How Brands Are Built (How Brands Are Built)

This is the first of several "mini episodes" of How Brands Are Built. Hopefully, you saw this mentioned on social media or in the newsletter: between now and the next season (TBA), I'll release a few short episodes on a range of topics—no consistent through-line, just some interesting, snack-sized branding content.

I reached out on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook asking for feedback on which mini episodes would be most interesting or useful. If you’re one of the many people who weighed in, thank you! And now that the results are in, I'm happy to share this first mini episode, all about careers in branding.

I've spent some time reviewing interviews from the past two seasons, looking at the advice guests gave, and grouping them into themes. I've boiled it down to six pieces of advice broken out across three categories:

Category 1: Where you work

1. Surround yourself with good people—it’s more important than getting to work on cool, big brands, especially when you’re just getting started. And it might mean starting out at a smaller agency, where you could have more exposure to clients and experienced coworkers.

Category 2: How you work

2. Master the basics, such as running an interview, presenting, and writing, as well as gaining a basic understanding of how business works.
3. Pick a lane; for example, research or analytics.
4. See the big picture—always think about the problem you’re trying to solve for the client. Know that saying, “To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”? Don’t be a hammer.

Category 3: Why you work

5. Get out there—experience new things
6. Enjoy what you do

This episode goes into more detail on each of the six pieces of advice, with clips, quotes, and insights from interviews with:

• Jeremy Miller of Sticky Branding
• Ken Pasternak of Two by Four
• Fabian Geyrhalter of FINIEN
• Caren Williams, independent brand consultant
• Dennis Hahn of Liquid Agency
• Ana Andjelic, strategy executive and doctor of sociology
• Alan Brew of BrandingBusiness
• Myra El-Bayoumi of Character
• Denise Lee Yohn, author of What Great Brands Do and Fusion
• Tim Riches of Principals
• Erminio Putignano of PUSH Collective
• Allen Adamson of Metaforce
• Gareth Kay of Chapter
• Adam Morgan of eatbigfish
• Laura Ries of Ries & Ries
• Marty Neumeier of Liquid Agency (and author of Brand Gap and Zag)
• David Aaker of Prophet (and author of Building Strong Brands and Brand Portfolio Strategy)

Nirm Shanbhag is the Chief Strategy Officer of Sid Lee USA, an international creative company. He’s also my old boss. Back in 2012, he was running the San Francisco office of Interbrand, and he hired me as Director of Verbal Identity. Before Interbrand, Nirm earned his MBA from London Business School and worked in advertising, at firms like Mullen and McCann. He also ran his own, independent agency, Notch Strategy, for about six years between his roles at Interbrand and Sid Lee.

Nirm and I have worked together quite a bit—first at Interbrand, then as independent consultants. We’ve been called in on brand architecture projects a few times, and Nirm is one of just a handful of people I consider an expert on the topic. Since I haven’t had too many (any) episodes focused on brand architecture, I was eager to get Nirm to share some of his insights into brand architecture—what it is, why it matters, and how it should be done. Throughout the conversation, Nirm came back time and again to the idea of keeping the consumer’s journey front and center, considering their motivations and approaches to decision-making.

We also talked about brand purpose, and whether brands are good or bad for society (heady stuff). At the end of the conversation, Nirm recommended two very different books: The Experience Economy (“a seminal work and … one that not a lot of people know about”) and A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking.

I’ve probably read [A Brief History of Time] four times in my life. The reason I think it’s worthwhile is because, yeah, it’s about physics, but at its heart it’s a book about perspective and recognizing that your perspective can change.”

– Nirm Shanbhag

To learn more about Nirm and Sid Lee, visit sidlee.com. I also recommend you check out some of Nirm’s blog posts on the Notch blog.

Today's guest is Alex Center, a designer and podcaster and founder of the award-winning design and branding studio, CENTER. From 2006 to 2017, Center worked for the Coca-Cola Company, helping build the brands Vitaminwater, Powerade, and Smartwater. Today, he and the team at CENTER are building the next generation of icon brands partnering with companies like United Sodas of America, Apple, HEYWEAR, Good Light, New Balance, SIMULATE, and Liquid Death.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Alex today is because his agency, CENTER, is a contributor to the new edition of Designing Brand Identity. CENTER pitched in on the pages about package design and differentiation, and also contributed a case study for KatKin, "a nutrition, education, and community-focused cat-care brand based in the UK that works with world-leading veterinarians and nutritionists to develop food that gives cats the nutrients they actually need." We talk about these cases, how Alex approaches branding and package design, and more on this episode of the podcast.

Today’s guest is Armin Vit, co-founder of UnderConsideration, a graphic design firm, and editor and writer for Brand New, the leading site for reviews of corporate and brand identity design work. Born and raised in Mexico City, Armin—along with his wife and partner, Bryony Gomez-Palacio—have created multiple other design blogs, co-authored books, and organized events like the annual Brand New Conference. I was excited to talk to Armin about design trends, blogging, and the pros and cons of being a professional critic.

The conversation started with some ancient history, going back to a blog called “Speak Up,” and FutureBrand’s 2003 redesign of Paul Rand’s UPS logo, which gave rise to Brand New.

I asked Armin how he selects which work to review on Brand New, and he said he has a "little grid" in his mind. The more people are likely to be familiar with the client, the more likely he is to write about the work. If the client is small and unknown, the work has to be groundbreaking. Much of the work he sees is "fine"—but work that's just fine is actually less interesting than work that's terrible.

I meet other designers [that] will joke that they are always wondering ... what I might say. They're always thinking about, 'Oh shit, I hope this doesn't make it on Brand New. Or if it does, I hope it goes fine.' It just increases that level of stress ... but in a positive way that I have to make sure that what I'm saying is valuable to as many people as possible and doesn't put down anyone just for the sake of it.

Armin Vit

Armin and I went on to talk about a design trend he's seen lately: a stampede of wordmarks featuring geometric sans fonts, like Airbnb and Google, and the backlash against them, epitomized by the Chobani logotype.

Next, we discussed how design and branding can make a positive impact on the world, his experience as a Mexican-American immigrant and how it influences his thinking as a designer—especially given some of the Trump administration's rhetoric and policies toward immigrants and Mexico in particular.

I asked Armin for an example of some work he's seen that's making a positive impact, and he mentioned IBM's "Be Equal" campaign, which repurposes a bee designed for IBM by Paul Rand, highlighting an equals sign in its stripes.

To close out, I asked for Armin's book recommendations (he likes Branding: In Five and a Half Steps, by Michael Johnson) and his advice for young designers and people in the branding industry: "Look at a lot of brand design ... It's really about building your palate for identity design, how colors work, how typefaces work. It's not about copying anything, but taking bits of pieces from different places, and how you will apply that to your own lens, to your clients, or to your work. It's consuming a lot of identity design and letting it simmer in your subconscious." But honestly, he says, that's not just a pitch for Brand New.

To learn more about Armin, visit UnderConsideration, from which you can find Brand New as well as design work by Armin and Bryony, books they've written, like Flaunt, and events like the Brand New Conference.

Today's guest is Jeremy Miller, author of the bestselling book, Sticky Branding, and founder of a strategic branding and business development consultancy with the same name: Sticky Branding.

One thing that makes Jeremy different from most strategists I've talked to is the way he got into this business: He was working for his family's company, a Toronto-based recruiting firm, when the business started to fail. He diagnosed the problem, recognized the need for a rebrand, and-long story short-he helped turn the company around, and it sold in 2013. In 2015, he published Sticky Branding, in which he shares what he learned from that experience as well as his decade-long study of other companies and how they grow recognizable, memorable brands.

Now Jeremy's got a new book, and it's about a topic near and dear to my heart: naming. When I first reached out to Jeremy, I didn't even know about the new book (or I might've had him on season one, which focused on naming).

Jeremy and I covered a lot of ground in our conversation: We talked about brand strategy, brand experience, Sticky Branding, and the new book, Brand New Name.

To learn more about Jeremy and both his books, visit stickybranding.com or Jeremy's author page on Amazon. Also check out the Sticky Branding Group on LinkedIn, which has over 50,000 members (!).

Today’s guest is Alina Wheeler, best known as the author of Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team, now in its fifth edition. One of my favorite memories of this book is seeing it on a desk when I arrived to my first day on the job at Labbrand, where I worked in Shanghai. I already knew the book, but seeing it in use, so far from home—that's when I really understood how influential of a book it is. In fact, it's been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, French, and other languages—and it's used by brand, marketing, and design teams, undergraduate and graduate students, and brand and business consultancies all over the world.

I wanted to get an idea of why Alina wrote the book and what she was doing beforehand (around 2003). Along with being an author, she's a designer with over 40 years of experience working with teams in the public and private sector. She’s led the development of integrated brand identity programs, sales and marketing strategies, and design and communications systems.

I was excited to have the opportunity to talk to Alina about her career, the book she’s created, and what the future holds for Designing Brand Identity. During the conversation, I learned that there will be a sixth edition but she won't be the author (!!!), how she gets case studies and quotes for the book, and the true identity of the mysterious Blake Deutsch. (It's hilarious—listen to find out.)

Toward the end of the conversation, I asked Alina whether there's anything she'd like to support and ask that others check out, and she talked about Simon Charwey, a brand identity designer and anthologist on indigenous African design systems and African Symbology. Simon's work includes the African Logo Design book, a compendium of 1,000 unique symbols inspired by indigenous African design systems, symbols, and culture. And off the air, Alina also mentioned Certified B Corporations, something else she’s passionate about and recommends everyone checks out.

I found the conversation both enlightening and inspiring, and I hope you do too. To learn more about Alina and Designing Brand Identity, visit designingbrandidentity.info. Of course, the book is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Alina’s also active on Twitter and Instagram.

When Adam Morgan wrote Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders in 1999, he introduced a new term to the marketing, advertising, and branding worlds: "challenger brand." Avis, with their "When you're only No. 2, you try harder" campaign from the 60s, is the most commonly cited example of this concept. But Adam, also the founder of a brand consultancy named eatbigfish, is quick to point out challenger brands need not be No. 2 in their category. Instead, he defines a challenger brand as "about mindset and attitude…Do you have business ambitions that are bigger than your conventional marketing resources and are you prepared to do something bold and ambitious to close the implications of that gap?" I was curious about 10 challenger brand "stances" Adam has proposed, such as The Irreverent Maverick, who uses "wit, humor, and sometimes even shock tactics to puncture the category complacency" or The Next Generation, who challenges "the appropriateness of the market leader for the new times we live in." I asked him whether his list of challenger stances ever changes (it does) and whether he considers the stances mutually exclusive (he doesn't). I also asked him how he uses the list of challenger stances with clients. Adam explained: "We use it as a shortcut to make [clients] understand that being a challenger is not about 'me versus another player.' It's about challenging something rather than somebody. What we tend to do is choose four of them, just as examples, and say, 'Let's look at each of these four lenses in turn and see what it would mean to think like this kind of challenger and that kind of challenger…[It] allows them to start to get a sense of the kind of challenger they feel most comfortable being and then sets the tone for the much more significant piece of work about how you bring that to life." In terms of process, Adam is a big fan of workshops because "you have to create a culture around a strategy at the same time as developing the strategy itself." In workshops, he likes to help clients articulate what they believe by first asking what they reject or hate in their category. He also recommends an exercise called the "pre-mortem," advocated by economist Daniel Kahneman. We wrapped up talking about one of Adam's favorite brands, BrewDog, and his advice for new strategists and brand consultants: Have an angle.

To learn more about Adam, visit eatbigfish.com and thechallengerproject.com. All his books are available for sale online:

• Eating the Big Fish
• The Pirate Inside
• Overthrow
• A Beautiful Constraint

Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. 

Episode sponsors

• Squadhelp. To begin a business name contest with hundreds of business naming experts, check out their services to get a fresh perspective on your company.
• Rev.com. Rev offers fast, reliable, and accurate audio transcriptions. Right now, Rev is offering listeners $10 off their first order. Follow this link for your $10-off coupon.

My guest on today's episode is Myra El-Bayoumi, Strategy Director at Character, a branding and design studio with offices in New York and San Francisco. Before Character, Myra held senior strategy positions at Landor, Siegel+Gale, and Interbrand (which is where I met her). Myra also holds an MBA from the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. Given Myra's experience, I wanted to get her perspective on the similarities and differences in brand strategy approach, philosophy, and deliverables among top-tier brand consulting firms. She has a lot of respect for her prior firms, but admits she's biased toward Character now that she's leading their strategy efforts. She says she's "better equipped to see the value of a place like Character because [she] grew up in the big shops," and that differences at Character include more flexibility, the ability to "blow up our process in service of solving" the client's problems, and speed. Myra describes the Character approach to brand strategy as arriving at answers to two key questions:

• Why did this brand exist, beyond to make money?
• Why should the world choose this brand?

The second question should be answered in a way that's relevant in today's culture but also "evergreen for the future." This link between the brand strategy and cultural trends is equally applicable for B2B brands, Myra says, citing the example of UberConference (a product of Dialpad, a Character client). "One of the examples of a B2B brand that we worked with, who I actually think does the brand experience thing pretty well is Dialpad. You might not know Dialpad, but you probably know UberConference, which is one of their products, and UberConference has that famous hold music. That's an example-and we didn't create that, so I won't take any credit for it-but we know those people now and we know how well that hold music-what it says, the sound of it, and the fact that it exists in the first place-represent the spirit and the DNA of who that company is." I asked Myra what components she thinks are necessary in a brand platform. She says purpose is critical, but that values and personality traits "lack precision, focus, clarity, and sharpness." We got into an interesting conversation about whether personality belongs within a brand strategy platform or should be removed, allowing design principles or voice principles to play a similar role, but "outside" of the brand platform. We wrapped up by talking about a brand Myra thinks is doing "pretty much everyhing right" (Billie) and a book she recommends (Mating in Captivity) even though "it has nothing to do with branding. It just has to do with humans." To learn more about Myra, visit the Character website.

Back in February of this year, I released the first Brand Names Report, an analysis of polling data on brand names from Brand New, the leading brand identity review site edited and written by Armin Vit.

From July 2020 to June 2023, visitors to Brand New cast a total of 22,769 votes across 131 brand names, rating each as Great, Fine, or Bad. These polls are the only easily available opinion data on brand names that I'm aware of. And while the data is far from perfect (I'll walk through some weaknesses on this episode), I wanted to see whether it could tell us anything useful about which brand names are preferred, and why.

To see the report as I walk through it page by page, visit How Brands Are Built on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@howbrandsarebuilt.

You can download the the Brand Names Report for free at https://howbrandsarebuilt.com/brandnamesreport/.

On June 11, 2020, Rob (creator and host of How Brands Are Built) joined Ilya Lobanov of Studeo on Instagram Live for a chat about brand strategy and naming. Ilya is an Australia-based designer and strategist who teaches multiple branding classes (available on his site and Skillshare).

Given Ilya's design background and Rob's naming experience, the conversation often covered similarities between design and naming. This special episode features the entire IG Live conversation (including live comments from viewers, which Ilya occasionally reads out loud). The episode is also available on IGTV and as a YouTube video.

