was it was really easy to use 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 some people love to polish their furniture others people love washing windows nobody wants them mock it's dirty it's inefficient ulcers so we went back to p g and said look let let's bring this alive let's put some fun in this it also had some materials and a little bit of magic so i pick things up so it's more efficient so boom swift right so you change pro map to sw that yeah that's right okay great decision almost the same time the core company would came out with ready mop okay now that's a comfortable name okay that's probably a popular name it probably did well in research because people said what do you think this is well i think it's a mop okay we got it we nailed it sw is a five a five billion dollar brand i think the cl ready mop is a couple hundred million dollars there do you think that the what percentage of the difference do you think was the name i think the name makes all the difference in that first i'm gonna say ninety to a hundred and twenty to the first twelve months because that's where you're getting interest you're holding people's interest for a while you're generating interest with retailers right they had to get into stores and say hey we're changing this business of cleaning floors it's not a mop it's a sw right and so now after that all the other marketplace dynamics come into gear but our whole thing here is to provide value to create value and it's we want it to be instant value sw does it impossible look at the press impossible god when they launched that right and that was something where we started with they really wanted something sort of you know kinda of crunchy hippie something that that fits into whole foods environment and that psyche and we said you're just gonna fit in you can't do that you have to make a claim here that you're better than the other guys and we did it hey i got something pretty cool to share with you guys so if you're like me you listen to podcast podcasts or youtube videos and you like to take notes you're here to learn and that's a lot of effort sometimes you're on the go and you can't do it and so the folks at hubspot who are sponsoring the podcast have done something pretty cool for you they have created the m vault it's a place to go find notes and resources that they pull from the different episodes that we do so if we have a guest on that shares their five point framework they write down those five points with the examples that the guest game and they put the notes there for you so if you want to access the vault it's totally free all you gotta do is click the link in the description below and you can access all the notes and the stuff in the vault we're gonna keep adding up to this trying to make it better over time thank you to hubspot this is a very cool way for them to sponsor the podcast but by instead of telling you to go buy their stuff they're actually giving you something instead i like it and so we you kinda hinted that two things just now you said a good name versus a and instead of saying great name you said the right name picked up on that sounds like you have some distinction there and then you also said you know what i would normally ask is what are the biggest mistakes founders companies make when it comes to their name and it sounds like what you're saying is there's do something that's safe and comfortable which causes them to be lost in the sea of same with everybody else is that the right way of thinking about it can you talk about those two things the right name versus just saying a great name yeah so so me let me address the founder thing because i think that that there's a sequence that people end up with relatively comfortable names a very common response when we asked the question well how'd you get the this name that you have right now they'll say well you know our attorney call and they said listen we've gotta put these documents together we need a name you guys gotta figure this out so we spend a few hours doing this and there there it is and now they're spending the time the money to to do it again for your first question about you know what what's the difference between a right name and a good name or an okay name right names always do three things first they're original you know in the category in the context that doesn't mean they have to be original like a pent something that's coin and that be that begins that sort of you're on a slippery slope if you want something comfortable or popular because things that original are you know humans like comfort for sure second thing is you really do have to know something about linguistics and how the brain processes information that's this processing fluency things so that it's there's something familiar and yet something surprising and that that's our creative strategy here is to really develop names that are surprisingly familiar because the brains that where our brains are a little lazy if you will this is gonna be easy for me to process but oh there's something interesting here that's where you get that attention so there those are those two things and then i mentioned this before you have to be unexpected right and an unexpected word can be something different for one company versus another azure for microsoft that typically has very descriptive and not so interesting words in their portfolio azure got people's attention if we had given that to google it wouldn't have been that attention getting because people would expect that from from from them can we play a game to make this sort of real so i'm a founder i'm listening to this presumably if i'm listening to this because i wanna be a better at naming a nickname a company and we could talk generally about how to do it or you talk specifically i like specifics okay so let's pretend i came to you david and i said hey i've got this great fiber brand i wanna bring a new fiber brand to market and if you look at the fiber market today there's what is it meta mu which i think is it all time worse name there's what are the what are the other big fiber brands i fiber one is that one yeah fiber yeah fiber one which is a very ready mop ben fiber that's what my mom's drinking ben fiber got some benefits to fiber i guess yes yeah and i say