From Brainstorm to Brand: A Client’s Journey

This week, NameStormers CEO Mike Carr and Director of Ops Ashley Elliott discuss the evolving role of AI in naming, highlighting a project journey for an outdoor lifestyle brand's bug repellent. While AI generated initial ideas, human creativity was crucial in refining names due to trademark concerns. The process involved presenting names with visual context, client feedback, and adjustments based on packaging and trademark needs. The key takeaway is that the best names market an experience, not just functionality. The hosts also recommend The Power of Instinct by Leslie Zane, emphasizing the importance of marketing higher-order benefits.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:40 Client Case Study: Naming a Bug Repellent
• 1:19 The Complexity of Naming in a Crowded Market
• 2:30 Importance of Strategy in the Naming Process
• 4:50 The Role of Human Creativity Alongside AI
• 8:34 Next Steps: Legal Screening and Deliverables

Transcript

Mike Carr (00:10):

Well welcome everybody back to the name Stormers podcast, which is all about naming in the AI age and there is so much going on with AI and technology, but we also always lean back into the basics and a lot of the experience and things that we've learned from many of our clients. Today we wanted to share with you a story that we think you're going to find interesting. So we'll get started. Ashley, who's the client or what's the space you want to talk about?

Ashley Elliott (00:40):

I think it's kind of cool sometimes to see the client journey as we go. This specific customer, the specific client was basically developing a product for an outdoor lifestyle brand. They were looking at this type of a name for a product that basically was this bug repellent. But as you know, the category is very complex. There's a lot of candles and sprays and lotions and misters and wristbands, and they even have stickers now to repel bugs. I don't know how they work, but apparently they do work and there's such a competitive environment that it's really hard to try to get a name. Even in this space,

Mike Carr (01:19):

This sort of leans into our discovery process that a lot of folks in this space tend to go very quickly to coming up with ideas and certainly if you use an AI agent or some of the AI tools that are now starting to surface, it's pretty darn easy to skip a lot of the in-depth detailed strategic thinking that is super important and sort of drives the style.

Ashley Elliott (01:49):

Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that the name drives the strategy, but really I feel like the strategy does impact what types of names and the tones and the themes that you're going to go down, and so really what we wanted to do was in the discovery process, figure out what makes their product different. How are you different than all the other ones in this competitive set is that you have better ingredients, that you have a different type of solution, that you have a specific price point even down to how is the product going to be used and where is it going to be found? You would think that they would think of these things ahead of time, but sometimes they don't and it's kind of a light bulb moment that comes off.

Mike Carr (02:23):

How did or how do we go about developing names and how do we use technology and AI in this process?

Ashley Elliott (02:30):

For me personally, I mean maybe it's just I'm an old soul. I start pen and paper, old school, let me just brain dump what I need to brain dump, but there is a time, and it's different for each namer, I feel like when you implement AI and how you implement it. I recently went to a luncheon and it was about AI and business and how to use it and I thought the analogy was great. It was that AI is like an intern. You can't just plug it in and say go. It has to be trained on how to do things a certain and the better you train an intern, the more efficient they'll become. Specifically in this category of insect repellent type stuff, they want a short real word name and just all of those are taken. There's just not, I mean, I went to a trademark screening webinar and they talked about how there are 85 million trademarks globally, and if you think about that, and they said that tripled in the last 10 years and it's only going to get with more of the globalization of our society, it's only going to get worse, and so trying to get AI to come up with really names that sound like something but aren't really something or trying to change letters here and there.

(03:34):

I mean it's still a craft I think in itself even when you get AI results. I don't know. I don't know about your AI process, Mike.

Mike Carr (03:39):

One of the challenges is really understanding how to best use it and where it falls short and that 85 million trademark data point is a great example. AI builds off the data, you feed it, it doesn't come up with new ideas or new names that haven't been out there in the past. Now it may in the future, the truly generative AI stuff that is being talked about now might have that capability, but we haven't seen that. So using AI to maybe get you headed in a particular direction that you hadn't originally thought of or helping you get some ideas that maybe your internal brainstorming session or your team didn't come up with is maybe a good starting point. It might come up with the diamond in the rough, but it still requires some wordsmithing and some good old fashioned human creativity to make that name really pop. When we made the first presentation, how or how do we facilitate the discussion? What do we give the clients sort of guide them down the right path?