If you like the interview, follow Ilya on Instagram (@wearestudeo), where he's also interviewed designers and branding experts like Michael Janda and Reagan (Frank) Mackrill of G'Day Frank.

Within the branding community, Marty Neumeier needs no introduction. But just for good measure, here’s a quick rundown:

- Director of Transformation for the Liquid Agency

- Author of The Brand Gap, hailed as one of the best 100 Business Books of All Time

- Also wrote Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands, and Brand A-Z

Marty and I kicked things off talking about his latest book Scramble: A Business Thriller, which launches today on Amazon. What makes Scramble different from Marty’s previous books is that it’s a fictional story. It tells the tale of a CEO and leadership team in peril, with five weeks to turn things around. The story becomes a vehicle for the two core themes of the book:

1. Agile strategy; and

2. Design thinking.

Marty and I talked about what inspired him to try out a different format and how the book explores the branding process in a realistic and deeper way than most traditional business books.

So, what is agile strategy? Marty uses five strategy Qs (questions) and five design-thinking Ps (principles) to break it down:

The five Qs of strategy

- What is our purpose?

- Who do we serve?

- Where should we compete?

- How will we win?

- How will we grow?

The five Ps of design thinking

- Problemizing

- Pinballing

- Probing

- Prototyping

- Proofing

The design thinking principles can be used to help answer some of the strategy questions in a way that forces you to go beyond conventional thinking.

I asked Marty about positioning and brand strategy frameworks., and he brought up a model he introduced in his previous book, The Brand Flip: the Brand Commitment Matrix. The Matrix features six boxes, each to be filled with the answer to one of six corresponding questions.

To learn more about Marty and his work visit his website, www.martyneumeier.com. I suggest signing up for his newsletter while you’re there.

Scramble is now available on Amazon as a paperback, audiobook, or ebook. Or, if you’re interested in a beautiful version with an embossed cover and French folds, visit 800ceoread.com. Even better, if you order two or more copies, you’ll receive a 40% discount!

Below, you’ll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors).

Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. 

Today’s episode is sponsored by Squadhelp. To begin a business name contest with hundreds of business naming experts, check out their services to get a fresh perspective on your company.

Today's guest is Rob Goodman. Rob specializes in content strategy and creative content production, with experience at companies like Google, Wix, and Webflow. He's delivered award-winning branded content, content strategies, and comprehensive content calendars for these companies and other clients, helping brands transform into publishers built for engaging today's audiences.

Rob also hosts his own podcast, Making Ways, about the intersection of art and music. He interviews bands, like Melvins and Nada Surf, and the visual artists they collaborate with to create album art, music videos, and more. It's as cool as it sounds—I highly recommend you check it out.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Rob is because he's also a contributor to the new edition of Designing Brand Identity, which I co-authored with the late Alina Wheeler. Rob pitched in on the pages about social media and a few others, but his biggest contribution was helping us update the content strategy spread, where you'll find the following quote from him: "The best content cuts through the noise, connects with customers, and drives the business—all while moving at the speed of culture."

On the episode, we talk about definitions of terms like content strategy, content planning, and content production. We dive into the different objectives of content strategy, and Rob shares some high-level process tips for creating great content. We also run through Jonah Berger's six "STEPPS" to viral content, and Rob shares his take on a few of them.

To learn more about Rob Goodman, visit robgoodman.com or find him on LinkedIn. You can listen to his Making Ways podcast at makingways.co. And if you're interested in the sixth edition of Designing Brand Identity, find it on Amazon or at dbibook.com.

Erminio Putignano is founding partner and managing director of PUSH, a brand strategy and design firm based in Melbourne, Australia. He's also an adjunct professor at the School of Economics, Finance, and Marketing at RMIT University. When I met Erminio, we were both working for FutureBrand, where he was managing director of Australian operations and I was strategy director for Southeast Asia. We met in Vietnam, where Erminio was giving a series of presentations to a client. I was immediately impressed by his ability to clearly and persuasively talk about brand strategy-what it is, how it works, and why it matters. I asked Erminio to walk through his process and deliverables from the moment a client asks for help with "brand positioning." After making the point that he'd first try to understand the client's underlying business problem (i.e., Why do they think brand positioning will help their business?), Erminio talked through a phased approach that includes exploring possibilities (through workshops, market research, etc.), defining a strategy while simultaneously validating through prototypes, and developing a final brand platform. Like Marty Neumeier and Gareth Kay, Erminio emphasized the importance of "helping the client...visualize what this brand could be" with prototypes such as visual/verbal identity elements, brand environments, or implications for culture. Erminio also outlined what he considers some of the essential "ingredients" of a brand platform:

• A clear articulation of the business problem(s)
• Who the brand is aiming for (could be demographic segmentation or a more conceptual target)
• "The shift." What is the brand trying to change or become?
• Brand essence (crystallization of the core idea of the brand in two or three words)
• Promise statement (elaborates on the essence)
• Pillars
• Proof points, including those we can activate now, those in the pipeline, and "what if," blue-sky ideas for future proof points
• Brand personality and/or cultural traits

I asked Erminio for an example of a good brand essence, and he walked through a detailed explanation of his firm's work for a Catholic university. PUSH developed a brand essence for the school-impact through empathy-which Erminio says works well because it is succinct, meaningful, and immediately sparks ideas for far-reaching implications. We rounded out the conversation talking about trends in brand strategy and some brands Erminio thinks are good at defining their core idea, staying true to it as they grow, and continually moving themselves forward: MUJI, IKEA, Patagonia, Nike, Airbnb, and Aesop, which started in Melbourne. I ended the conversation by asking Erminio his advice for newcomers to branding. While he loves the entrepreneurial spirit he sees in young professionals, and encourages them to set out on their own if they want to, he cautions against doing so too soon. "If you, as a young practitioner, have the chance to identify an agency...that can be a good school for you, where you can receive good mentorship, be guided...stick to it. Try to learn as much as you can, like a sponge." Visit the PUSH website to learn more about Erminio and the work his firm is doing. I also recommend Erminio's recent talk: "Managing brands in the Trump era: not for the faint-hearted."

Listen now:

Clive Chafer has been a namer for almost as long as naming has been a profession. In 1987, he started at the firm now known as Lexicon, where he helped develop a few names you definitely know, like PowerBook for Apple and Outback for Subaru. He went on to eventually become creative director at Master-McNeil in Berkeley, California, and he now runs his own firm: Namebrand. Clive also does freelance naming work.

Clive and I dove right into a conversation about his process for name generation, which led us to a discussion of "sound symbolism." I brought up the bouba/kiki effect (but couldn't remember what it was called) and Clive pointed out that, "whether it's consonants or vowels, you can build something just on sound symbolism that will have certain tonalities and associations, even if the brief is very abstract. We linguists are not left entirely adrift."

Clive talked about his "wonderful thesaurus" from the late 60's (so good luck getting a copy).

Clive Chafer's well-used Roget's Thesaurus

He listed a handful of other online ad offline tools* he uses while naming, e.g.:

• Wikipedia
• Foreign-language dictionaries (online)
• Forvo.com (to hear native speakers pronounce foreign words)
• OneAcross.com (a crossword dictionary, especially useful when length is a consideration)

Clive talked about keeping the creative juices flowing by stepping away from a project for a bit and exercising, going out with friends, or doing a DIY project. He listed a few pitfalls young namers (and more experienced ones) can fall victim to, and proposed some solutions. Lastly, Clive shared his favorite thing about being a namer: "It keeps the brain young."

If you want to learn more about Clive or get in touch with him, check out wemakenames.com. You should also check out the interview Clive did with Robert Siegel on NPR's All Things Considered. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built.

* To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers.

Rob: Clive, thank you so much for making time to speak with me. I'd love to just talk about process, and given how long you've been doing this, I figure if anyone has a process—I'm talking specifically about when you sit down to start generating ideas—where do you start?

Clive: I knew in advance you were going to ask me this, and I had to sit and think for a moment about whether or not there is a start point, or indeed a process. Yes, there is a starting point. And, having been a project manager as well as a creative, I know a little bit more now about how those two things work together, and the brief is incredibly important in how well the creative process develops and how well it goes. And it may well be proved to be—as you probably know—way off track after the first or second round of creative. Back to the drawing board. But in terms of the actual creative process, I start narrow and broaden out. So if I get a brief, whether it's couched in single-word naming directions or explained content, I will draw up a list of words and word parts that I think might be useful. Now how do I get to those? Well, partly from the words that are already given to me in the in the brief. And then from there, broaden out to closely associated ideas, concepts, and directions. And I think, yes, I definitely use the thesaurus, but it really depends on the nature of the project whether the thesaurus is going to be a useful tool or not.

Rob: Right.

Clive: If you get a name, this rarely happens, but if you get a brief that says, "This name needs to have no content whatsoever," because perhaps it's a name for a company and they don't want to be tied to any one activity.

Rob: Sure, a name like Avaya, or something ,  a coined...

Clive: Yeah, or Hulu or something like that. You know if you're going to do that then there's not a lot of point in going to the thesaurus. I mean, the truth is that most names have something about them that does relate back to what they do. You just mentioned Avaya. If you kind of pick that apart for sound, the idea of 'a way,' "via," is buried in there somewhere. And so the idea that a buyer is a communications company and that it's providing the means the "via" for communications. Okay. Yeah. You know, it's not too many steps away from the thesaurus.

Rob: Right.

Clive: So sometimes, even when it seems like they want to take a step away from real-world vocabulary, you still can start with that kind of mindset, if you like—that kind of relatively pedestrian research that says, "Let's put together as many words that word parts that are relevant to this as possible, and let's use those as the springboard," rather than trying to find something entirely meaningless out of nothing, out of whole cloth, if you like.

Rob: Yeah, I find that that's really hard to do. You end up sort of wandering aimlessly.

Clive: Well yes. Now this is where, going back to Lexicon, I met the chap who was their kind of linguistics expert. His name's Will Leben—lovely chap—who I've come to know as a friend as well, and the exquisite irony of Will Leben is that he is almost entirely deaf. He is a linguist who doesn't really hear language the same way that we do. Plus which, his specialism was what they call "sound symbolism" or what he called "sound symbolism." And he really developed the idea of sound symbolism and it's not a particularly deep science, but short, high sounds tend to suggest things that are smaller, and larger, longer, deeper sounds tend to suggest things that are bigger. So, "Pixi," has to be something small. You don't know what it is, necessarily, although obviously a pixie is a little creature. But sound symbolism is a somewhat disputed area of linguistics and it's very culturally confined, but it does work as a way to look at the tone—the tonality, if you like—of what you're trying to put across. These are things that work without meaning, without semantic meaning.

Rob: Right, and to some degree across cultures. I hear what you're saying, it certainly is culturally specific to a degree, but I think I've seen—and I'm not sure whether this would have come from Lexicon or if it's actually just from social psychology—but this diagram with two drawings, one of which is pointed and sharp looking, and the other is just a bunch of curves and swirls, and then there are two made-up name options underneath them, and one of them has hard stops in it like "t" and "k" and the other has, like you said, liquids, more vowels, more soft fricatives "s" and "f" and "v." And it's, I believe the finding is that across pretty much every culture, people choose the same way that the harder sounds, so to speak, go with the pointier made-up object and vice-versa.

Clive: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now what cultural associations they make with that can vary. But yeah, I mean by and large, that works and it works particularly well across all the romance languages. It's a little harder in the Germanic languages, but anyway, yes you're right. I mean whether it's consonants or vowels you can build something just on sound symbolism that will have certain tonalities and associations even if the brief is very abstract. We linguists are not left entirely adrift.

Rob: Well, if you'll bear with me getting into the weeds a little bit on process: Let's start with timing. Do you generally sit down for a certain number of hours with any given brief? Do you have any kind of consistent approach along those lines, just with regard to timing?

Clive: It's not entirely consistent but there is a pattern. When I first sit down with a brief, there very often quite quickly comes a point within an hour or so where I'm banging my head against a brick wall—where I've got through the obvious stuff, I've made the obvious connections and made the semantic and language word parts and phonemes, and so on, and listed them, and come up with some names based on them, and so on. And then I kind of go, "Ok, what's next?" I have found personally, that if I break off then, that isn't going to help. That's actually a barrier that I have to work through, so I generally don't want to start a project unless I've got about at least four hours clear in front of me.

Rob: Wow.

Clive: Because I find that a lot of really good stuff comes after that point where you're going, "Wow, this is a tough one. I don't know that I'm going to be able to come up with a lot of stuff for this." And then you just have to keep pushing back the borders of your own immediate responses to a brief. And that's the problem. I've been doing this for so long now—you know for 25 plus years—that there are tracks in my brain. And to get out of those ruts, you need to make associations that you haven't made before, or least if you have, it was a while ago and you can't read them. And I find that I need to work through that barrier rather than walking away at that point. Now, having said that, there then comes a point about—you know, whether it's 4 hours, or whatever in—where you've then had a little breakthrough and suddenly there's been this strangely rich period of productivity. And then I think, frankly, the brain just gets tired, and that's the point at which I take a break.

Rob: Ok.

Clive: And yeah, it helps if you can go away for 24 hours. There are other things you can do as well. Exercise is terrific at reframing the brain, at you know throwing the pieces up and letting them fall down in different places.

Rob: Do you find that when you are exercising—or just, you've gone away from being immediately focused on the project itself—do you find yourself still thinking about it, and that sometimes ideas will pop up and maybe you'll need to quickly find a way to jot them down before you forget? Or do you really feel like you push it out of your brain for a while?

Clive: Both. I find that I can definitely push it out of my brain for a while. I find that if I do go off and do something else, I'm not thinking about it. But ideas will come to me and it's clearly there in the subconscious, because something out of apparently nowhere will come and will relate back to what I'm working on—the project that I'm working on. And I'm not making any conscious effort and in fact, some of the best associative ideas—associated ideas—come from doing something completely different, but there's suddenly this connection with what you're doing or with an idea that you have to what you're working on. And your brain reminds you, or at least it does me, that this is an idea you might want to capture for what you're working on. But I never go to bed when I'm working on a project without a pad next to the bed. My partner, Christian, will tell you, I quite often turn out the light, five minutes later, I turn the light back on, because that moment between sleep and waking is absolutely the best time for my best ideas.

Rob: Do you use a pad otherwise, or is it just for that space specific context. I was gonna ask anyway, do you work in Microsoft Word or something like that as you're coming up with ideas, or do you tend to stick to pen and paper?

Clive: It used to be pen and paper. Partly that was because one of the great things about naming is you can do it anywhere, and I used to do it in the back of the tour bus when I was touring a theatrical production, and then it was definitely a pad, because laptops were way too big and expensive back in the nineties to do it any other way. But occasionally I'll do it with a pad if I'm travelling and getting a laptop out is a hassle, or whatever. I still make notes on pieces of paper. But generally, I work in Excel now. I used to work, for years I worked in Word, till I realized that actually, it's easier to manipulate data in Excel even if it's just text data.

Rob: And what about, you mentioned the thesaurus earlier. Do you do you favor any particular thesaurus, whether it's print or online?

Clive: I have a wonderful thesaurus...