david we can disrupt this market here we're we have a we have something so much better right yes step one what are we can do okay our process is driven really by two things it's a combination thing it's we we call it or i call it creative curiosity so the first thing we would do for you is we'd say okay well let's look at the category what's out there what's the landscape we would find a lot of fiber this or something fiber and we would say that's not the way to go generally speaking that would be our first hypothesis about this so you you you you you look at the landscape and you put everything into a bucket and you say we just have to make sure that we aren't like that or we don't know where we're going but we know we're not going there we know we're not going there we may go back to that once we find out more about what your product so we would look now hard at your product right and we would have a list right of those things that you have then we would look to the consumers right well why are they doing this what what is their need what's their expectations would go up that ladder of what's the ultimate benefit right okay then we would step back from that that's just kinda of logical practical stuff right then we say okay we go through a little series of questions that that the there's almost no exception to this it it it pays off greatly first we say okay how do you define winning here alright now if you get in a room with six clients and you ask that question i will tell you that every client will have a different definition then we say well what do you have to win and you would start talking about how your fibers made how it's ground differently those types of things then we say okay what do you need to win well we gotta a breakthrough through right we gotta communicate people that fiber done this way is better for you than fiber done this way i'm making this stuff up because we're playing a game here and then well what do we need to say that's the last sequence of questions and so from there we begin to articulate with you a strategy for the name because your fiber is gonna do something on its own your packaging things like that along the way we'll do other stuff but we have to understand what you need to say sean do do you do you know enough about fiber to go through this exercise with him we could try i actually i think it's kinda almost funny to to assume that you don't have a magic bullet in the product right let's say that the it's like most commodity products on the shelves where like we think we're better we have clean ingredients we're gonna have cool packaging we're gonna have we're gonna be great at grow go to market you know we're gonna try to do all those things so let's assume for a second i don't have a absolute innovative novel solution yeah i have a very good solution i'm looking to break into the market they're just to increase the level of difficulty here and say i didn't have some totally new out of left field angle because i think that does happen a lot most people are not coming out with a absolute groundbreaking approach now we might find something in the in the process that you know what's the old mad men being like our our cigarettes are toasted or whatever it's like a version of that but let's assume for a second i don't have a magic bullet feature that nobody else has of okay fifty efficacy or anything else alright so the the second hypothesis of mine would be that everybody there is describing that they have fiber in this package right and they're making the assumption that people know that fiber is good for them and has certain benefits so i would say we're gonna we're gonna move away from that and we're gonna talk about the ultimate benefit of that so then then you know let let's just play the game here sean so what do you think is the ultimate benefit of of me taking fiber on a daily or weekly basis you there's a couple ways to do it some people would say gut health okay can you have clean gut somebody would say you regular bowel movements or you know fix your bowel movements and there might even just be an argument that like i think there's not a person i know on earth that doesn't wanna have better metabolism you know just like have high metabolism wouldn't that be great and so maybe there's some way we could go there that this is a metabolism booster that this helps you process digest your food better so one of the things that you were talking i was thinking about is i think one of the real benefits here would be it's lighter you you you feel lighter right okay that's a rich area there i i think and so we would go down that category how good is i didn't even say the word was good you just saw that my posture change and i like did it upward motion and he's like so what saying is after all that the real ultimate benefit would be you feel lighter great so so so then the then we would explore that and and we would look for and we have databases here and we have software that helps us we we we'd be and there's some really tactical things that we would do just because this is really for us a treasure hunt you need to look at the all the possibilities of that right have you ever in the book ship of gold in the deep blue sea no oh you guys would love it so very quickly a ship left san francisco loaded with gold gold coins right from the gold rush so this is in the eighteen fifties it sank off the coast of southern california estimated at over a billion dollars of gold of course everybody tries to find it one guy who's is a scientist develops it takes some sonar booms and he goes everybody is getting excited they find a ship rack down there and there's a lot of ship bricks because of the storms off the coast and then they spend all their money on that ship rate because i am going to map out the higher area here i'm gonna make some decisions about what pays off and then i'm gonna dive he found ship of gold in the deep blue sea okay yeah wow same thing happens here just we're we're gonna go okay what are greek word units for lightness you know for air for less volume for you know anti gravity things you know those types of things we're we're gonna look at expressions around i'm feeling light i'm feeling better we're looking at aerodynamics i we would have someone for fifteen