Ashley Elliott (04:50):

We typically start with, and I feel like maybe it's the teacher in me like, okay, here's the ground rules. Here's where we are, this is how this discussion's going to go, but we start with basically saying, let's see how a name could work that gets the ball rolling down the right direction. We don't want to start, I mean, it's easy to start commiserating together about how a name might not work and so trying to first of all start with the positive. Also, if they have questions, feel free to ask questions, but we want to take the feedback off until the very end. At the end, after we present names, we have an anonymous poll and I think that's been a really good thing that we've started doing where you get everybody's kind of gut reactions and I think that's been kind of helpful, especially if you have a lot of people of different levels of seniority in the room, and so everybody feels a little bit like we're on a level playing field when we're voting.

(05:39):

I think also for this specific client that we were talking about, seeing the visual context of what it would look like, because oftentimes, especially if it's a product, they'll have some kind of mockup and if we try to take that and help make it look like what the name would be on context, they were like, oh, this name needs to be significantly shorter because it's not going to fit on the package the way we want it to, or we need to redesign how we're going to package it, and so just some things that you just don't think about on the front end of stuff.

Mike Carr (06:03):

Even the most brilliant names or the most obvious names won't shine and sparkle without that, right? But when you drop a name on the package, when you put the colors around it, when you come up with the catchphrase or the tagline, then you start to see the real potential the name has and how it's going to differentiate from what else is on the shelf and hopefully drive demand. Once we present the names, we have the poll where everyone can sort of vote on their names independently of everybody else, then what happens next?

Ashley Elliott (06:39):

We don't want to mishear or misinterpret their feedback, and I think sometimes we want to make sure that everybody's on the same page. What we do is we basically condense the feedback into feedback from the round as well as guidance for the next round because getting feedback is helpful in some ways, but if you just say you like a name and you don't give us any reason why you like it, it's not helpful for us to figure out different territories or do you like how it looks together? Do you like how it has logo potential? Do you like how it sounds? Do you like how many syllables? There's a lot of details that go into a name from a name R perspective and from an ideation perspective that is important to learn. So what we do then is we compile feedback, we get their okay on this feedback look correct to you, is this correct guidance?

(07:21):

And then we use that feedback to really go back to the drawing board and go through more ideas specifically for that next round of screening with this specific client. We ended up going another round, but they found that they wanted those shorter words and those shorter words were not super available, so we had to really lean into coined changes that leaned into something that they wanted to lean into. We ended up really having some conversation with the clients at the end because there's still, if you give a handful of names, they're kind of like deer in the headlights unless they've done this and they're a huge company and they know the routine, it's like, okay, now what I do with these, and so basically what we do is we ask them to, okay, let's take these top favorites. We suggest you screen them with your legal, you have your legal screen them and do that due diligence, that full screening, and then if you want to have any conversations, if you'd like us to talk to your legal about what we've found on our end, we're happy to do any of those. I think the nice little bow that's wrapped on the naming ebook gift I guess you could say would be the ebook where we basically take all the deliverables we've given them over the course of the project, and so there's a lot of emails that have been back and forth instead of having to find and sift through all of those, we compile it all together and we send it in one little nice little packaged bow.

Mike Carr (08:34):

How did we end up with on this one?

Ashley Elliott (08:38):

They liked the names.

Mike Carr (08:40):

TBD,

Ashley Elliott (08:41):

We don't know, but stay tuned. Once we know, we'll let you know.

Mike Carr (08:45):

We try to stay up to date on a lot of stuff and one of the books that came out recently that we found worth recommending we don't do this very often is by Leslie Zane and it's called The Power of Instinct, and one of the statements she makes in there I think is really insightful and worth remembering. What you sell is not the same thing as what you market, and so you think about bug spray, what you might be marketing. There is that event outside on your patio with friends and family after the football game and the barbecue's wonderful and everybody's having a good time and you just don't have to worry about bugs flying around and biting the kids or causing distractions and all that kind of stuff. What you're selling is an insecticide that you put on your skin or perhaps in the case of candles or other things that wafts around you. Sometimes, depending upon the environment and the strategy you want to name that leans more into the functional aspects what you actually are selling, but often the best names are more about what you're marketing that experience, that higher order benefit. Not always a right or wrong answer. Hope you guys have a great rest of your week and we'll be back in a couple of weeks with another podcast about naming in the AI age. Thank you all.

Ashley Elliott (10:14):

Awesome. Thanks. Bye.