Rob: That sounds like a book, then. Not a website?

Clive: Absolutely. I was awarded this. I was actually able to choose the modern languages reading prize at my secondary school—my high school—I won for reading a Russian poem, and was awarded Roget's Thesaurus in nineteen sixty...I can't remember, eight, or something like that, and it still has the sticker inside that says, "Modern Languages Reading Prize, Awarded to Clive Chafer."

Rob: Congratulations.

Clive: It's not because of that, although it's wonderfully battered now, because he used to go to Lexicon, it used to go to Master-McNeil, and so on. But it has words in it that I've never found in any other thesaurus. It's a treasury of the English language. I was given more recently I think a Bartlett's Thesaurus, which was given by a namer who said, "This is absolutely the best thesaurus I've ever found." And it's very good, and it has a lot more modern usages in it than my sixties tome, but it's nowhere near as comprehensive.

Rob: Right, it sounds like if you cross reference both, maybe you get the best of both worlds.

Clive: Absolutely, and I use both. I use them all the time, and I even use thesaurus.com although I pretty much hate it. But it's very convenient. So I do use it rather than lugging a book around with me. I find thesaurus.com is very poor at alternative meanings and concepts that are close to the words that you're looking up. There are some just outstanding omissions from thesaurus.com.

Rob: Are there any other books that you keep close at hand as you're doing naming aside from those two thesauruses?

Clive: Not for every project, no. I mean, clearly there are lots of books that I use, whether it's books on mythology or astronomy. You can get a lot of this online, as well, but I still like having...the way that you use a book is less linear than the way you use online resources.

Rob: Right.

Clive: And so, I like the fact that it takes me in different directions. If it's Bulfinch's Mythology, I end up looking at different things than I would if I had looked up Wikipedia for "Roman gods associated with agriculture" or something. Having those books around is very useful, but I would say that I probably use the thesaurus on 95% of projects that I work on, and then the Oxford dictionary and the other Bartlett's Roget's that I have, those I use pretty frequently as well. Beyond that, it's really specific to the individual project and brief.

Rob: What about websites other than dictionary.com, are there any that you just find yourself going back to or...you know, even if it's not on 95% of the projects, even if it's only 25%.

Clive: The things that I keep bookmarked are foreign language dictionaries and Forvo, which is a place you can go to to find the pronunciation of—by native speakers—of foreign words, which is kind of interesting.

Rob: Interesting, how's that spelled?

Clive: F-O-R-V-O dot com. There is one that I have been using in the last year or so. I think it's more of a crossword type dictionary. One of the parameters for a name is often length, and the thing about a crossword dictionary is that it will offer you solutions that are, you know, all the solutions that are five letters long. And that I find useful for projects where length is particularly important—if it's going to be on a name badge that has very little space, for instance. I think it may be OneAcross.com.

Rob: Oh. That makes sense, speaking of names.

Clive: What it lets you do, and this is what I was trying to think about earlier, is find every six-letter word of which the last three letters are "con," for instance. But at OneAcross you can put in three question marks, "C-O-N," and it will come back with everything in the dictionary.

Rob: Exactly. Yeah, this can be very helpful.

Clive: Yeah. And you can switch that around as well. You can make it "two blanks, "con," two blanks, or something like that. And it's surprising what it will come up with.

Rob: Is there anything that you've done to get past that inevitable writer's block at some point when you're on a naming project? Any tips or tricks for other namers to help? You mentioned working out; I think that's a great one.

Clive: Pretty much anything that takes you completely away from what you're doing is really what you need. I mean, going for a walk in the country, going for dinner with a friend. You'll get into conversation and your subconscious still has the brief in it, and you'll find that you'll find yourself bringing your pad out at the dinner table. "Excuse me a minute, can I just make a note, I just had an idea." And they all think it's very fun. "Oh, he's being creative again." So yeah. I mean it generally is not a social faux pas to do it. It opens up a whole new direction of conversation. As long as you walk away—physically walk away—and go off and do something else, whether it's a DIY project or whatever, it will help you to take a new perspective on what you're naming. The thing about exercise is that it's been scientifically proven to really help freshen up your brain.

Rob: I don't know how often you have the opportunity to work with newcomers to the field of naming, but I'd love to hear any tips that you have for them or any mistakes you see them consistently making that you think you could help them steer clear of.

Clive: I used to come into contact with them much more. It's funny, because back in the days of Lexicon, almost everybody did brainstorming sessions, which brought together—physically brought together—as many as a dozen people in a room. It did become obvious that a lot of people had...the way their brain worked meant that their creative output bore a very distinct resemblance across projects, even though those projects weren't necessarily related. So look at what you've put down as names over maybe five unrelated projects and look for patterns. And if you see them, be aware of them, so that you can break them.

Rob: That's interesting. So, I almost imagine printing out those lists and circling anything, or highlighting anything that you see across lists and recognizing your own biases.

Clive: Yes, exactly. Yeah, it is, it's biases. We all have ideas that we like and we are desperate to have them expressed in some form or another. And it's astonishing the lengths that we will go to to get them represented. And it's really good to be aware of them so that you can say, "Ok, I've got to be careful not to just fall into this pattern again," and find a way of breaking it, and find a way of expanding beyond it. And you can do that consciously. And if you don't do it, you'll probably find that unconsciously, you will continue to regurgitate the same stuff again and again.

Rob: It feels a little bit like when you're new to naming, it's more about just sort of what interesting words do you know? And you're very tempted to throw those words into the list, whether or not they make sense. And maybe the more mature you get, the more you really stick to what is the brief asking for, and start there, as opposed to just having hopefully too much of your own bias to put into it.

Clive: The other thing I would say—sort of advice to the young namer—is that you will be terribly disappointed, time and time again, by one, the names that get chosen, which will always be...they will always ignore the names that you think are the best.

Rob: That's so true.

Clive: And that's partly because a brief is a terribly inadequate way of communicating what a client actually wants. And it can be a very frustrating experience being a namer, because either you never find out what the client chose anyway, and you feel like you're just throwing this stuff into a black hole, or you find out afterwards that the whole directions—all the directions that you were working on—were not the direction they ended up going in. Or they abandoned the project, and it sounded wonderful, and you came up with all these great names. It's very easy to get dissuaded at that point and feel like a very small cog in a much larger wheel. And it's only by being a project manager as well as a creative that I have been able to understand how what I do fits into a bigger picture and not get frustrated about it.

Rob: Absolutely, and I remember as a junior namer, it's not only the client. It's also if you're junior and you're on a larger team, it's the rest of your team. I remember feeling like my boss didn't get it. You know, they didn't get the names that I'd come up with and they weren't choosing my best names to even present to the client.

Clive: The single biggest problem with naming, the single biggest thing that goes wrong from anybody's point of view, is that somebody in the company—somebody at the client—is not brought into the process early, even though they have veto power over the name. And very often, it's somebody down the line who is protecting their boss from getting involved because they don't want them to have to put time into this, and then they're saying, "No no no no, he's got much more important things to think about. We'll handle this." And then they come up with a name and they put it in front of this person who has not been involved, and he looks at it and goes, "No." And you know they, well, yeah. You know, the answer is no because you didn't ask him what the question was in the first place.

Rob: It's a classic problem and we've all seen it too many times.

Clive: It is the single-most frequent way that the wheels come off the project. You've got to involve them from the start. Ignore the fact that they have very busy schedules and that their calendar is all booked up. If you don't get them involved at the start, you are risking wasting everybody's time.

Rob: Well just the last question, just for fun: You've been doing this for so long, I'm curious what do you like about it? Do you have sort of a favorite thing about naming and name generation that makes it something that you want to keep doing?

Clive: Well I'm in my sixth decade now, and I am grateful for anything and everything that keeps my brain ticking over. It is really good to have something like this that makes me not just think conceptually around a problem but, as I said before, that gets me out of the ruts that my brain is in. When I come to a project, I try as hard as possible to make my brain do what is unfamiliar, because I really do think that that is part of what keeps my brain ticking over at a reasonably good level.

Rob: There you go, naming keeps you young.

Clive: Yeah. Keeps the brain young, certainly. Yeah.

Rob: Thanks again Clive.

Clive: You're welcome.

Rob: I'll talk to you soon.

Clive: Yep. Have a good day.

Rob: You too. Bye bye.

Clive: Thanks, bye.

Listen now:

Shannon DeJong is the CEO of House of Who, an art house and agency based in Oakland, California, whose clients include Google, among others. Outside of her naming expertise, Shannon is an artist, speaker, and podcast host: she hosts ArtistCEO, where she uses her story to talk about how business and art can work together. Shannon's also worked at Salt, an independent branding agency in San Francisco. She's worked at Logitech, and also HP, where she was global naming manager. 

Toward the end of my conversation with Shannon, she describes what she was like as a kid: "a very mercurial, precocious little thing...[that] would bounce around and just talk and talk and talk" [27:16] You can still hear that kid come through in the enthusiasm and energy she brings to this episode.

We kicked things off talking about her approach to name generation, in which Shannon starts out as a hummingbird, flitting from idea to idea. Later on, she turns into a drill, when she's more thorough and exhaustive. In the hummingbird phase, Shannon's quick to get out of her chair and go outside, sometimes driving for miles to find the right setting for creative inspiration.

Shannon lists some tools* she uses, such as:

• A dictionary (ideally the Oxford English Dictionary)
• OEDonline
• Dictionary.com ("not the best dictionary...[but] often it gives me that base of synonyms that I start from")
• Synonym.com
• Online Etymology Dictionary
• Google
• Google Images
• OneLook

We also talked about how to get past writer's block, for which Shannon shared the "Stupid Rule" and the "10-minute Rule" [15:24]. Lastly, Shannon gave her perspective on "brand truth" [21:20], and says the reason she loves being a namer is that "for just these few hours, I get to create an entire world" [26:26]. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built.

* To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers.

Rob: Shannon, thanks for taking the time to chat.

Shannon: My pleasure. Good to be here.

Rob: Let's zero in on name generation. So, you get a naming brief, you sit down to start generating names. Walk me through what you do next.

Shannon: Well, I am a bit of a hummingbird when it comes to creative. The very first thing I do is just read and absorb and listen, letting it kind of sink in, because sometimes it's the stuff that I wouldn't hear on first blush or the nuance of what the client is saying or not saying that ends up proving to be a really fruitful area. You know if someone's like, "Here's the brief; we want it to be about connectivity and speed," you're like, "All right, network, hive, bee, prism, nexus, fast, cheetah pounce, run, paw." Y'know, it's like, that's great. And, once that has run out, the place that's gonna be sweet, where it's going to be truly helpful to the client and where the client could not maybe have gone on their own, is to think about the subtlety of what they're asking for and the subtlety of what the right answer could be. Especially now with the world—everything, brands, naming, trademarks—being so cluttered, it's really about these little teeny slivers of space, whether it's creative space, strategic space, where there's going to be something truthful and effective and clear. So, I like to just do a lot of receptive work first, especially because naming is such a generative, productive act.

Rob: So, talk to me a little bit more about interrogating the brief. Is there anything you can point to that that works?

Shannon: Yeah, I mean, I guess broadly I just want to ask every question until I have no questions left and I'm sitting there on the call or looking at the brief going, "Ok, Ok, I guess there's nothing left to do but start naming." Like, if I have any question at all in my head, even if it's a playful one or a curious one, like, "Hey this maybe doesn't have anything to do with naming, but how did this company start?" And then I think, practically, I will interrogate a brief or dissect it by just making sure the strategy is watertight. You know, the number one factor for success in any naming project is the strategy. It's always about making sure that you're clear what the ask is and what this name is going to do for you. So, I will always look a brief through and through and just know that there are those different pieces that I know need to be covered. I have to be very clear on what the brand—the master brand or the product brand—is about, the positioning must be ultra-clear. One thing that I find really helpful is coming back to the simplicity of this particular exercise, which is just a small part of branding writ large. It's a very important part. It's an essential part. But just reminding everyone, hey this is a name. There's a lot of other things that the brand is going to be. What do you need the name to do?

Rob: Well let's talk about a hypothetical. I don't know how often this really happens, but let's pretend that you've been given a perfect brief. Where do you start, any process or steps that you follow consistently?

Shannon: Oh yeah. Now the fun begins. I think my number one thing that I always do—so I mentioned I'm a bit of a hummingbird and then other times I act like a drill...

Rob: And explain what you mean by those two metaphors just so that I'm clear.

Shannon: Yeah, sure. As a hummingbird I like to give myself permission to...so creatively, I think I need to be able to flit from idea to idea. So, when I first sit down, I really like to give myself a ton of freedom, even though later on I will be more thorough and more exacting and I will make sure that I've covered my bases, and what am I missing, and where can I mine? And that's when the drilling comes in. The initial phase for me is always one of freedom and following the thread wherever it goes. It's organic, it's potentially disorganized. It's kind of like a little kid with a bunch of sugar who just wants to like, run around like, "Oh ooh, what's this over here? Oh, look at that! Oh, look it's a kitten. Oh, Mommy, can I have another..." You know, it's like I let myself do that because I know that that's where a lot of the creative wisdom is. And at the very least, even if that initial flush of naming doesn't produce names that are going to be viable, because like I said, the way the brain works you're going to have to be recycling and going over lots of synonyms and things that maybe aren't the quote unquote "diamond in the rough," that's where you get the volume. That's where you get the quantity, at least for me. I should say, I get the quantity and the volume and the breadth and inspiration and the curiosity, so I can cover a lot of ground if I just let my mind flit from beautiful little idea to beautiful little idea.

Rob: And just to be clear, how are you, in practical terms, how are you working at this point? Are you often on a whiteboard or working with Post-It Notes or are you in software of some sort?

Shannon: Great question. I would say that, well, first of all, I would say even my method is a little hummingbird-like in I also follow wherever the impulse is in terms of how to work. So, in the first several hours I really do just follow however I want to work. I start totally on impulse. It's like, have I been sitting at my computer all day and I'm just now getting to it? Well, opening up an Excel spreadsheet, while it can be very helpful later on with organizing, right now is going to just kill my creative mojo. So, why don't I grab a pen and paper and my running shoes and walk outside and go for a walk? I mean, I have even driven before an hour away to a beautiful setting. Especially when it's a particular kind of project and I need you know more tranquil, kind of open, expansive ideas and given myself physical space and physical beauty in order to start unleashing. Other times, I work a lot in just good old Word or good old Google Docs or a text doc. Increasingly now, I have, when I have a limited amount of time, I actually will start in Excel because anytime you take your pen and paper and you go out into nature, it takes longer. But I would say that I love starting with pen and paper. That's always a great way to start because you know that no matter what you're going to be ending up back at a machine.

Rob: And I'm just curious, when you when you do wander off into nature with a pad, you don't you don't have Wi-Fi access when you're doing this?