minutes look at what makes an airplane lift up okay and along the way we would have all this stuff we typically internally call that trash you know it's just things just concepts and we would start eliminating things and along the way you know you're calling it trash but you're not like dis discouraging it you're like this is necessary it's the necessary things or wide trash 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 and you know we're really stuck now you and i'll say okay well we how how many names you generate we will get back a list of fifty or hundred names and that's where and they got stuck and they stopped right we we can't do that we we're we're looking at maybe two thousand names right again these these aren't all the right names they aren't even good names some of like if there's two thousand written down so for example pre pre ai you're it sounds like you have like multiple categories where you go treasure hunting so chris names is one maybe like i have one where it's like streets in my hometown like i like look at all the streets of my hometown or like you know you i'm sure you have like which i actually do wanna ask you like what are the all categories and you go through all of them and you would literally sit in a group and write them down yes out well they're they're either written in a small we work in small two person teams here we don't use brainstorming sessions oh i like it what what's the problem with brainstorming well first off you have you know in the classic ones so you you have peer pressure right so so and then that you the stopping that cascade of evaluation when you have you know four or five or six people at alone ten people it's just is it's a slow slow grind and we really documented that and this is going back now thirty years ago doing research because we used to do brainstorming here and we used to have freelancers right and so the combination of that and over an eighteen month period i mean we just asked us you know it's always in life the questions you asked right and and we said where are names really coming from right and at the end of that eighteen months even though the collection was a little sloppy and a little crude 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 they're not they don't they don't have that as decor it's not coming from brainstorming sessions it's coming from individuals or people working in two person teams and so we stopped all that brainstorming never hired a freelancer again and we work in three teams now so so usually it depends on the budget and the timing one team knows everything about your fiber product right next team we're still in fiber but now with that team we're gonna say we're adding ingredient an ingredient to this we're it's got energy in okay well what happens there it changes their perspective and their names are gonna be completely different than that first place and the third team we're not even talking about fiber we're talking about probably something an athletic performance now we've got three distinct types of names that we're generally this is searching the deep blue sea searching the whole lotion of the we're looking sorry the second one was what see if they're they know it's fiber they don't know everything about our product and then you add something unrelated yeah i know what have been like energy you know the the this now has it's it's fiber so it's digestion plus is gonna give you some some energy it might be a package of minerals i mean you these things i call it the the blueprint for for for a program we're what we're gonna do and then we try these things out and you know so you there's a lot of failure in creativity and you know everybody here has complete permission to fail if we're not failing here we're not doing our job right because it's again you're looking for that ship in the deep sea and so along the way you know we're gonna uncover something like you know well what's about lightness how do you feel like well feather alright so and we'd say well what would this what would this feel like if i walked into walgreens and there's fiber plus and there's meta mu and now in a new package there's a brand called feather right and now there's gotta be copy that supports it right so that you gotta a sugar can we create a sentence or a little phrase where people get it i get it it's gonna have fiber on the label okay so you know it could be feather the the lightweight fiber you need or something like that right alright i got it right you know consumers aren't stupid right this is like the sw so for it's not called a mop but it's the quicker picker upper exactly so we would go through that drill and eventually we would have you know a list of tens sometimes fifteen names now it goes to our trademark group here which we have paralegal and a trademark attorney and they're looking at i'm gonna stick with feather for now is feather available probably would be in this category right and so now what do we have we have something original we have something that's easy to process because it's a real word and it's familiar but all of a sudden in fiber it becomes surprising today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth of the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are trapped emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com right away you said you know you said light and we both lit up and you are like now let's look at the the greek words for light you said that very quickly as if this is just one of the many the many places where you go treasure hunting what are the other handful of places that you'd like to dig yeah so in terms of databases that anybody would have access to we we we do look at latin roots greek roots roman mythology greek mythology those really basic things which sometimes heal things i mean pent came out of you know we have a database not only of the periodic table but a lots of information about the periodic table you said lots of those basic things they're not basic to us okay you know we're we're we're dummies we're we're a few brain cells away from being just ta monkeys so like what are some of the what are the other few what are the other simple databases yeah okay so so there's your periodic table but you gotta go you you have to have databases