“Professionals employed to give you [company] names sometimes [present] a thousand concepts. It’s not simply a day of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good concepts. It’s … scratching beneath the floor,” Rob Meyerson, founder and principal of Heirloom, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.
The impartial model strategist was previously head of naming at Hewlett-Packard and director of verbal id at Interbrand.
Within the interview, he argues that constructing a model requires hanging a steadiness “between becoming in and standing out.”
Additional, he discusses the professionals and cons of making an authentic title for a monetary advisory versus utilizing the founder’s personal title.
His shoppers have ranged from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500 corporations, together with Activision, AT&T, Intel, Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co.
Primarily based within the San Francisco Bay Space, the place a lot of his expertise shoppers are situated, Meyerson additionally talks in regards to the good and unhealthy causes for renaming a agency and opines on Riskalyze altering its title to Nitrogen.
Writer of “Model Naming: The Full Information to Making a Title for Your Firm, Product or Service,” Meyerson has a brand new e-book due within the fourth quarter or early 2024: the sixth version of the Amazon bestseller, “Designing Model Id” (Wiley), co-authored with Alina Wheeler.
ThinkAdvisor lately interviewed Meyerson, who was talking by cellphone from Pacifica, California.
He declares that “branding is the promise the corporate makes [and] the nice will it has constructed through the years.”
Listed below are excerpts from our interview:
THINKADVISOR: Monetary advisors must differentiate themselves from each other. Why is it important to place nice effort into naming their firms?
ROB MEYERSON: Consider it as a very good funding. Constructing a robust model is necessary. And the title is a comparatively low-cost advertising and marketing expense with probably very excessive influence.
It should make adverts more practical and [can] final for the size of the corporate. So getting it proper upfront makes lots of sense.
Getting it mistaken might be very, very costly if it leads to your getting sued or having to rename or rebrand a number of years after launching.
Why would you get sued?
For those who use a reputation that’s similar with or too just like one other firm that’s offering comparable items and providers, they’ll ship you a stop and desist letter to cease utilizing that title.
So that you or your lawyer ought to do some vetting to ensure from a authorized standpoint that you simply’re ready to make use of or personal the title.
Ought to you will have a model technique in thoughts earlier than you select a reputation?
Sure. Ideally, it types the muse of the naming transient that ought to allow you to decide what forms of names are going to work — both names that sound like monetary advisories or names that sound fully completely different and can allow you to stand out.
The naming transient consists of the concepts you wish to convey via the title. A part of that’s opponents’ names and understanding how one can stand out.
It additionally has the forms of names that may get extra consideration or names that may mix in, which might make folks have hassle remembering them.
What’s essentially the most difficult a part of naming or renaming a agency?
Partly, it’s naming the agency! Professionals employed to give you names sometimes [present] a thousand concepts. So it’s not simply a day of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good concepts.
It’s days or even weeks of scratching beneath the floor for fascinating concepts.
A giant motive we do that’s due to the authorized constraints round branding. You wish to keep away from the numerous names which have already been utilized in completely different industries.
Please speak additional about developing with an authentic title for a monetary apply.
It means that you can categorical some inventive concepts. It offers you just a little extra flexibility, together with at level of exit.
You may say one thing about your positioning within the market, whether or not about ease of doing enterprise or innovation or a suggestion of scale [etc.].
The monetary providers trade is conservative. Ought to an advisory’s title be conservative, or are you able to be inventive and provides it a kicky title?
It’s a query that goes deeper than naming. Anytime you’re constructing a model, you’re attempting to strike a steadiness between becoming in and standing out.
How a lot you stand out is determined by the way you’re attempting to place your agency within the market.
Suppose you wish to stand out?
For those who’re attempting to do issues in a different way and need that to be clear to your prospects and prospects, you is usually a little much less conservative and give you a reputation that may allow you to be seen as cutting-edge and breaking the mould.
However if you happen to’re not doing these issues, if yours is simply, type of, the monetary providers agency that you simply’d anticipate, then you definately would most likely wish to keep on with a reputation that matches in just a little higher within the market.
Many practices use the proprietor’s title of their agency title, reminiscent of “Joe Smith Wealth Administration.” Your ideas?
Finally, it is determined by what the individual’s title is. Will it make you stand out and differentiate? If it’s a reputation that sounds just like [many] different folks’s names on the market, it’s not an amazing thought.
However it does assist to maintain the concentrate on you and your private model. So if you happen to’re a one-person operation attempting to construct your individual model, it might probably assist.
On this context, what are another concerns?
Is your individual title easy sufficient that individuals will have the ability to learn it, pronounce it, spell it? However is it distinctive sufficient? If it’s, say, “Joe Smith,” properly, there are [numerous] Joe Smiths on the market.