Shannon: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. That's part of the genius, I think, is that, to totally disconnect. I'd like to give myself a chance to see what I can do without any influence. I guess I should say without any digital influence. Because I think once I start getting into using—and there are a lot of great tools out there and they're absolutely essential, you know dictionaries and thesauruses and I think there's something called OneLook, and Wordnik, and Wikipedia, not even for words but just for ideas and how are certain concepts related to other concepts. These are all great. And for me that's more like middle process or it or toward end of the generation process when I'm starting to slow down a little bit from my raw creative fire. I think the best stuff has come from when I'm actually just sitting back a bit. And sometimes I physically do this. I sit back from the computer, I sit back from my desk, maybe I don't even have a pen and paper and I just... It's kind of that like shower moment, that lightbulb moment of, "Hold on, hold on, let me take a break from trying to generate 20 words a second and just go back to that initial listening and thinking. It's a very important step because sometimes I have had that moment and it's like, "Oh, that's the name." Like you just had this moment you're like, "That's it. Yes!" And you know that it's probably not it.

Rob: Or it's not available.

Shannon: Or it's not available. Yeah, usually that's the next thought. I think I need to have a feeling of, oh, I've had several moments like that, where I just go, "Yes, oh yes!".

Rob: You've brought up timing. How do naming projects go for you from a timing standpoint and what's the ideal? Is it to have a huge block of time in front of you or do you like to work in little sprints?

Shannon: Well, the ideal timeline is one that is two weeks for creative work where I have the opportunity to try out a lot of different modes. No matter what, at some point, I need to have a long block of time and that long block of time is always relative to the timeline and size of the project. So, if it's a quick little name list that I'm helping another agency with a long block of time might be two-to-four hours. I mean, that might feel like a good amount of time to sink in. I do feel like the minimum amount of time total is four hours. Like, I feel like it's after the four hours is when you can really get to some good stuff. And then you do hit a wall and you're like, "Ok, I need to refresh."

Rob: Let's talk about tools. You mentioned a few but I'd love to just get a list from you, if you have it off the top of your head, of online or offline tools that you like to have handy for every project or maybe there are some that you find you only use once in a blue moon.

Shannon: Sure, yeah. I have to admit, while I'm always on the search for new tools, I kind of I kind of feel a little boring or old school because as of yet I haven't found a tool that's better than my brain. But, with that said, I definitely use various dictionaries. So, I might have a dictionary here, whether that's a Webster's, ideally you have a full, original OED and you can open up and look through etymologies, but I do not have one of those. I do use, I think it's called OEDonline or Etymology.com [Online Etymology Dictionary, I believe. OneLook. Just, really Dictionary.com. It's not the best dictionary and often weeding through all of the ads and crossword puzzles and whatever I find very distracting, but it works as a tool because often it gives me that base of synonyms that I start from. Like ok, here is "fast," and dictionary.com or synonym.com, they're going to give me a definition and like top-10 synonyms. And then those synonyms, I, using my brain, or my other favorite naming tool, which is just Google, then get inspired to take that synonym and try and find what I call related or extended conceptual synonyms to go from. I also just use Google and the way I use it is I will start, embarrassingly, by just taking words in the brief or in the pathways and just typing them in. Like hey, let's just start. What does the Google brain and what does the world and what does the internet...how do they relate to this word or this pathway that I need to explore? Then I go into, I use a lot just Images, Google Images, and I'll type in various words, whether it's from the brief or even words that I have found that capture some kind of essence, even if it's not the right word. I'll write that into Google Images and then I'll get a visual palette or visual collage of more things that stimulate more thought.

Rob: That's a great idea. I love the Google Images idea just to break yourself out of...I mean frankly, you're looking at words a lot when you're doing gaming so it's even just a nice break for the eyes. Is there anything particular that you've found works well for writer's block, so to speak?

Shannon: I want to think carefully before I say this because I might jinx myself. I was going to say I don't experience writer's block very often. Maybe more than writer's block, I just get constricted and rigid and I get too narrow in my thinking and it just gets dry. So, I think that's probably my version of it. It's not a full block. But it just sort of is there's no juice anymore. And what I always do then is the Stupid Rule and the 10-minute Rule. The Stupid Rule—I just made these up right now, can you tell I'm a namer? The Stupid Rule is that I have to write down things that are stupid. Like alright, alright, now I want the next ten names, fifty names, to be totally stupid. Like you would never name this that. You would never even show it to the client. You'd be embarrassed to do it, you know?

Rob: And the Stupid Rule—I love the name—when you do that...so, I guess it's sometimes it tells you, "Ok, I'm done, because I did this and I feel like I've gotten everything out of my system," essentially? And then other times does it, it spurs another wave?

Shannon: Well, I don't think that just feeling like I'm out of ideas is the right feeling for telling me that it's time to stop. Usually that tells me that it's coming up on that first wave or a dry spot and I have to push through it. The 10-minute Rule—to finish up that thought—is just do anything for 10 minutes. If you want to stop after that, ok, then maybe it's not the right time to do it, but most likely you'll get into flow and you'll be on the treadmill and it will just, fwip! And off you go. I think it's absolutely that way with creativity. I mean anything, right, it's "I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, I don't do it. Ok, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes—oh, this is fun."

Rob: So, in that example what are you doing? What are you doing for 10 minutes? I just want to understand, are you doing something naming related for 10 minutes?

Shannon: That's it. And maybe you only get 10 minutes of naming right now and then do something else and come back to it. If I'm really feeling blocked or I don't like it I'll just say, "Ok, 10 more minutes. Just do 10 more minutes." You know, I've even done that to myself three times in a row, like "Uggh, I don't want to." "Ok. Hey, hey, how about another 10 minutes?

Rob: Making deals with yourself.

Shannon: Exactly.

Rob: Are there any specific name ideas or naming tropes you know like the "-ly" on the end of all these startup names—is there anything in particular that you're sick of seeing or that you've identified as a trend that you try to steer clear of?

Shannon: Well, it's a trend that isn't my favorite but I'm not yet able to steer clear of it because it's so pervasive, but I must say the verbable name is lovely in theory and there's nothing overtly obnoxious about it. But here's what I don't like: I don't like it because people ask for it just because they think that that's going to be a successful name, and I hate to be a broken record but I want to go back to this idea of, "Yeah, but does it make sense strategically?" And I have gotten a lot of that like, "We want it to be one syllable, real word, ideally verbable," which is nice but there's going to be tradeoffs.

Rob: To what extent do you think verbability is a real thing, though? Because "Google" is a noun, right? I mean, if anything.

Shannon: You know what, Rob, thank you! So is Apple. So is...Uber is an adjective. This is what's so funny, is that I look around I'm like, "How many names are actually..." and people are like, "You know, like Twitter." I'm like, Twitter is not...you don't "Twitter" something. You Tweet it. And I don't know, honestly, if that came from Twitter, the company, the brand itself. But I don't think so. I don't even think that they created their own language. That was done by people. That's the thing, people will do that. This is the nature of language. This is my background: linguistics. I started as a linguist and I love language and the beauty of language. This is why I'm not a prescriptive but a descriptive linguist, which just means languages is alive. Language is organic. And it will extend and bend and twist itself as memes, as trends, as tropes from person to person in this way that is beyond any one individual or brand.

Rob: I absolutely agree with you. I think what I hear you saying is that it's not necessarily our decision as the people behind the brand as to whether or not people end up using it as a verb. That's their decision, and one that they'll likely make subconsciously. But then, on top of that, I also think that brands need to be really careful about trying to impose that type of prescriptive language on to consumers or onto their customers because it—aside from it potentially not working—it could also just really backfire in terms of making them look silly. You talk about "brand truth" a lot. I think I saw it on the House of Who website and I believe you give talks about it as well. Can you just explain what brand truth is and how it relates to naming?

Shannon: Brand truth is the very simple idea that one, you don't have to be fake in order to succeed. And two, your truth is going to be your most valuable asset. I think that the branding industry and the marketing industry is often known for putting layers on and making things shiny and beautiful and glossy, and there is a time and a place for that. I'm most interested in peeling the layers back and getting to the heart of what is essential. And if you are a business and a brand, there's something truthful about your product, your offering, your culture, and the essence of who you are, and that is going to be your sweet spot. I think that that actually ends up being—especially now with the way the world is going—people want realness. People want to be able to connect with a brand and its truth, in all of its glory, wants it to be whole. And I think in terms of naming it drills down the value of essential information. You get one word, one name, to communicate who you are and hopefully you have a bunch of other brand assets that go along with it. But sometimes you don't, and it's one word that may appear in print, it may be verbal, it may be someone just passing on the street. And I think, in that one name, there should be something really essential about who you are and it should be real. Also, just in terms of the process of naming, we're talking very tactical, you don't have to go to all these fancy bells and whistles and naming trends and what's going to be cool in five years and what's most searchable. All of those things are important to consider because they're realities. But I think in the process of naming, what's most important is to think of something really clear and clean and concise. And I would call that "truthful." We recently worked on Google Home Mini, and that's not a sexy name, necessarily. It's not like, "Oh god, that's so fun, and you just say it and it's like an inside joke, and it's cool, and it's hip." But it's pretty simple and it just makes sense. And it's at the heart of what the thing is. It's a small, cute version of Google Home, and there you have it. So, I kind of feel like people often try too hard when they don't have to. There doesn't have to be anxiety, you don't have to worry like, "Oh god, we have to be super creative, or edgy, or unique, or differentiated." Yeah, those things, sure. That's where your strategy comes in. But when it gets down to naming, I say start with the truth.

Rob: Yeah, I often find myself reminding clients that no one will ever think as hard about this name as we're about to do. And try to relieve a little of that pressure and temptation to overthink it.

Shannon: I often say to people my secret as a namer is that naming is the most important thing you will ever do for your business, and...it doesn't matter. At some point, get as close as you can and do the best you can, but as long as you—again—as long as you're on strategy and you're communicating what you need to communicate, you're fine.

Rob: Well I love that Google Home Mini name. I think it's a good example of a name that's great but you don't realize it is. And the reason for that is, or the way to realize how great it is, is to think of what they could have called it. To think of all the things they might have done and some of the atrocities that other companies have waged upon us with more fanciful attempts to convey what is ultimately a pretty simple message.

Shannon: I think when I was younger and new at naming, for a long while I was like, "Oh, I want to get that that perfect name. I want to have on my resume...like I want to have named Twitter!" I want to get something that people hear and they're like, "Oh my god, that's such an amazing name!" and I'd be like, "Yeah, thanks." And at this point I really let that go and I realize that it's far more satisfying to just get a name that's right and just makes sense. And if I never get associated with it, great. And if it does its job, great.

Rob: Last question: What is your favorite thing about naming or generating names?

Shannon: Oh gosh, I think that it's a little moment to play God. It's like, for just these few hours I get to create an entire world. I mean maybe it's like—I don't have children, and so maybe it's getting to name all of these potential little babies that will grow up and go out into the world, and there's sort of like a maternal pride about giving my creative oomph to something that will live on past me. I think that's part of it. And I think the other part is it satisfies this, like I said, the hummingbird in me. When I was a kid I was a very mercurial, precocious little thing. I was super teeny with shock-white hair and I would bounce around and just talk and talk and talk, and I think at some point, people were just like, "Ok, thank you for the 15 cartwheels and the story about rainbows. But it's time to be quiet now." And I think that energy, that childlike enthusiasm for language and ideas, gets to play when I'm naming and then it gets to saddle up next to, and ride along with, the other part of my brain which then wants to make it all make sense and put it all into a structure and find a place for it in the world.

Rob: Shannon, thanks so much for making the time to chat.

Shannon: Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

How Brands Are Built is a blog and podcast where branding professionals get into the details of what they do—and more importantly, how they do it.

I'm your host, Rob Meyerson. In each episode, I'll interview other strategists, designers, writers, researchers—anyone who’s part of the world of branding. In this first season, I’ll mostly be talking to namers. I’ve been lucky enough to meet and work with some of the best out there, and I’m excited to hear what they have to say about the creative process and their experiences in the niche world of naming.

My plan is to keep the conversations practical and tactical. There are already plenty of great blogs and podcasts out there about branding, but most of them focus on news, opinion, or high-level theory. If those other resources give you a 30,000-foot view of branding, How Brands Are Built is where the rubber meets the road—conversations, articles, tools, and tips to help you understand how brands are really built.

So, I hope you’ll subscribe on iTunes. And leave a rating and review—I’d love to hear what you think.

Come back to this site, HowBrandsAreBuilt.com, for show notes and articles—I’ve got a bunch of branding experts contributing content (it's not just me!). I hope you find it useful.

Thanks for tuning in. I'll be back soon with the first episode of How Brands Are Built.

Listen now:

Anthony Shore is one of the most experienced namers out there. He has over 25 years of experience in naming and has introduced more than 200 product and company names to the world. Some of the names he’s created include Lytro, Yum! Brands, Fitbit Ionic, Qualcomm Snapdragon, and Photoshop Lightroom. In 2015, he was featured in a New York Times Magazine article titled “The Weird Science of Naming New Products,” which tells the story of Jaunt, a VR company he named. And a BBC News article called him "one of the world’s most sought after people when it comes to naming new businesses and products." Anthony has led naming at Landor Associates. He worked at the naming firm, Lexicon, and now he runs his own agency, Operative Words, which you can find at operativewords.com.

I had a great time talking to Anthony. He shares a bunch of knowledge, some great tips and examples, and we even got to nerd out a bit talking about recurrent neural networks. Anthony's using artificial intelligence to supplement his own name generation; it's fascinating to think about how tools like these might be used in the future.

Anthony also gave a great overview of his naming process and provided a list of tools and resources he uses when generating names. Some namers I've talked to seem to prefer analog resources (i.e., books). In contrast, Anthony almost exclusively uses software and online tools*, including the following:

• Wordnik ("a great resource for lists of words")
• OneLook
• Rhymezone
• Sketch Engine (a corpus linguistics database)
• TextWrangler (a plain ASCII text editor)
• BBEdit
• Microsoft Excel

Anthony and I rounded out the conversation talking some of his least favorite naming trends, as well as what he likes most about being a namer.

I highly recommend you check out Anthony’s website and blog at operativewords.com, where he has a bunch of amazing content that goes into way more detail on some of the topics we discussed. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built.

* To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers.

Rob: Anthony, thank you for joining me.

Anthony: Thanks so much for having me, Rob.

Rob: One of the first things I wanted to ask you about is something I don’t talk to namers about that much. It’s artificial intelligence. So, I saw that you’ve written and talked about the potential for using neural networks and brand naming. Can you tell me a little bit about what made you start down that path and then maybe how it works today?

Anthony: Sure. I love talking about this. Artificial intelligence, and really using computers in general as an adjunct to what I do, has always been near and dear to my heart. Way back in college, I created a self-defined AI major. And so, when recurrent neural networks started becoming available and accessible over the last few years, I took an interest. And a woman named Janelle Shane, who is a nanoscientist and a neural network hobbyist, started publishing name generation by neural network. And this really caught my interest. And she was doing it just as a hobby and for fun, but I could see that neural networks offered a great deal of promise. And so, I engaged with her and asked her to teach me what she knew, so that I could also use neural networks to help me create brand names, in addition to using the other tools that I use, like my brain and other bits of software and resources.

Rob: And is there...how technical is it now in your use of it? Is it something that anyone could do or does it really require a lot of programming knowledge?