where we built have built them out it's not anybody can just you know okay i'm gonna go and look at the the periodic table we've taken that table and then we've loaded it up with other articles and information about it so now it's a richer base of words relating to that periodic table and and that's where kind of the gold can be then what we've done is when we have an assignment let's say it's a it's a small car for nissan right all those names go into a database not called small cars but small things k and a processor for intel that's small that would go into little bit so now what's happening is that gives us some a real believer in the sync right the connecting of seemingly irrelevant things right that that that's about fundamental layer of creativity impossible is seemingly irrelevant to what they're doing but look how it performs in the marketplace right what what would have been the comfortable name for the impossible burger it would have been like when we came to the client they said yeah we wanna fit into whole foods so it would be something like natural farms right okay okay so so you don't know if you still come up with names yourself or your the king of the kingdom and you don't you you let the describes do that but how do you get in flow so like what do you do let's say it's a name day and you need to you need to get into a creative mindset flow what do you actually do you do anything in your routine it's more difficult to keep in the flow because of because of interruptions here right but what i really try to do is i first sit down with a pad and a and a pin and i just start kind of free associating thoughts about where to go with this you know i i sometimes might draw a treasure map with a grid and and put ideas down in there and you know we use the i mean everybody's addicted somehow to the web i'll i'll use i mean we use all the ai things claude c you know chad g you know all these things and i'll start asking questions i i don't only ask it for names but i'll i'll ask about different things relative in your case to fiber and i'll get stuff like that and then at a certain point this is really like a twenty minute kind of thing so so it's not you know very ar for me so i'll just start generating names and i'll write down other directions right and then i'll pursue that it might be okay i think this i think greek would be a good thing to look at i i think aviation and aircraft for things that are lighter right i would go and i would look at other words for light and then that would lead to sunshine and and and and soul and you know so things like that and then i just start crafting names so my my guess is that i'm just we've only talked to you for thirty minutes and i've already glean from you that hey you're probably just incredibly talented at this but you seem very process driven you seem like you acquired you seem like you were creative and then you've made this into a skill which implies it's somewhat teachable what when we're trying when sean and i are trying to we both have companies when we're trying to manage creative people to come up with these bits of brilliance whether it's just a name or it's anything else that's creative you seem really good at this because you you just seem like you know what you're doing what mistakes do you think that we are making with our team or a lot of our listeners are making with their employees on managing people when you're asking them to come up with something unique or creative or dangerous a little bit you know things like that it's a little bit of search for the holy grail of how how to how to manage creative people and and that's where your kind first mistake is or clients make this mistake is i try to lead everybody here and i really try to encourage people and you know the root word of encouragement is courage right and so it may be that you're not giving the people you're asking these things to do that you're not actually letting them just flow free i mean here when people develop a list and they give it to me right because i'm i'm still a creative director here and i still generate names every week they know that i'm not gonna look at that partially that i'm not gonna i'm not gonna evaluate it i'm gonna speculate with it right and now eventually we do have to evaluate thanks yeah at all it all we'd we're working for clients and we gotta do the right thing for them but you know go back and look at how you're communicating with your team and and and and see if you can't move it from leading versus managing and encouragement versus evaluating it seems like one important part of get having people have courage just to not get smack down on their first bad idea and you you talked about separating when you judge an idea versus when you're generating idea and put it doing both at the same time you know everything i've read about creativity tells you that based on this one of the most key things you could do i think disney had three different rooms in his office one to dream ideas want to plan out which ideas to do and then want to judge the the result at the end he you don't don't you don't judge when you're in the dreaming room right because that would sort of kill the creative a flow do you guys do something similar or do have any rules around when you judge and then also do you judge like how do we know if feathers a good name how are we gonna know is it just we just go on our gut or do we have some testing we do have testing i'll talk about that in a moment but going back to your issue with your your creators there's two things that we do and these are kind of magical phrases i mean just trust me on this i know you don't know me very well all 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 at an a name down you're getting people to think about okay well let me think about because humans love to solve problems we do that that's it's in our dna how we survive and so try those things things someone comes to you with an idea angle you know it's interesting idea that's the first thing i say okay it's interesting or i'll say i would not have thought that okay which is just being honest which is code for i as a smart person would not have thought of that but you know say it that one yeah the other day i was sean blake scott i bet this guy