Radical Thinking

Finding a name

Every once in a while I'm asked to help people coming up with a name for their company or their product. Reason enough to try to systemize this excercise somewhat - so success can be replicated. I'd like to share some of my findings with you:

In potential a name should:

• achieve differentiation from your competitors
• reinforce a unique positioning platform
• create positive and lasting engagement with your audience
• be unforgettable
• propel itself through the world on its own, becoming a no-cost, self-sustaining PR vehicle
• provide a deep well of marketing and advertising images
• be the genesis of a brand that rises above the goods and services you provide

A typical process to get to a new name looks like this:

• Competitive Analysis
• Positioning
• Name/brand Development
• Trademark
• Creative/Testing

Competitive analysis
In this step you asses how your competitors are positioning themselves. What types of names are common among them? Are their names projecting a similar attitude? Do their similarities offer you a huge opportunity to stand out from the crowd? How does your business or product differ from the competition? How can a name help you define or redefine your brand? Can you change and own the conversation in your industry? Should you?

Quantifying the tone and strength of competitive company names or product names is an empowering foundation for any naming project. Creating such a document helps your naming team decide where they need to go with the positioning, branding and naming of your company or product. It also keeps the naming process focused on creating a name that is a powerful marketing asset, one that works overtime for your brand and against your competitors.

Positioning
This step is to help you refine and define your brand positioning. The more specific and nuanced your positioning is, the more effective the name will be.
While it's important to understand what competitors are doing in order to act in a distinctive and powerful way, it's also useful to learn from their mistakes and successes. For instance, the company that became Apple needed to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by the other computer companies at the time that had names like IBM, NEC, DEC and Integral Systems.

The new company needed to reverse the entrenched view of computers in order to get people to use them at home. They were looking for a name that was unlike the names of traditional computer companies, a name that also supported a brand positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different.

Name development
The first step in name development is deciding what you want your new name to do for your marketing, branding and advertising efforts. Making this decision allows you to narrow your name search to a certain category of name. There’s four major categories of names:

• Functional / Descriptive Names – Functional names are purely descriptive of what a company or product does.
• Invented Names – There are two kinds of invented, as in made-up, names: those that are built upon Greek and Latin roots, and those poetic constructions that are based on the rhythm and the experience of saying them.
• Experiential Names – Experiential names offer a direct connection to something real, to a part of direct human experience.
• Evocative Names – These names are designed to evoke the positioning of a company or product rather than the goods and services or the experience of those goods and services.

Trademark screening

During a naming project, all names need to be screened at a trademark database. Depending upon your needs, names are also screened by trademark attorneys for availability worldwide or in the select countries that are of most concern to you.

You might also want to consider a global linguistic check of names in as many languages as you deem necessary and detailed Name Protect trademark and common law searches.

Creative testing
These are tasks that are constantly performed throughout the process. However, near the end of every project you need to evaluate the leading name candidates that will best serve your purposes.

At this point, the job is to exhaustively and specifically flesh out the relative strengths of each name. Evaluate names with a range of taglines and contextual positioning support in the form of print ads or commercial treatments. This presentation is key to helping everyone involved understand how a given product or company name could work in your marketing and advertising campaigns. It lifts the naming process out of the realm of theory and breathes life into the names, a vital step in the decision-making process.

These same materials are designed to work seamlessly for any focus group testing or market research that you feel is necessary.

Last but not least - what does it actually cost if you want help to find a new name? I've seen prices ranging from a million Euro (it's true!!) to a small 10,000 Euro. The above is the d.i.y. version and it costs not a dime. If you want help with the creative process, you know where to find me ;-)

Cheers, Pat May

Six degrees to insights

Computer processing time decreases, so does the cost of storage devices. As a result, we've started to (re)produce and save vast amounts of data.

According to various studies (Wharton et.al.) more than 90% of this data we do not know what to use it for. We just 'save' it. Logic tells us that, in spite of search engines, it's increasingly difficult to find what we are looking for. OSX has a beautiful searchfunction helping me to find whatever junk I've dumped on my harddisk - without it I would be lost.