Anthony: Well, right now I’d say it’s not for the faint of heart. The only interface that really helpful is through command line, really using a terminal. So it’s all ASCII. It’s done in Linux and there’s various and sundry languages that have to be brought into play like Python and Lua and Torche.

Rob: So you’ve got to know what you’re doing a little bit.

Anthony: Yeah yeah. It’s not something that’s just a web interface that you plug ideas in and it’s going to work like a charm. Now, that is right now and it’s changing constantly. I mean, even in just the few months, six months that I’ve been doing this, I’ve been seeing more and more neural networks front ends on the web pop up. But their results aren’t very good at all. But it’s clear that that’s going to change.

Rob: And I saw that Janelle has named a beer I think using her neural network it’s called The Fine Stranger which is a cool name for an indie beer. Have you had any success using it yet for some of your naming projects?

Anthony: I’ll say this: that neural networks have, in my use of them, have illustrated to me some really interesting words and ideas, and clients are interested in AI and neural networks as part of the creative process. But there haven’t been any names yet that a neural network I’ve trained has generated and the client said, "Yes, that’s going to be our name." But it’s only a matter of time before that happens. But I’m bullish on AI and neural networks.

Rob: Well, it’s funny because, I know this isn’t the same thing, but every now and then, I’m sure you see this too, there are these doomsday proclamations of naming...the human aspect of naming dying out because computers will be able to do it themselves. What are your thoughts in terms of how people and computers will interact in the future to do this job?

Anthony: Oh, without a doubt, accessible AI tools for name generation will increase everyone’s access to interesting names. But just because you are shown a word or a list of words doesn’t mean that you’re going to know, as someone in the company for instance, is this really going to be the right word? Does this have the potential to become a brand? And there’s other aspects of naming such as understanding and ascertaining what the right naming strategy should be. What should the right inputs that an AI should be trained on? You know, what kinds of words should the AI be trained on? Helping a client see how each word in a list of words could become their future could become their brand, and helping them to see the the assets and potential of each of these names. That’s not something AI is going to do. So there’s still a place for professional name developers.

Rob: I want to back up a little bit and just talk more generally about about name generation. Can you just give me a 30,000-foot view of the entire naming process before we dive into some of the specific steps within it?

Anthony: Yeah, sure, I’ll be happy to Rob. So, I’ll be briefed by the clients, and maybe they’ll provide me with an actual creative brief, or not, but from that, I’ll develop name objectives that succinctly capture what the name needs to accomplish; what it needs to support or connote. And once we agree on those marching orders, I’ll get into creative. Now the first wave of creative is a mile wide and an inch deep, where I explore many different perspectives of the brand, different tonalities, different styles of names, different executions. And that process takes about two weeks of creative development. At the end, there’s probably a thousand or several thousand words that have been developed. I’ll cull the best 150 names and run those through preliminary global trademark screening with my trademark partner, Steve Price. And from that, there’ll be 50 to 70 names, and I’ll present those names to the client. And I present them in a real-world context so they look less like hypothetical candidates and more like de facto, existing brands. And I present each name in the exact same visual context to really keep the focus on the name and not confound variables by changing up the color or the font. I present each name individually, talk about their implications and what they bring. And at the end the client gets feedback—what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re neutral about—and that informs the second round of creative work, which is an inch wide and a mile deep, where I delve into what was really working for them. And, it’s important to have a couple of rounds of creative because it’s one thing to agree in an abstract brief, but what clients really react to are real words, and that’s where you can really find out what’s going on, because it’s difficult for people to really understand what they like and don’t like in a name until they see them. And so that second round of work focuses on what’s working for them. And that process again is about two weeks, thousands of names developed, 100, 150 go into screening for trademark and domains, and then 50 names plus are presented to the client. And the client chooses from all of the names that’ve been presented across both rounds—typically over 100 names. They bring a handful of names into their full legal screening. Maybe there is cultural and linguistic checks that have to happen, and their full legal checks and then they choose one final name to run with.

Rob: What steps do you take when you just start generating names?

Anthony: All right, so once we all agree on what the marching orders are. The process looks like this: I’ll first bring up my go-to set of software and applications and resources that I use pretty much in parallel, and I bounce between them as I go through development. So, I’ll bring up I’ll bring up Wordnik, which is an important piece of software online, a great resource for lists of words. I use OneLook, Rhymezone, an engine called Sketch Engine, and various other applications. And I will use those to identify words, word parts, that are interesting to me. And so over the course of that development I will use different techniques in order to unearth every possible idea I can find. I will also go through prior projects that I’ve done through Operative Words, and if I find a good word for this project, I’ll search on my computer for all files that I’ve worked on that also contain that word, and so I’ll be able to mine from my prior work. And so, that creative process happens for about two weeks. At the end of two weeks I will have amassed thousands of ideas, and if I bring neural networks and software-based combinations and permutations there are literally tens-of-thousands of ideas in the picture.

Rob: You mentioned Sketch Engine awhile ago as one of the online resources that you use. I’ve seen that you’ve written quite a bit about it and how you use it. But can you just briefly explain what it is and why you recommend it so highly?

Anthony: Yes, Sketch Engine is a corpus linguistics database. So, let me explain that. Corpus linguistics is using a very large body of real-world language. That’s a corpus, and it’s plural is corpora. And using computers to sort of analyze and tag and organize what’s in there. So a corpus might be, for instance, the one I use is all of the news articles that have been published between 2014 and 2017. All of that real-world text—that’s 28 billion words—all of which have been tagged by part of speech, and it’s recorded all of the words that live next to all of the other words. In other words, it records what are called "colocations." Now, colocations are useful because you can learn a lot about a word by the company it keeps. So if there’s an attribute that a client is interested in, let’s say ‘fast’ or ‘smart,’ I can look up a word like "fast" or "smart" or any other related word, and discover all of the words that have been modified by it. So, therefore I can find an exhaustive list of things that are fast, things that are smart, or verbs related to things that are fast and things that are smart. And so, the benefit is, one, is exhaustiveness, two, is also linguistic naturalness. That is, you’re finding how words are used in a real-world context, and I believe that linguistic naturalness in names is very important for names being credible, for names being relatable, and for names feeling very adaptable. You’re not foisting ideas on people that make no sense.

Rob: It rolls off the tongue, to use kind of the layman’s term.

Anthony: Yes, that’s right.

Rob: You’ve mentioned so many online tools, I’m just curious, is there anything offline that you frequent?

Anthony: I’m typically watching some kind of movie or TV show or some other sort of visual stimulus while I’m doing my creative development.

Rob: Interesting.

Anthony: And those things provide visual stimulation and there is dialogue and other ideas that come up that provide an extra input to my creative process.

Rob: Do you choose what you’re watching based on the project, or is it just whatever you happen to be watching anyway?

Anthony: No, no, I do. Absolutely. So, with projects that are very technologically driven or scientifically driven, I’ll watch something that’s sort of technological or scientific.

Rob: That’s fun. Do you ever just, you know, there’s been a movie that you’ve been wanting to see anyway, and you feel like, "Oh, that fits this project," and you put that on?

Anthony: Yeah, absolutely.

Rob: Another technique that I saw that you wrote about, it’s called an "excursion." Can you can explain what that is? Is that related to the idea of watching a movie while you’re doing naming?

Anthony: In an excursion, you identify a completely unrelated product category. Sometimes the less related the better. And you look for examples of a desired attribute or quality from that category. For instance, if you’re naming a new intelligent form of AI, let’s go ahead and consider examples of intelligence from the world of kitchens. Let’s look for ideas of intelligence in the world of sports. By thinking through an attribute as it appears somewhere else, you are able to find ideas that are differentiated but relevant, because when you take a word from a different category and drop it into a relevant category, it immediately becomes relevant to that new category. People are very comfortable with this technique.

Rob: I have a couple of tactical, logistics questions that I’m curious how you would respond to. What about the actual medium that you use when you’re writing down or documenting your name ideas? Do you do this in Excel or do you have a pad of paper with you while you’re doing all these other exercises, and you’re just furiously jotting down ideas?

Anthony: I’m using Microsoft Word, by and large, for this. I also use another text application called TextWrangler. I use Excel when I’m charged with developing a generic descriptor for a new product.

Rob: And what is TextWrangler? Is there an important difference between that and Word, or just, you happen to use both?

Anthony: TextWrangler is a text editor. So, there’s no formatting whatsoever. It’s plain ASCII text. It has another sister application called BBEdit, and these applications are very useful when you’re working with pure text, and it has some terrific tools like the ability to eliminate duplicates, the ability to use pattern recognition, something called Grep, in order to find words that include certain patterns. So, very useful tool and an adjunct to the toolset that I use.

Rob: And then the other logistical question is just about timing. You mentioned usually a two-week period of time for your first run at name generation, but I’ve heard other namers say they like to have a four-hour window to really immerse themselves in a project anytime they sit down to do name generation. Do you have any rules of thumb that you adhere to in terms of timing?

Anthony: Over the course of two weeks, the process is, I will immerse myself completely in a project maybe for four hours, maybe for a day, maybe for two days, or three days even. And then I put it away. And then I forget about it, and I work on something else for a day or two, and then I come back to it. And so, I have this repeated process of immersion and then incubation and I repeat that in order to do creative work. That’s a process that’s been demonstrated and proven to help maximize creative output. Those "aha" moments—those Eureka moments you have in the shower—happen because you’ve been thinking about something and then stop thinking about it, consciously anyway. But meanwhile there’s something bubbling up under the surface that comes out when you least expect it.

Rob: You’ve mentioned a lot of things that you could use if you get stuck on a project. Do you ever get writer’s block so to speak, and if so, is there anything that you haven’t already mentioned that you would use to kick yourself back into naming gear?

Anthony: Sure. You know, the writer’s block happens when a client is looking for something that isn’t different. If their if their product or their brand doesn’t really have something new to offer, that’s a more difficult nut to crack. And so, in those cases, I will look at projects that are utterly unrelated in any way, or other kinds of lists. And in this way, I expose myself to words that have nothing to do with the project whatsoever. But, because of how I see words and how I think, I can look at a list and look at a word and go, "Oh, wait a minute. There’s a story there." I can see what would be related or that would be interesting. So, really, it’s a process of compelling me to look at words just in order to see what happens. It’s a little bit stochastic. It’s a little bit random, but it’s actually very useful and interesting and new ideas can come out of it, even for projects where there isn’t something wildly different under the surface.

Rob: I like to ask whether there are any names or naming tropes that you see that you’re getting sick of. You know, like any other creative process, there are trends in the industry—startups ending with with "-ly," for example. Are there any specific name ideas or trends like that that you want to call out or that you wish would discontinue?

Anthony: Well, Rob, there’re always trends that I wish would go away. In fact, any trends, by and large, I wish would go away, because they’re unoriginal and they don’t serve the brands that they represent. They look derivative. They look unoriginal. And what does that say about their company or their products? So, yes, I’m not crazy about the "-ly" trend that’s been going on, just as I wasn’t crazy about the "oo" trend that was happening after Google and Yahoo found success, just like I wasn’t crazy about the "i-" or "e-" prefix trend back when that was happening. You know, I’m just fundamentally opposed to these ideas because they don’t they don’t serve their clients and they, I think, reflect a company that isn’t truly original. I’m also not crazy about the trend to randomly drop consonants or vowels, or double them, because it’s clear that it was done just in order to secure a dotcom domain, and it feels like domain desperation.

Rob: Right, it feels forced.

Anthony: Exactly. And linguistic unnaturalness, where you do these things in order to shoehorn words in order to get a free dotcom, I don’t think serves a brand well either, because they’re immediately off-putting, they look unnatural, and they’re difficult to relate to.

Rob: The last question I like to ask namers is just what your favorite thing is about being a namer or coming up with name ideas.

Anthony: Well, I really love the process of identifying, exhaustively, every possible perspective of a new brand. If I’m looking at a list of a thousand potential names, those are a thousand different perspectives, a thousand different ways of framing you looking at this company. And those are a thousand potential futures. And then seeing when a company finally adopts a name that I’ve helped them with—to see how they adopted the name, breathe life into it, and then run with it, and do their own, get their own inspiration from the name. So, as an example, a while ago I worked with an architectural and design firm called Pollack Architecture, who needed a new name. And eventually, I worked with them and developed the name "Rapt Studio" for them, R-A-P-T, "Rapt Studio" for them. And they do brilliant interior and architecture work and branding work as well. Really brilliant and wonderful people. And so once I gave them "Rapt Studio," they ran with it and they called their employees "Raptors." I didn’t give them that idea. They have meetings once a week, which are called "Monday Rapture" meetings. All right. So, I love when a name can inspire a client with great ideas. That makes me very happy.

Rob: That’s great. Well let’s leave it there. And I just want to say thank you again for your willingness to share some of your thinking and how you do what you do.

Anthony: Well, thank you so much, Rob. You know, I really do this for selfish reasons because I hate ugly words, and names are an unavoidable part of our environment and our habitat, and wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded by beauty and gardens than blight? I feel that way about names and so I give away what I know, because I want other namers, even my direct competitors, to come up with with great names so that they can also populate the world with words that are interesting and creative imaginative, and words we like to have around.

Rob: Well, you call it selfish but it seems selfless to me. I really appreciate it and thanks again. Let’s go make some more beautiful words out there.

Anthony: Yeah, let’s do that. Thanks, Rob.

Rob: Thank you.

Steven Price runs Tessera Trademark Screening, which specializes in preliminary trademark screening, a critical step in any naming process. Steve is the go-to guy for preliminary trademark screening. He does it for just about every independent naming consultant I can think of, many of the big brand consulting firms, and directly for clients of his own. Through the years, he's worked with Microsoft, Intel, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and others, and brand names like BlackBerry, Dasani, Pentium, and Swiffer.

We talked about his screening process, the tools he uses, and why he describes name ideas as “gos,” “maybes” and “maybe nots.”

On this episode, I spoke with Amanda Peterson, formerly the Head of Naming and Leader of Brand Management at Google. While there, she helped establish Alphabet, Google's parent company, as well as sister companies like Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company. Before Google, Amanda headed up naming at HP—before I held that role—and also worked at Logitech and Landor. She recently left Silicon Valley and is now Head of Marketing and Communications at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Amanda and I go way back. I first met her when I was Director of Verbal Identity at Interbrand San Francisco and she was my client at HP. And then, funny enough, when she went to Google, I went over and took her place as Global Head of Naming at HP.

Amanda and I talked about naming briefs, her approach to name generation, one of her favorite names (Bluetooth), her pet peeves in brand names, and what she likes most about being a namer.

Jonathan Bell is Managing Director of Want Branding, a brand consultancy with offices in Miami, Denver, and New York, and clients like Bose, Royal Caribbean, and Call of Duty. Jonathan has about 30 years of experience in the branding industry, during which he's completed over 800 projects and worked with over a third of the companies in the Fortune 100—companies like Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, and Disney. He's also a visiting professor at Wharton and a frequent conference speaker, including a 2016 TED talk, "How to create a great brand name."

Jonathan shares clear, straightforward thoughts and advice on naming, including his four-step naming process, an approach to shortlisting, recommendations for presenting names, and more.