had a conference and he was making his argument about why ai we've peaked and i was like i understand your argument i'm not low iq so i don't agree with you but i i totally get you i totally get your argument so he was like what okay okay you don't do that you just say is you give them credit i i wouldn't have thought of that and then and then you sort of redirect towards a problem yeah we try to redirect and and then there's a certain point where you know you you do start just eliminate things it but you have to give there's a moment there's a period where things just live in our system right and then and and then we start comparing them down and our of course trade trademark pairs things down automatically it's very precise right in the in the when you're gonna switch gears like do you tell the team or you wait till tomorrow when you say okay now we're gonna narrow down or like how do you switch gears from the diver phase and maybe converging on an idea yeah we we in our process there that we're we're going through a us a cycle there there's an initial cycle where we're just trying to figure out are are these were these assignments right was did do we get anything out of fiber plus energy do we get anything out of this sports medicine thing that we had over here should we red but after we gone through really about two cycles which is a two two and a half week period because people are working not on not on this one project for two and a half weeks they they might have three or four things that they're working alright then it's time to really look and say where are we are we you know and of course we have we go back and we look now at the objectives we call the creative framework and there's a reason for that because we want more of a window for people to walk through and create as opposed to conform to these five things so we'll look at that creative framework and we'll say hey i think we're i think we're getting now let's ship this off to legal most of our products are are projects have to do with two or three or four or five markets that our cup clients wanna do you know global in a sense right and so we have linguist that work for us around the world and we're shipping those out we also have software that we built here that takes certain language principles and certain cognitive science principles and that's all been in there into software and now it's ai powered so that i can put a name in and it will come back and it will talk about processing fluency the famous thing as as a a cv cv constant vowel constant val that's how children learn language the ceiling email a child will pronounce like mama you got it that's it he'll never hear anything until about a little bit past the age of two that's like sonos what other around names that you you might have had what are the other like power letters or aren't there some letters that have like you know just like you know not all letters are created equal you know some if they're all the letters are in a bar and one letter walks in everything is the all shit yeah who's he's here k oh my god you know what what are the key letters 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 so you're you're you i don't know you mean may maybe you wanna work for us at some point but but so the those letters that are strong i mean this is in many ways just intuitive but think about in some some you you can call them explosives 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 so in our software now well i mean we used to do this hand a high coordination but now we just say i'm you know to our platform which is called predict we say okay for this project this name has to move fast sort these ten names out as to which ones faster right and it's looking at all of the research we've done on sound symbolism and it's going well d is fast p is fast z is really fast and it's looking for those letters it's not it's not commenting really on the semantics of the word or even on the project it's just saying okay this is faster than that and that's really helpful to us thanks podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic so i'm i'm a self taught copywriter which means i'm pretty good but i'm not world class but i have a process and i would like to explain my process to you and then maybe you can give me a process that you can that i can use at home to be a better neighbor so when i when i when i write i always up top i have general knowledge which means i'm reading books constantly and they're on any topic that i like and i just am i'm learning i'm generally learning then when i have a project i i get specific knowledge so i dive deep on that one thing so i can i can learn then i i get my draft out and my draft i know it's gonna be horrible and i just i say i don't care i'm just gonna like just get horrible ness out there then i do it's called the incubation period so i drop it and i go for a walk it could be a one hour walk or it could be a twenty four hours or i could come back to it in a week but some amount of period because that's like when those weird shower thoughts happen and i think there's a reason for those shower thoughts and then finally i'll do the edit and the edit is where brilliance comes up and in this process i i just stole i i i stole from david og where he said like i'm not even a good writer but i'm a world class editor is there process let's say i a new company i have a fiber company is there a process that i could do in five days that you could like bullet point out of like if you do this this this and this you'll be eighty percent of head ahead of where most people are you may not be as good as as me but you'll be pretty good okay yeah there's at least one thing i would add admit may maybe two and i'll go back to what i said earlier that i'm a real believer in sync right the you know looking for connections from things that are seemingly irrelevant so as you get to before you go to that final draft and if this was you know we'll stick with if this is helpful fiber for for you writing this article on fiber i would go to a bookstore and i would either get a book or it'd be easier to get a couple magazines that you never have read before right and i would spend thirty minutes on those two magazines just looking for connections that might be