If you assess the quantity of information available and combine this with the time we spend searching for information we in the end give up finding, the concept of an information black hole comes to mind.

At the same time, I'm convinced that most of the answers on the questions you might have, are available. Probably unstructured, probably used in another context and most likely stored tacitly in the brain of some nerd you would not typically have in your buddy to buddy network. So how do you identify and access this information? Since the sixties people around the world have been fascinated by the six degrees of seperation model.

The principle is simple - we're all connected in some way and there's max six links between you and a possible relative. As interesting this might be for a thought experiment (it never really exceeded this level) - it would be far more interesting to see whether this model works for knowledge as well. I.e. what does it take for you to find the nerd running around with the answer to your problem?

In 2002 I introduced the concept of 'knowledge brokerage' where the idea is to professionalize (conceptualize and systemize) the art of finding the answers that are already out there. The concept has in 2004 resulted in a company where we tried (still do) to build a professional community around a theme where questions typically are raised (Internal communications). To make this work for real, the community of course needs to grow and needs to become diverse and global - which it is not today. But in the process, we have gathered a lot of interesting learnings and insights on what works and what not, and we have build a tool that can capture the concept of knowledge brokerage.

I am convinced that concepts the like are necessary in our knowledge society since the cost of not finding knowledge will increase exponentially with the development of countries like India and China (which will contribute to the enormous amount of available explicit data) and it will hurt our innovational power.

What we haven't succeeded in is to come up with a model for people to adapt the principle of knowledge brokerage and accept that finite searching along six degrees methodology offers a credible platform to act upon. Nor have we been able to find an economic model which enables the development of the concept as such. Obviously I'd be interested in your ideas and experiences on the above. Looking forward hearing from you.

Cheers,

Pat

Rudimentary modeling

”If you don't have the time to do things differently, you will never learn”

Innovation processes have evolved from being fairly rudimentary activities to sophisticated and complex methodologies of practice. Rothwell (1992) suggests five models of innovation, indicative of evolutionary stages in the innovation processes.

Linear sequential processes were dominant in the 1960s and early 1970s. Innovation in this era was predicated upon technology-push, and the market simply was used to absorb the output from technical advances.

The second stage came to fore in the 1970s and 1980s. This generation remained essentially linear in process but was driven by the needs of the market, in contrast to the technology-push of the earlier generation.

The pressure of the mid-1980s led firms to attempt to fully capitalise upon technical and market opportunity. This necessitated a much closer coupling of the drivers of the innovation process. Nevertheless, despite a greater level of coupling of the interface between R&D and marketing the process primarily remained sequential, with feedback loops.

Innovation requires a high degree of cross-functional integration and collaboration with external partners, such as suppliers as well as customers

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the evolution of a much more tightly knit process, in which the transition from a linear process to innovation as a complex process involving both parallel and sequential activities was made. This model of innovation represents one involving a high degree of cross-functional integration and collaboration with external partners, such as suppliers as well as customers.

Much of the development of this generation was based on lessons derived from Japanese best practices, particularly from the insights and understanding emanating from the concept of lean production. One of the most fascinating examples actually is being described in 'The knowledge creating company' by Nonaka and Takeuchi. The authors describe a case from the automotive industry (think it was Nissan) where a piece of paper with five key words from manegement proofed sufficient to assemble a new car matching the exact vision these exectives had.

The fifth generation process represents an integrated systems learning (ISL) model. This generation of innovation processes is driven by a much greater utilisation of electronic technology to create internal and external linkages. Generally this requires a much higher collaborative approach to innovation and involves strategies such as joint ventures and strategic alliances. Linkages such as between a supplier as a part of extended CAD system to co-develop new products, or between design agency and manufacturing become norms rather than anomalies.

A further attribute of this generation of the innovation process is its emphasis upon the learning capability of the innovation system. Therefore the ISL is not only cross-functional and multi-institutional but also involves an iterative learning methodology capable of dealing with a great level of complexity and chaos.