Laurel Sutton is a co-founder of Catchword, a Bay Area naming firm behind names like Asana, Vudu, and many of the activity trackers from Fitbit, like Zip, One, Flex, and Force. She is also the Information Officer for the American Name Society; but Laurel's not only a naming expert. She's also a trained linguist, with a Master's Degree in linguistics from UC Berkeley.

Laurel's expertise in naming and linguistics make her perfectly suited for her current role: She now runs Sutton Strategy, where she focuses on providing linguistic analysis on name ideas. Linguistic analysis is a crucial step in the naming process, ensuring you (or your client) don't end up with a name on one of those listicles of "worst naming disasters" because you failed to realize your brand name was slang for something offensive. For some reason, the most famous example of a linguistic disaster in naming is actually fake news: the story of Chevy Nova selling poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because it translates to "doesn't go." Never happened. But there are real examples, too, like Zyklon, Incubus, LaCrosse, and Strange Fruit.

Laurel kicked off our conversation by defining linguistic analysis as "pieces of research that are designed to make sure that any name is going to work globally." She then shared her process, what it means to do a "global" check, whether it's still important to do linguistic checks when your brand will only sell in the US (it is), and the difference between translation and transliteration.

Scott Milano is Founder and Managing Director of Tanj, a boutique brand language firm specializing in names, taglines, stories, messaging and voice strategies, and copy. Scott has over 15 years of experience in verbal identity and has worked on names like Scott's worked on some big brand names, like Nintendo Wii, Ally Bank, Sony Bravia, and Film Struck, among many others.

Scott and I talked about the naming guides Tanj makes available online, the naming process, tools he uses (like stock photography sites and the MRC Psycholinguistic Database from University of Western Australia), and some naming trends. We ended the conversation talking about what Scott likes best about being a namer: “It's essential for any business to go to market. If you don't have a name, you don't have a business. So we're helping people, and businesses, take flight. And being able to do that, right at their inception, or so early on, and having such a big impact, is cool.”

Eli Altman runs A Hundred Monkeys, a naming and branding agency in Berkeley, California. A Hundred Monkeys was founded by Eli's dad, Danny Altman, in 1990. Eli grew up helping his dad come up with name ideas, and the second he was old enough to sound like an adult on the phone, he was taking on freelance naming projects. In addition to running A Hundred Monkeys, Eli wrote the Amazon bestselling naming workbook, Don’t Call it That. He has a new book coming out soon called Run Studio Run, all about the business of running a small creative studio.

On this episode of How Brands Are Built, Eli talks about his "naming workbook" (Don't Call It That), the naming process he uses at A Hundred Monkeys, pitfalls for new namers, and what it was like growing up the son of a professional namer.

Today’s episode marks the end of season one, but certainly not the end of this podcast. Plans for season two are already underway, and I’m very excited about some of the guests who’ve already signed on. But I won’t be ready to release those episodes for a little while, so…to make sure you’re the first to know when they’re available, please make sure you’ve signed up for the newsletter at HowBrandsAreBuilt.com. And between now and season two, we’ll still be posting new articles and information on the website. You can follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook to make sure your seeing the latest content.

I’ve organized this season-one wrap-up episode loosely around the naming process: the naming brief, name generation (as well as a few tips on what to do if you get stuck), shortlisting, prescreening, and presenting names. For each step, I’ll call out some comments I found especially interesting or informative from interviews with nine naming experts: Anthony Shore of Operative Words; Shannon DeJong of House of Who; Clive Chafer of Namebrand; Steven Price of Tessera Trademark Screening; Amanda Peterson, formerly of Google; Jonathan Bell of WANT; Laurel Sutton of Sutton Strategy (and formerly of Catchword); Scott Milano of Tanj; and Eli Altman of A Hundred Monkeys.

Today's guest is Tim Riches, Group Strategy Director at Principals in Melbourne. I met Tim in Singapore, at FutureBrand. When I joined FutureBrand's strategy team in 2011, Tim was running the Singapore office and serving as Chief Growth Officer for all of Asia Pacific. He left shortly after I arrived, but in the few months we overlapped, Tim made a big impression on me. He's a fast-talking, no bullshit, powerhouse thinker who often seems to be offering solutions before anyone else in the room has even fully grasped the problem.

I asked Tim about an article he wrote a few months back, titled "The greatest change branding agencies have faced in a generation," in which he states "branding 101 hasn't changed ... but the shift toward experiences has permanently altered how people assess 'different' and 'better'." He calls out a shift in focus-on the client side-toward a broader definition of "customer experience" that no longer holds marketing or brand as the exclusive "business lens" on the customer relationship. For agencies to maintain relevance going forward, he argues, they must be able to build bridges "between the promise of the brand and the delivery of that promise" by creating actionable principles that experience designers can use to deliver the pillars of a brand.

We also talked about brand strategy frameworks and how rigid or flexible they should be. Tim has strong opinions here, which I alluded to briefly in my conversation with Gareth Kay. (When I said a friend referred to some frameworks as "parking lots," I was referring to Tim.) Tim's main point is that, in order for concepts like pillars, values, and personality traits to provide any guidance as to how a brand (or organization) should look, feel, or behave, there must be some coherence between them. "I don't see how you can create a cohesive story unless there is some relationship," Tim says. "At least trying to do that helps you show where you have disjoints and incongruities within the thinking."

When I asked Tim about books, he justified his own love of sci-fi by claiming "it's good fuel for the imagination, and I do think strategists have to have imagination-not just analytical skills." He also recommended strategists read The Economist and at least understand the core concepts of books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow.

Wrapping up, I asked Tim for his advice to those just starting their careers in branding. He advised junior people to stay focused on what value looks like for each client rather than getting drawn into an obsession with methodology. He also emphasized the importance of having good "practitioner skills," such as being able to run an interview, present to clients, and design and facilitate workshops.

To learn more about Tim and Principals, visit Principals.com.au.

Generally, I try to make the How Brands Are Built podcast evergreen. I want listeners to be able to go back any old episode and find that the conversation—whether it’s with a namer, a strategist, an author, or some other branding professional—is still relevant.

But this episode is different. It’s April, 2020, and we’re in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. To say the least, it’s been disruptive. (And not in the cool, buzzwordy kind of way.) Early on in the crisis, I read news of Zoom making conference calls free for K–12 schools, grocery stores creating special shopping hours for more vulnerable populations, and The New York Times taking down its paywall for all coronavirus-related coverage. I started keeping track of how companies were pitching in, and created an Instagram post highlighting six approaches, with an example for each.

Shortly thereafter, I started seeing similar content, including a blog post from Character, titled “A Brand’s Responsibility In Times of Crisis.” I wanted to talk a bit more about how brands are reacting, so I reached out to the authors, Lauren Wong, Associate Strategy Director, and Myra El-Bayoumi, Head of Strategy. (Myra’s name may sound familiar—she was a guest on the podcast last season.) Lauren and Myra graciously agreed to hop on Zoom for a quick, impromptu chat about what brands can do, should do, and in some cases, should avoid doing, in times of crisis.

Season four has arrived, and my first guest is Dr. Jason Chambers of the University of Illinois. The theme for this season will be a bit looser than past seasons, but I'm hoping to get perspectives on the social impact of brands and branding. In other words, are brands a good thing for society, overall? In light of what's happened in 2020-the pandemic, protests for racial justice, increasingly extreme weather as a result of climate change, and even the U.S. presidential election-this topic felt relevant.

I first heard Dr. Chambers on 1A, a podcast from WAMU that's distributed by NPR, where he talked about "reckoning with racist brands" like Aunt Jemima and the Washington, D.C., NFL team. I was excited to talk to Dr. Chambers in a little more detail about these brand names, where they come from, why they should change, and how to change them.

Dr. Chambers's research is focused on the history of African Americans in the advertising industry, a topic about which he's written a book: Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry. Given his expertise, I also wanted to get his take on diversity in the agency world.

I don't often interview professors on the show (which makes sense, given it's a show about "how brands are built"), but I had so much fun talking to Dr. Chambers and exploring his in-depth knowledge of these subjects; I hope this is not the last time I host an academic or professor on the show.

To hear more from Dr. Chambers, I encourage you to check out the episode of 1A he joined, "Reckoning With Racist Brands." You can also find his opinions in publications like Ad Age, Adweek, CNN, Forbes, Black Enterprise, and The New York Times. He's written another book, too: Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship. Lastly, you can of course find him on the University of Illinois website and LinkedIn.

This episode of How Brands Are Built is a live recording of an April 25, 2024 book launch for Designing Brand Identity, sixth edition, held at Noise 13 in San Francisco. The event included a panel discussion moderated by Rob Goodman. The panelists were Dava Guthmiller, founder of Noise 13, Rob Meyerson co-author of the sixth edition of Designing Brand Identity, and Robin Goffman, creative director for the book. The discussion includes thoughts on rebranding, trends in branding, and how Rob and Robin first got involved with Alina Wheeler (the creator and author of Designing Brand Identity, who passed away in December, 2023). Panelists also talked about Noise 13's work for Adventr—a case study featured in the book.

Alan Brew has been in branding since 1985. In this, episode he takes us back to that year to explain how he got into the industry and what he's seen change since then. Along the way, he's worked with clients like Chevron, Elsevier, Tech Data, Royal Bank of Canada, Delta Airlines, and Huawei, as well as a number of startups and small-to-medium businesses. Now a founding partner at BrandingBusiness in Southern California, Alan's career has also included roles at Landor, Addison, and Siegel+Gale.

Alan and I met at that last one: Siegel+Gale. I was lowest man on the totem pole (I think that may have actually been my title) when Alan came in as Managing Director of the LA office. I remember an early meeting with Alan. We were in a full conference room with lots of smart strategists and designers sitting around the table. I was used to being a fly on the wall for meetings like this-maybe just taking notes or waiting for some marching orders. I can't remember what the meeting was about or what we were trying to decide, but I remember, vividly, Alan turning to me and asking my opinion on the matter at hand. Now, maybe Alan just didn't know how unimportant I was, but I took it as something else: To me, it was a recognition that my point of view had value, hierarchy be damned. That moment stuck with me, and shortly after Alan left, I followed him to his next agency and joined his strategy team.

I wanted to get Alan talking about his early days in the industry, including the origin of "global brands," the first time he saw the book Positioning, the age of the corporate narrative, and a fateful dinner meeting with Walter Landor, back in 1985.

Next, we talked about a proprietary tool at BrandingBusiness, the Brand Performance Platform. "The Brand Performance Platform is a databased research program that produces analytics, metrics, for evaluating brands on ... awareness, consideration, preference, and purchase intent-the classic sales funnel," says Alan. "But we can put metrics against those elements and look at where a company is succeeding or where a brand is succeeding. ... We can, on those four metrics, create an index, which we call the Brand Performance Platform, and say, 'This is your index and this is how you increase it,' and we can correlate that increase to revenue performance."

Afterward, we got into an interesting conversation about "corporate narrative," which Alan think of as an evolution of positioning. We talked about storytelling and content creation, with Alan explaining that brand strategy has "become more of a fungible externalized set of strategic components rather than just this inert strategic document that lives on somebody's shelf."

Lastly, Alan shared some favorite brands (Amazon and Subaru) and recommended some non-business books and authors he recommends every brand strategist and businessperson reads: Dickens, Michael Lewis (including The Undoing Project), Man's Search for Meaning, and The Economist.

To learn more about Alan, visit BrandingBusiness, where you can learn about his agency, read his bio, and see many of his blog posts. Speaking of blogs, you should also check out Alan's blog about brand naming: Namedroppings. You can also follow Alan on Twitter.

My final guest for season three of the podcast is Denise Lee Yohn, author of the bestseller, What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest. She's also an in-demand keynote speaker, and has appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, NPR, and in the Wall Street Journal discussing business and branding issues.

Denise cut her teeth in lead strategy roles for the advertising agencies behind campaigns for Burger King and Land Rover, and has held client-side positions at Jack In The Box and Sony.

On this episode, Denise and I talk about the relationship between brand and business, why it's important to "sweat the small stuff," brand experience versus employee experience, and her latest book, Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies.

I kicked off the conversation with a question about the relationship between brand and business, something I've been interested in since writing an article on the topic for The Guardian in 2014. Denise and I agree that business leaders need to stop thinking of brand and business (or brand strategy and business strategy, at least) as two separate things. They are "one and the same," to use Denise's words.

Next, we talked about one of the seven "brand-building principles" from her book, What Great Brands Do. According to the book, great brands "Sweat the Small Stuff." Denise explains that the process she recommends for achieving this goal and introduces one of the free tools she's created, the Brand Touchpoint Wheel.

Later in the conversation, Denise and I talked about her latest book, Fusion, which explores the relationship between culture and brand. While she does not recommend creating employer brand platforms (partly because they create an unnecessary divide between the external and internal-facing brand), she does recommend working on the employee experience using a similar approach to that used for customer brand experience. The Brand Touchpoint Wheel can again prove useful when working on the employee experience, as can another tool Denise offers, the Employee Experience Architecture Framework.

As usual, we wrapped up the conversation with Denise's book recommendations and advice for junior/aspiring branding professionals. You won't want to miss it!

To learn more about Denise, visit deniseleeyohn.com. On her site, you'll find information about her books, speaking engagements, and consulting practice, as well as her blog, and more free, downloadable tools like the ones we mentioned in our conversation. You can also find and follow Denise on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Rob Meyerson and Fabian Geyrhalter discuss brand strategy's balance of innovation and foundational rules, touching on brand creation challenges and successful launches in the evolving marketing landscape.

Today’s episode is special. It's an edited version of a LinkedIn livestream chat with Fabian Geyrhalter, founder and principal at FINIEN, "a purposefully small consultancy based in Los Angeles." Fabian is a brand strategist and creative director and host of the Hitting the Mark podcast. He's also written several best-selling books, including How to Launch a Brand and The Brand Therapy Book. Lastly, Fabian is founder of Toneoptic, which we discuss on the show.

Fabian was a guest on season two of How Brands Are Built, and I had a great time talking to him again. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

To learn more about Fabian, visit www.finien.com. From there, you'll find links to his podcast and books. For Toneoptic, visit www.toneoptic.com.

A few weeks back, on LinkedIn and Instagram, I asked whether anyone had questions about branding, naming, or other topics I might be able to speak to. My plan was to do a Q&A episode—and this is it.

On this episode, I answer questions from branding professionals and others about branding, naming, and book publishing. Here's a sample of what was asked:

• How do you manage clients wanting to wordsmith your brand strategy work?
• What guidance should you give clients to help them implement your recommended brand strategy?
• How do you maintain brand consistency when people at your company won't use design templates?
• What is the current state of AI in naming?
• How can you attract new clients if you can't show your work online due to an NDA?
• Can you walk through the book publishing process?

Here are links to a few things mentioned during the episode:

• Brand Naming
• Designing Brand Identity, sixth edition
• David Placek, founder of Lexicon, on an early episode of the StartUp podcast
• AI-powered naming agency, Monika
• Tessera Trademark Screening
• Brand implementation agencies TenTen, Monigle, and BrandActive
• Clutch (B2B company reviews)
• Swiss Cheese Mono font
• Ohno Type School with James Edmondson

Thanks to everyone for your questions. If you have questions that I didn't answer, please reach out—maybe I'll do another one of these episodes at some point.