moved into your article and i guarantee you that at least thirty percent of the time by doing that you will find a new perspective or you'll put a new spin on that article that you're writing or a new insight that will be in the article because you've gone out and you've suspended he gotta suspend logic and evaluation and just speculate what what could these two magazines or what you know i've never read a book on thomas edison so what what what can he teach me about this particular project mh does that make sense yeah love that yeah do what what names did you present to clients that they turned down because they were fearful of that you think was a big miss every name behind me has been rejected by clients every i wanna so i see blackberry impossible sonos toro feb breeze sw they all return down at for first blackberry is interesting one is there a good blackberry story yes there there is so so when we named blackberry we so so we're in su you may or may not know this but during world war too su it was a ship building area i mean lots of people worked here and we were in 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 okay so these canadians come from waterloo canada and they're sitting down in a vault so so right away they're going like what scott we're in here in sa we're in california and then we present to them blackberry okay and what one of the clients i can't even remember his name just said he goes man this is this is something else you know i'm here in the vault i'm in sa there's no windows and you know i'm looking at blackberry and so that that was you know off the table right but but one of the things i said there in that conference room was hold on you know let's take it off the table for now but i'm gonna bring it back right because there's things in this that that are of real value and and that was it was just fort two for us our first wave of research on sound symbolism where we went out and and we did testing in in about six different languages six different countries by the way it wasn't inexpensive i said i can tell you that b is one of the most reliable sounds in the english alphabet a bit that's number one two black is going to be you know recognize across multiple languages and not all but some people will recognize berry right and a blackberry is kind of a delightful thing and i said there's one other quality here and they were they weren't you know their arms were crossed they were you were kinda listening but not i said your current competitors who are all big companies who would never have the courage to put blackberry on the device then the heart dropped and you could see people going okay maybe this guy knows something i don't know and then i had to i had to fly at waterloo canada a couple times just to for extra sessions and talked to them about this and then finally we'll they went with black bear which was the best decision that they ever made i mean talk talk about a name that just took off right can i give you can we play a little game where i give you the name of current tech companies and i want you to give me a one to ten score as the naming guy just your your gut gut reaction you love it love the name it's a ten you hate the name it's a one alright here's the rule one more rule no sevens no sevens sevens are for webs okay alright i'll i'll give you one rule i don't know anything about these companies so it's just gonna be sort of a based on it's arbitrary and create on my creative judgment yeah far away alright open ai okay that's that's a four okay good and drop it well it's better than open ai let me start there okay okay so we're making progress at a moment in time when that was out i i'm gonna give that an i'm gonna give that an eight i'm gonna give it an eight okay eight that's a that's a strong score i like it g has a four maybe a three okay very unpleasant very unpleasant agrees spacex okay that's that's a ten ten alright why is it why is that what you wanna give us a little quick why on that one totally expected they make space spaceships and rockets space but boom we you know now i know i i know something about the letter x right okay and and x always says innovation to people it does you put it in a car you put it on a a tech device whatever so right that's a tim thought it was so now we're gonna compare to you tell me which name you like better x dot com or the old name twitter yeah that's you know we i get that question a lot you know people the setup is always don't you think elon musk you know made a mistake and i always say i don't know what he was thinking so i can't say he's making a mistake but i'm gonna say that twitter was probably the better choice to stick with right how about our podcast my first million oh it's i think it's a good name and i'm not saying that because i'm i'm on your show it's just intriguing right it's a good title for for for something right sean named it thanks we hate it alright here we go hubspot yeah i'm gonna give it an eight because there's a literature there hubspot i it's it's mer yeah what are names you were jealous of that you didn't get you didn't get to name you saw it you're like well done perfect yeah well there's two really i dream works the film entertainment i think i think that's a beautiful name right yeah and i think the car lexus is is right just you know perfect structure that x in the middle there's that x again so yeah they did fabulous job yeah you know how so like in our internet world there's like this niche of person sean i have a bunch of these buddies where they will acquire domain names and sometimes joking but not always joking sometimes they actually do it they'll start a company just around a domain name do you have a list of names where you're like you know you should start a company just around this name you know we have and i had this guy named eric ryan on the podcast and he started ollie wait is it ollie band aids is that what was called sean ollie gum well band aids yeah well band aids and ollie gum and then he had like three more amazing companies method soap is one of them and he was like i'll start companies just around like what form of the bottle i can i can like get the soap bottle you know method bottles method soaps of famous bottles are there names where you think are