Season three of the podcast featured my most wide-ranging conversations yet. I talked to guests about topics such as naming, social influence, and fusing brand and culture. Like last season, I talked to a mix of popular authors and speakers, like Jeremy Miller and Denise Lee Yohn, as well as some people I've worked with closely at agencies like Interbrand, Siegel+Gale, and BrandingBusiness. Thank you to all my guests this season:

• Jeremy Miller, founder of Sticky Branding; author of Sticky Branding and Brand New Name
• Ken Pasternak, president of Two by Four (formerly president and COO of Marshall Strategy)
• Fabian Geyrhalter, principal and founder of FINIEN; author of How to Launch a Brand and Bigger Than This
• Caren Williams, independent brand consultant
• Dennis Hahn, Chief Strategy Officer at Liquid Agency
• Ana Andjelic, strategy executive; PhD in sociology
• Alan Brew, founding partner at BrandingBusiness
• Myra El-Bayoumi, strategy director at Character
• Denise Lee Yohn, brand leadership expert; author of What Great Brands Do and Fusion

Thank you, too, for listening, sharing your thoughts, following along the website, social media, and the newsletter. The theme of this season, broadly speaking, was brand experience. In this wrap-up episode, I walk through what a brand experience is and how to create or improve one. First off, how should we define brand experience? About a year ago, before this season started, I posted the following definition: "The totality of all sensations, feelings, thoughts, and actions evoked by a brand." That pretty much aligns with other definitions I've seen from the likes of Marty Neumeier. (His, from The Dictionary of Brand, is "All the interactions people have with a product, service, or organization.") The episode kicks off with Ken Pasternak and Caren Williams each going into detail on how they think about brand experience. Next, we get to the four steps for creating (or strengthening) a brand experience. Sounds simple, but each step requires some serious work. In the episode, each step is fleshed out and supported with audio clips from the season's interviews. Four steps to create or improve a brand experience

1. Get the brand strategy right (should a strategy platform include experience principles?)
2. Outline the context within which the brand will be experienced (e.g., customer journey mapping)
3. Brainstorm ideas for the brand experience (often takes place in a collaborative work session with the client)
4. Implement, measure, and modify (organize ideas by impact/effort, mock up or prototype ideas, and always be iterating)

To learn more about brand experience and the guests from season three, listen to each full episode or read transcripts on HowBrandsAreBuilt.com. You'll also find a growing list of books recommended by guests this season and last. Thanks again, especially to those of you who've subscribed, left a rating or review, or connected on social media. If you haven't done those things already, please do-I really appreciate the support!

Emily Heyward is co-founder and and Chief Brand Officer at Red Antler, the leading brand company for startups and new ventures. Red Antler is the branding firm behind brands like Casper, Allbirds, Keeps, and Burrow. They also work with established brands like American Express, HBO, Google, and Gap.

Emily was named among the Most Important Entrepreneurs of the Decade by Inc. Magazine, and has also been recognized as a Top Female Founder by Inc. and one of Entrepreneur's Most Powerful Women of 2019. She's also the author of a new book, Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One.

I asked Emily what makes Red Antler different from other branding firms and what makes it, in the words of a 2018 Adweek article, one of "the surprisingly small group of branding shops behind today's top challenger brands." She says Red Antler was "the first creative services company that was designed and built to work with startups" and, as a result, "we've thought about brand in an incredibly holistic way … with obviously a particular focus on digital."

Next, we turned to Emily's book, Obsessed.

"The book really came out of 12 years of running Red Antler, launching new, disruptive businesses into the world, and seeing the ways in which brands’ relationships with consumers are shifting. … The rules are not the same as they were, certainly 20 years ago, but even six years ago. Things keep changing.”

– Emily Heyward

Then we turned to the events of 2020, and I asked Emily for her take on how brands should respond to racial injustice, as well as the COVID pandemic. Lastly, I asked Emily some wrap-up questions, including a brand/initiative she recommends checking out (the 15 Percent Pledge), a book recommendation (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), and her advice to you people in the industry:

"Be curious. I think that so much of what we do is a response to the world around us—to culture and trends and what makes people tick. And when I meet with someone that doesn’t seem like they're passionate about what's happening in the world, and what businesses are out there, and what they're seeing, and what they're loving—for me, that's an immediate red flag."

– Emily Heyward

To learn more about Emily and Red Antler, visit redantler.com or emilyheyward.com. Obsessed is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

In this episode, I'm talking to Dava Guthmiller, founder and Chief Creative Officer at Noise 13, a brand strategy and design agency based in San Francisco. She's also cofounder of In/Visible Talks, and annual conference that celebrates the art of design and creativity, and In/Visible Project, which includes a collection of other events that bring people together over the process, inspiration, and challenges for design and creative professionals.

Throughout the conversation, we touched on diversity in the worlds of design and branding. I asked Dava what it was like to start Noise 13 as a young, female designer, and how In/Visible Talks is giving a platform to a racially diverse and heavily female-leaning group of speakers.

Next, we got into the weeds a bit on how Dava built the In/Visible Talks brand. She told me where the name came from and how the visual identity for year one involved a trip to the dollar store.

We rounded out the conversation, as we often do on the podcast, with book recommendations and advice for young professionals in the branding and design industry. Dava recommended The Empathy Edge by Maria Ross (see Maria's post on How Brands Are Built) and Marty Neumeier's Brand Flip. And she had several pieces of advice for young designers, including encouragement to try many different internships and jobs until you find the best fit: "Take internships. Find a mentor. Try it on. Try a small company. Try in-house. Try something big. This is your life. This is your job. Find the right project team fit for you, so that your life is not miserable."

To learn more about Dava, visit Noise 13 or In/Visible Talks. The annual conference will be on Jan 14, 2021, and early bird tickets are on sale now.

Ana Andjelic is a strategy executive with wide-ranging experience on the agency and client sides. Recent roles include Chief Brand Officer at fashion retailer Rebecca Minkoff and SVP, Global Strategy Director at Havas LuxHub. Past agency experience includes time at Droga5, HUGE, The Barbarian Group, and Razorfish.

Ana also has a PhD in sociology and has published dozens of articles about luxury and fashion branding, the experience economy, social influence, content strategy, and more. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, Fast Company, AdAge, Adweek, LeanLuxe, Luxury Daily, Glossy, Campaign, and Form Design Magazine.

In 2018, she was listed by Forbes as one of the top 50 Chief Marketers in 2018 who "serve as models of a new, emerging and disruptive chief marketer." She's been recognized as one of the "Luxury Women to Watch" by Luxury Daily and one of the top 10 digital strategists by The Guardian.

I kicked things off by asking Ana about her PhD-why she chose to pursue it and how it's impacted her career. Then we talked about a term she writes about "social currency." I asked what it means and why it's important. Next, we talked about how she defines "brand experience" and what brands should do to create compelling brand experiences and social influence.

Ana says, "These days, the strength of the brand is how successfully it can defy the strength of the algorithm." To do so, she suggests brands must exhibit at least one of her 4 Cs of the modern brand:

1. Community
2. Content
3. Curation
4. Collaborations

Throughout the interview, Ana lists quite a few brands she's interested in because they're "trying something new," including GOOP, Casper, Net-a-Porter, The Upper House (a luxury hotel in Hong Kong), Rapha (cycling clothing and accessories), Tracksmith (running gear), Away (luggage), Glossier, and MUJI.

Wrapping up the conversation, I asked Ana for book recommendations. She likes Value Proposition Design (by the authors of Business Model Generation), This is Service Design Thinking, and a series called Brand. Balance., which she describes as "little booklets [that explore] what iconic brands have done right ... a deep dive into the brand aesthetics, identity, and then the brand expression." She also recommends books in the field of behavioral economics, such as those by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Bruno Latour.

Lastly, Ana offered some advice to young and/or junior people in branding and marketing:

"I overall believe that people need to think more. They're too trusting of ideas-they just adopt ideas without critical thinking. Whatever can inspire junior people, or advance their critical thinking ... I would advise that. And then, ... I cannot underscore [enough] the importance of observation and being very aware that one's own perspective is limited. So, that means travel, expose yourself to other cultures, observe how people behave, observe obstacles, how they overcome obstacles in their behavior, and just be very open."

To learn more about Ana, visit her website or find her on Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

This week's guest is Miriam Stone, an independent strategist who works with agencies around the Bay Area, including lifestyle branding agency Noise 13, where she's Strategy Director. In addition to her brand consulting work, Miriam's helped create and develop brands from inside the organization, as a Co-Founder of Swing Left, a national political movement, and previously as VP of Business Development for VisionSpring. Miriam and I first met at Interbrand San Francisco in 2012. Since then, we've become good friends and frequent collaborators. She's one of the smartest, most thoughtful strategists I know. When she told me she'd been working on documenting her process for getting from facts and observations to useful findings and insights, I jumped at the opportunity to have her walk through it on the podcast. This is exactly the "practical and tactical" information for which I created How Brands Are Built. It's an in-the-weeds conversation, but if you're working in branding and looking to get more systematic in your approach to insight generation, you'll want to tune in. Miriam walked through four steps to insight generation. Her perspective is that, while some parts of brand strategy may require "that little, extra, innate spark or talent," other parts, like those below, can be approached systematically. Step 1: Collecting

• Try not to make any judgements until the research is done. Miriam: "Just listen. Read, and listen. ... Just be a sponge."
• Use the "Three C's" to collect information about the Company, the Category (including competitors), and Customers.
• At a minimum, do a few fact-gathering sessions with the client team and supplement with desktop research.
• One exercise recommendation: Have the client list every competitor, then prioritize the top three. Break into groups and list out points of differentiation between the client's brand and competitors' brands-not just product benefits, but brand strengths and weaknesses.

Step 2: Grouping

• Put everything up on the wall with sticky notes-one fact per note.
• Group similar or related facts and findings, without trying to draw out insights yet. Miriam: "I think that takes the pressure off of you as a strategist. It takes the pressure off of the data."
• At this point, you might have 10 or 20 different groupings, which is way too many to present to a client as "insights."

Step 3: Synthesizing

• Take a step back and ask yourself what themes you see-what the groupings are telling you on a deeper level.
• Look for points of tension between the themes, ideas that are strongly supported, or anything that doesn't make sense.
• Ultimately, you should be able to get down to five or six big insights.

Step 4: Storytelling

• Don't think in PowerPoint. (Credit to Caren Williams)
• Write an outline-what's the key observation or insight on each slide, and what facts or quotes will you use to back each one up.
• You should feel like your outline is 70-80% complete before you move to slides (assuming that's how you'll present).
• The outline allows you to see any holes in the story.

Miriam's a big proponent of using sticky notes throughout these steps, an approach she learned from Caren Williams, with whom we both worked at Interbrand. Caren is now an independent brand strategist working in the Bay Area. Despite having tried other methods, Miriam finds that sticky notes work best for a number of reasons:

• They "force you to distill as you're doing your research."
• "Because you can only write so much, you have to abstract a little bit as you're writing."
• "You can move them around really easily."
• They force you to switch medium (from screen to physical paper).
• You stand up and move around while using them. "I think it does something good for the brain."
• When working with other people, you can look at the wall together and discuss what you're finding.

We also talked about competitive audits, getting from insights to a brand platform, what "ingredients" should be included in a brand platform, and what makes a good brand essence. To learn more about Miriam, visit her website Brand Plume, or Noise 13. You can also find some blog posts she's written on How Brands Are Built.

In today's episode of How Brands Are Built, host Rob Meyerson speaks with Jacob Cass, designer, brand strategist, and founder of Just Creative, about his recent venture: the Brand Builders Summit. This innovative, four-day virtual event featured 24 speakers and attracted over 20,000 attendees from 156 countries, significantly surpassing Jacob's initial goals. Jacob discusses the unique format of the summit, which blended pre-recorded sessions with live Q&As, panels, and workshops, emphasizing the crucial integration of brand strategy, design, marketing, and community. He reveals insights into the promotional strategies that generated buzz and shares logistical lessons learned while managing a large-scale event. The conversation also highlights the importance of speaker relationships, communication tools like AI chatbots for participant support, and plans for future enhancements to improve networking opportunities. Jacob's commitment to feedback and reflection post-event underscores his dedication to continual improvement. Listeners are invited to explore Jacob's work at Just Creative and look forward to the next Brand Builders Summit in 2025 (if Jacob decides to give it another go!). Join us to dive into an inspiring discussion on strategic marketing, community engagement, and the key elements driving successful brand experiences.

Today's episode features a rare repeat guest: none other than David Aaker, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, Vice-Chair at Prophet, a global marketing and branding consultancy, and prolific author of books and articles about branding.

Last time David was on the podcast, we talked about two of his books, Aaker on Branding, 20 Principles that Drive Success, and Creating Signature Stories. We also talked at length about his brand vision model. If you’re interested in hearing that longer conversation with “the Father of Modern Branding,” go take a listen.

This time, we’re talking about David’s newest book, Owning Game-Changing Subcategories: Uncommon Growth in the Digital Age. The premise of the book is that the only way for a business or brand to grow (with rare exceptions) is "to create or find 'must haves' that define whole new subcategories that can attract a loyal customer following."

During the conversation, David explains where he got the idea for the book, what he means by terms like "game-changing subcategory" and "must haves," and how digital has changed everything. He also illustrates his ideas through examples like Dollar Shave Club, Apple, and Airbnb. At the end of the conversation, David provides one final piece of advice to business owners and brand managers:

"Look for opportunities to create subcategory platforms—new ways [of] looking at what the customer is using and their relationship with the brand. And when you see one, think long and hard before you turn your back on it. ... Take some risks and make some investments, make some commitments. Because that's really the only way to grow."

Caren Williams and I met in 2012 at Interbrand San Francisco, where she was a Director of Strategy. Caren's since become an independent brand consultant, working with brands like Google, Sunrun, and Sandbox VR. One reason I wanted to talk to Caren is because of her diversity of experience, which includes an MBA from University of Texas, managing brands at consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms like Proctor & Gamble and Nestle, strategy and innovation consulting at a firm called Jump Associates, and, finally, brand consulting. This background gives Caren a unique perspective on brand strategy and brand experience. I asked Caren about the difference between building brands in the CPG space versus corporate and B2B brands. She says that while the fundamental approach is the same, the inputs and outputs are often slightly different. Consumer product brands can require deep consumer research and the resulting strategy can revolve around functional and emotional benefits and "reasons to believe." Corporate brands, on the other hand, may require more internal stakeholder research to get to the "spirit and ethos of the entire company," and some of the strategic positioning pillars might be "almost tagline-y." Next, we talked about brand experience. Caren and I talked through a model we both have experience with, which breaks brand experience into four dimensions:

• People includes corporate office employees who don't interact with the brand as well as customer-facing people, like retail store employees or drivers for Uber/Lyft. The People category also includes performance reviews, job descriptions, and on-boarding processes.
• Places (and spaces) means physical places, like stores, lobbies, and conference room names, but also digital spaces like websites, assuming they can be considered "a place you can go. ... [Visitors are] entering into your brand world."
• Products (and services) are simply "the things that you make and sell." For Google, products include the G Suite, which houses Gmail and Google Drive. Caren says, "If you're trying to bring your brand to life, it's not just how you bring it to life across your advertising and your communications and your messaging. The things that you make and sell need to represent that brand."
• Communications include anything written or spoken on behalf of the brand. Most marketing and advertising falls into this category, including email marketing, social posts, responses to emails/chats/phone calls, as well as keynote speeches from the CEO and blog posts.