company worthy well i i i'll tell you one one that we we had and we now have a small little you know venture at just an llc where we make investments with with with our our our clients and we had face change which i is a lovely i you know face change water to eyes ice to water those types of things in boom we we we use that yeah it is a cool name yeah you had this cool slide in one of your decks that i i i really liked which is that you don't just give the clients like a a list of names so yeah here's forty things on a spreadsheet picked a favorite you kinda present it in context you show it i don't know is this what you actually you showed it in the news headline or on a shirt or like in emotion on a bus somewhere and and that gives you the feel for it very differently is that right yeah we call that a proof of concept right so so we we look at this internally right we before we would show it to a client we would look at this you know two or three of us and we would say and there's just really one rule which is okay is believable alright because that's really the most important thing is in that first less than a second they have to some lean towards this i think i believe i think i believe this right i think microsoft could have a brand called azure for clouds i think there's something interesting and believable though so we're typically putting it in you know things like the wall street journal we'll take a famous actor or a tennis famous tennis player and in a kind of beautiful photograph black and white will say you know companies that run well run on blank and there's this you know so there's an into a sponsor if you will and then if we say yeah that's believable then we show up to clients and and there's a psychological reason for doing it you know most of the people we work with don't have a lot of practice in making creative decisions and so you have to make these things come alive right you have to give him an advantage to to to sort these things out i wanna ask you about this this was like the most brilliant slide because i'm pretty obsessed right now with at my company like getting people to be creative because a lot of times the founder is the creative person but that doesn't particularly scale past a certain size you need like empower others you have this really cool slide and you call it the comfort trap and it basically says like there's the tension zone this is where half the team hates what you're doing or hates the name the energy is high but it's very polarizing and then below that when things get incredibly familiar but have very little distinctive that's when things get invisible you're in the invisible zone there's a lot of consensus there's a lot of it's a safe choice and basically it's not remarkable at all this makes a lot of sense how do you a convince people just to go with it like i know you think this is a bad idea because it's dangerous or it's different but just go with it and how do you commit yourself maybe to like release things that are polarizing i will never forget i i learned a lot from working with andy grove on the pent team project and x and you know other things andy g being the former ceo ceo intel and he like wrote the book on like management yeah he did still use his stanford for gs and he wrote the book only the paranoia survive i was in a meeting with them now there's another thing it was not not promo but pro chip the engineers at intel they you know hey they're engineers and they wanna look what is this it's a professional chip it's got more powerless you know what's the deal and andy he gave pete had me present what we'd found and why pent worked and we'd done we've done a lot of research with consumers on this 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 and i i remember thinking man that guy is so smart and that's that's where i began this kind of the value of and we encourage people we say listen this is polarizing for your organization that's good you may not decide to use it but let's really think about what's going on in that word that's creating that kind of energy and what do you say to founder who kinda wakes up and realizes we don't love our name yep and but obviously switching is a dangerous thing it's a time consuming thing an expensive thing to read educate the market sometimes you're taking some personal risk doing it i mean do you have a framework for kind of the win to do it when to not do it in terms of changing your name well the simple answer is and you heard this from me earlier you know the advantage of the right name is its compounds right it's it it names give you cumulative advantage the longer is in the marketplace the more advantage you will have because it becomes familiar with people so that's why it's really important to get it right from the very beginning not not just you know have that friday afternoon session and and and do it but when people come to us and and we spend time making sure they should change their name like you know you know now if they're being sued okay it's a simple decision but we'll figure out the pluses and minuses says we don't wanna work on a project where they're just kinda of how i really wanna keep this name i wanna keep it and so at that point and here is this is really counterintuitive because the biggest the biggest comp 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 the benefits for you are a b and c people know that they're not losing that technology or the software they're using the the name is changing and they're gonna add stuff to it and so rather than struggle with something of bad names create friction right they just do and and so why put up with that friction when over a six month period or a nine month period you have to devote extra resources and if it particularly if it's a young company in a series a or b it's not it's not traumatic if you're coca cola that's a different story you know and then you really have to have a compelling reason to change it right if you were to run for president do you think that you could take your naming ability and come up with cool slogan and do you think that those slogan could meaningfully impact the outcome of an election yes without any he so what's can you give an example of of this done well or an example of a candidate that could have done it better had they tightened up some of their stuff well the the slogan that i think it's the best slogan and certainly in american politics is written and developed by hal rh here in san francisco it's mourning in america the reagan campaign i mean that in a world where there was a lot of negativity in the stock market and you know fuel cost us for his stuff he gave people not false real hoe it's morning in america tremendous commercial if if we wanted to go down the rabbit hole and learn the stuff what would be the couple of books you would point people to to to really start to master the the art of marketing and positioning and thinking differently you know what what are the best books that would get us goodness us going one david og on advertising is a simple book it's it's it's just good and i mean you can read it you know over well not i mean maybe a couple glasses of wine or something like that but there's a lot of great principle in there hem mean he truly was an advertising genius i love his second book confessions of an ad i think is equally is good have you read that one sean yeah okay he i have for sure yeah it's brilliant then i i'll switch and and i i would recommend it's simply because it's about creative curiosity and it's the book on leonardo da vinci written by the you know the famous guy that wrote the one on steve jobs yes yeah i think that's a great book and it's it it really is creativity takes a lot of persistence and ten you you have to keep going right and that's exactly what da davinci did and the third from a marketing standpoint i like reading the books by roger martin he wrote a book called new ways to think i am familiar with him because we've done so much work pro and gamble and he you know i don't know if he still is but he he was a very close consultant to ag g laugh who was you know one of their great presidents and he's he's written two or three books one of them with laugh which is called play plane to win and i i think those are are are really good they're very direct there's no bs s about them there there's no word salad throughout his books you know there's there's a lot of marketing books out there that it's just a bunch of for word salad spun different ways are you happy or angry at the rise of ai like is there any type of thing where you're like this is gonna put it us out of business or are you thinking this has helps us so much i'm happy about it for a couple reasons one it does i mean anybody now can generate you know two hundred three hundred names using chat or claude so it does move our competitive advantage to our ability to judge names to separate the right names from the good names and the okay names because we have a lot of data that we've been invested in and at software which is now you know we spent the last sixteen months integrating ai into that so and then that that so that's the first reason second reason is you know we we we have we have twelve projects in here now or thirteen six of them are ai driven you know and i mean we we are seeing the future and some of this future is really very very positive how much does it cost to work with you there's a range of things that it really depends most of our our projects are somewhere between you know a low of seventy five to a high of a about a hundred and fifty big corporate name will go to maybe two hundred and when you give the name you gave it to slip you said alright here you go how at it or are they like asking you for further slogan and things like that yeah so sometime with what we'll do then the what's called the nomenclature around it you know what what what is this how do you define it what's the positioning line we'll help them write a short story we'll do yeah a commonly called tracking research so you know we'll look at how it's going over the the next ninety days a hundred and twenty days small quantitative study we have a small research group here that does that so but basically it's it's you know we're we're giving them the name which is one of their most valuable things they will ever have and now i know i've convinced you of that you have you change your mind yeah man you've you've convinced me that i would love to be your your friend if you would if you would be okay with be friends with me and here yeah man i i i totally bought in i yeah i mean my premise was always that like a a bad name is no excuse to to to fail but yeah like you you've convinced me to take way more thought into this process well i'm gonna give you a guy i know you you want and but by the way hap pep happy to be your friend happy to talk more about your creative process and if we can make it better i i certainly will there's a little chart i'm gonna get our 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 right 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 let let's just stop there let's let's let's look at these approximate ideas they're not baked out they're not full they may be bad and mean if you give people permission to do that you will see that your creativity will spike wow like that wonderful david thank you for coming on you're very welcome spin my pleasure really it's really been a privilege to it to to be totally honest so hit ours too we we learned a lot today yeah man you're you're you're just wonderful thank you so much and we appreciate you alright that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back if you made it this far then you're gonna love what i'm about to tell you so there's this amazing entrepreneur james neil patel he's been on m mfa he's one of our favorite guests and he has a podcast called marketing school and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network marketing school brings you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years and years of being in the trenches they have over a hundred million downloads in over twenty five hundred episodes marketing school gives you bite size marketing wisdom that you can implement immediately whether you have a new website or you already have this huge established business you're gonna learn about the latest seo content marketing social media email marketing conversion optimization and general online marketing strategies that work today you can get marketing school wherever get your podcast