Then Caren shares some simple, straightforward tools and exercises (or "creative brain games") you can use with clients to tease out the best ideas for building a brand experience. She recommended an "old school" book called Why We Buy, by Paco Underhill that explains purchasing behavior such as "why we reach for things on the middle shelf versus the lower shelf." (To see another book she recommends, as well as recommendations from many past interviewees, check out the Useful List: Books recommended by branding experts.) To close out, Caren shared some great advice for people just getting into brand consulting. To learn more about Caren-her approach, the services she offers, and her client experience-check out her website at Caren-Williams.com.

The concept of brand positioning was introduced to the marketing and advertising world in the 70s and 80s by Al Ries and Jack Trout in a series of Ad Age articles and a subsequent book titled Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. (If you haven't read it, Positioning is definitely recommended reading for anyone in the branding world.)

Today's episode features Laura Ries. Laura is Al Ries's daughter, and has been his business partner for 25 years at their consulting firm, Ries & Ries, where they advise clients such as Disney, Ford, Frito-Lay, Papa John's, Samsung, and Unilever. Laura is a bestselling author in her own right. She's co-authored five books with Al, including The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, and she's also written her own books: Visual Hammer and Battlecry. We discuss both during the episode.

Laura and I start with her definition of brand positioning (it's about "owning an idea in the mind"), and the introduction of an illustrative example we come back to again and again during the conversation: Red Bull. Laura says Red Bull "owns the energy drink category because it is the leader," while Monster Energy Drink positioned itself as the opposite of Red Bull by launching with a much larger can. 5-hour Energy, on the other hand, created their own, related category by positioning as an "energy shot." Throughout the course of the conversation, Laura presented her six principles of positioning:

1. Find an open hole. "If somebody owns a position, you're not going to take it away from them. You have to look for another open hole that you can take advantage of...by being the opposite of the leader."
2. Narrow the focus. "Too often, brands and companies, they want to be everything to everybody."
3. The name is so important and significant. "Not just the brand name but the category name."
4. Visual hammer. "Not just a pretty logo or a person-the product itself can be the visual [hammer]. It's something that communicates an idea about the brand."
5. Verbal battlecry. "Not just a slogan, although it might be a slogan or tagline, but it's really the battlecry that'll be used both internally and externally to really understand the brand."
6. PR, not advertising, is what builds brands. "New brands and new categories have more news value to them. That's where new brands need to leverage that opportunity for PR."

To learn more about Laura, her books, and her consulting services, visit visit www.ries.com. You'll find some great content on her blog, and more information on their consulting practice. With the exception of an upcoming, revised edition of Positioning, all the books we mentioned on the episode are available online:

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
• Visual Hammer
• Battlecry

Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. Episode sponsors

• Squadhelp. To begin a business name contest with hundreds of business naming experts, check out their services to get a fresh perspective on your company.
• Rev.com. Rev offers fast, reliable, and accurate audio transcriptions. Right now, Rev is offering listeners $10 off their first order. Follow this link for your $10-off coupon.

Rob joins Jacob Cass of JUST Creative and Matt Davies on their new podcast, JUST Branding. We explored best practices for naming, positioning statements, and conducting discovery for brand strategy through the lenses of the company, client, and consumer. Rob shared actionable tips and real-world examples that will help you build a better brand.

For the second mini episode of the podcast, I’m talking to Brad Flowers, founding partner of Bullhorn, a marketing company in Lexington, Kentucky. Brad is also the author of a new book entitled, The Naming Book: 5 steps to creating brand and product names that sell.

Regular listeners know that naming is an area of focus for me, so when I heard about Brad’s book, I couldn’t want to read it and ask him a few questions.

We started out talking about how there aren’t too many books about naming out there (here’s a list, which now includes Brad’s). Brad wrote his book because he’d had trouble early in his career finding something that documented a replicable process for his team. The five steps Brad recommends are:

1. Establishing Criteria
2. Brainstorming
3. Compiling Names
4. Expanding Your Knowledge
5. Deciding on the Final Name

Within each step, Brad includes short worksheets and exercises. One that I especially like comes right at the beginning, when he asks readers to pick any three brand names and post-rationalize where the names came from. Brad says it “gives someone the opportunity to take a step back and start to just recognize the names that exist and how they’re working, so that when you start to think about your name, you can understand that while Apple seems like a great name, on day one it felt like a really risky, and probably a pretty dumb name, really.”

We rounded out the conversation talking about the benefits of sometimes going “off brief,” how to ask other people their opinion on name ideas, and Brad’s favorite naming story (involving his five-year-old son).

To learn more about The Naming Book, visit thenamingbook.com. It’s available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.org. To learn more about Brad and Bullhorn, visit BullhornCreative.com, or find them on social media.

This week's guest is Allen Adamson, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Metaforce, a boutique, hybrid marketing services firm focused on growth strategies. Allen was previously Chairman, North America of Landor Associates, and has written four books:

• BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep it Simple and Succeed
• BrandDigital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World
• The Edge: 50 Tips from Brands that Lead
• Shift Ahead: How the Best Companies Stay Relevant in a Fast-Changing World

We started the conversation by talking about the importance of simplicity-the premise of his first book. Allen says he likes to think of your brand as your story and asks, "When someone hears your name, what do you want to pop into their head?" While he acknowledges the utility of the various components of a typical brand platform (i.e., brand pillars, brand personality, etc.), he keeps coming back to the ultimate goals of focus and simplicity. I asked how companies or brand managers should find that simple, relevant, differentiating story or idea, and Allen recommended one exercise he likes to do with clients: Write down everything special about the brand on index cards, and try to prioritize them into pyramids. Force yourself (or your clients) to put one card on the top of the pyramid. Once you have one or two brand stories, he recommends developing some prototype to ensure a story can be translated into execution. We talked about longer brand narratives (that read like ad copy), adlobs, and other potential prototypes. As I've done a few times recently, I ended the interview by asking Allen for a book recommendation. Rather than suggesting a brand or business book, Allen said he likes to read anything that helps him "get out of [his] bubble." A recent book he enjoyed was Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. To see other books recommended by podcast guests and branding people, check out our recent post, Useful List: Books recommended by branding experts. To learn more about Allen, visit Metaforce.co. His books are available on Amazon.

On the podcast today: Sunny Bonnell, co-founder of Motto, one of the leading branding agencies in the country, with clients like Google, Hershey's, and Twentieth Century Fox. Sunny and her co-founder, Ashleigh Hansberger, recently wrote their first book, Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different. Sunny says the book started with a question: "What if you could take the parts of yourself that other people criticize—traits they call defiant, dangerous, and different—and turn those things into your selling points?"

We talked about how Sunny and Ashleigh arrived at the seven "virtues" in Rare Breed:

• Rebellious
• Audacious
• Obsessed
• Hot-blooded
• Weird
• Hypnotic
• Emotional

If you're curious which virtue applies to you, try the Rare Breed quiz. Sunny and Ashleigh also host a YouTube series, also called Rare Breed, where they sit down with guests like Charlamagne Tha God and Jon Batiste. I asked Sunny about Motto's origin story, the challenges of being one of very few female-owned agencies, the importance of diversity, and more. Toward the end of the conversation, Sunny recommended a few books: It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be and Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite, both by Paul Ardern, as well as The Hero and the Outlaw, by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson. We ended with some of Sunny's motivating advice for anyone trying to grow their career: "Own who you are. In a world that wants to own you, owning yourself in this way can really hurt like hell. Being defiant, dangerous, and different is a gift. Succeed because of who you are, not despite who you are." To learn more about Sunny, check out her agency's work at wearemotto.com. Rare Breed is available now on Amazon and elsewhere. And, if you go to rarebreedbook.com, you can watch episodes of Sunny and Ashleigh's YouTube show and take the Rare Breed quiz. If you take the quiz or read the book, drop us a line on social media-I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I'm sure Sunny would, too. Episode sponsors

• The Brand Strategy Kit from Egle Karalyte. Available in both digital and print formats, the Kit provides structure and tools to streamline and gamify your branding process.
• Squadhelp. To begin a business name contest with hundreds of business naming experts, check out their services to get a fresh perspective on your company.

This past season, I had a great time reconnecting with old peers like Miriam Stone, Tim Riches, and Erminio Putignano, as well as getting to talk to some other branding experts I'd previously only known through their writing and speaking engagements:

• Allen Adamson
• Gareth Kay
• Adam Morgan
• Laura Ries
• Marty Neumeier
• David Aaker

To all my guests, thank you for joining me on the podcast and sharing your expertise. On today's episode-the last of season two-I share five themes I noticed as I looked back on all nine interviews. These are ideas I felt like I was hearing again and again throughout the season-they're not necessarily the only themes or even the most important ones, but they stuck out to me, and I wanted to share them. Each theme is supported by two or three clips from the interviews, but most came up in other conversations, too. The five themes are:

1. Thinking of brand strategy in terms of questions to be answered [01:51]
2. Prototype, prototype, prototype [04:20]
3. Keep it simple [07:03]
4. The importance of category [09:43]
5. The flexibility of brand frameworks [15:05]

Toward the end of the episode [27:25], I play back-to-back clips with interviewees' advice to younger or more junior people in the industry, or anyone looking to get into the industry or become a stronger strategist or branding professional. Don't forget to go back and listen or read transcripts from this season and last on HowBrandsAreBuilt.com. While you're there, you can find more content on brand positioning as well as a list of books recommended by guests this season. Thanks to all of you for listening to the show, and especially to everyone who subscribed, left a rating or review, signed up for the newsletter, or connected on social media. If you haven't done those things, please do-I really appreciate the support, and it helps ensure, eventually, a season three of How Brands Are Built!

He's been called "The Father of Modern Branding." If you've ever read anything about branding or brand strategy, my guest today requires no introduction. I'm talking to David Aaker, author of over a dozen books and hundreds of articles about marketing and branding, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and Vice-Chair at Prophet, a global marketing and branding consultancy. Given this season is about positioning and brand platforms, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask David directly about his brand vision model, which most people refer to simply as "the Aaker Model." We also talked about two of his most recent books, some of his favorite brands, a few books, and his advice for junior people in the branding industry. Aaker on Branding I kicked off the conversation by asking David about one of his latest books, Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success. David says he wrote the book because employees at Prophet were asking him what they should read and he was tired of saying "these 40 pages in this book...these 80 pages in this book." He wrote Aaker on Branding to "capsulize the main ideas that were in each of those books" into a "Reader's Digest version." Aside from the brand vision model (see below), other big-picture advice in the book includes:

• "Move from brand competition to subcategory competition if you want to grow."
• Regarding portfolio strategy, "you have to make [a family of brands] work so they generate synergy and they generate clarity and they generate relevance."
• Develop a "shared interest program."
• Tell stories.

The brand vision model (the Aaker model) Seven of the principles in Aaker on Branding have to do with what he calls "brand vision," which others (including Prophet) refer to as "brand positioning." David says, "There's a lot of things you can call it...actually, the terminology is not so important. What is important are some fundamental ideas." He created his brand vision model (originally called the brand identity model) because he was convinced advertising agencies were doing it wrong by attempting to reduce brands to three-word phrases. Brands are multidimensional, so David created a model that allows for any number of elements (some are core, others are extended and "provide extra texture and guidance"). He's also against "fill-in-the-box" models that force strategists to populate a model with ideas that may not be relevant to the brand in question. For example, a product brand won't need organizational values and a B2B corporate brand may not need a brand personality. I asked David what determines whether an idea rises to the level of a brand vision element. According to David, elements should:

1. Differentiate from other brands,
2. Resonate with customers, and
3. Be something you can deliver (either a proof point, which you can already deliver, or a strategic imperative, which is aspirational but attainable).

David agreed, however, that not every element has to meet all three of these criteria, although there's "no hard and fast rule." The model consists of 12 elements arranged into four dimensions: Brand as Product, Brand as Organization, Brand as Person (including brand personality), and Brand as Symbol. David clarified that these dimensions are really there to ensure you've thought about every possible way of expressing the brand's identity, rather than requiring the strategist to answer every question or fill in every box. Creating Signature Stories Next, we turned to Creating Signature Stories, David's most recent book. To write the book, David first had to define "what is not a story," given how overused the word has become in branding and marketing today. It's not facts, programs, descriptions, or attributes. He says, "It's a narrative-a once-upon-a-time narrative. It's involving, it's authentic, it's intriguing, and it has some sort of a 'wow' factor. It really jumps out at you. It's something you want to share with others because it's so entertaining, so informative, so relevant. And it has a strategic message." Throughout the conversation, David gives several examples of great signature stories, including UCHealth-specifically, Becky's story. David's has four high-level pieces of advice for creating signature stories:

1. Believe in the power of stories. "You just have to get religion."
2. Find strong stories. Not just any story will do.
3. Figure out a way to get the stories produced so they're effective. Good presentation is key.
4. Figure out a way to distribute the stories effectively.

As to why stories are important for brands, David says, "Stories are just unbelievably powerful. It's astounding ... It turns out that stories get attention. It turns out that stories persuade-they change perceptions. ... They avoid counterargument." And the emotions from stories are transferred to the brand telling them. This is known as "affect transfer." Wrapping up In a handful of wrap-up questions, David shared his appreciation for Dove soap and their Real Beauty campaign and two "elephant books" (Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff and Who Says an Elephant Can't Dance by Lou Gerstner. David's advice for junior people looking to get into the branding industry is to take advantage of the fact consultancies and client organizations are "just absolutely terrified about becoming relevant in the digital age." If you're young, he says, take advantage of the fact you understand social media, statistics, or data analysis, and use that knowledge as a way to open the door. To learn more about David, visit davidaaker.com. That URL will redirect you to his blog on the Prophet website, where you can also read about his latest books and find links to buy them. You can also follow David on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium.

Diego Segura is a design apprentice at Collins, an independent strategy and brand experience design company with offices in New York City and San Francisco. In this episode, Diego describes how he discovered graphic design, his decision to drop out of high school, and what it's like being an apprentice at a prestigious branding and design company.

This is the second part of a two-part series; the episode begins with a continuation of my conversation with Brian Collins in part one. Brian shares his side of Diego's story—how Diego first got in touch, how he became a full-time employee, and why, on one of their early days together, Brian took him out to run errands throughout New York City.

After a short intro from Brian, the interview with Diego begins. I was eager to get Diego's backstory—it's fascinating (and inspiring) to hear how he got from a small town outside Austin, Texas to Collins in New York City. Along the way, he emailed with Michael Beirut, did multiple remote internships, and wrote The Dropout Manifesto (a chronicle of [my] crazy junior year).

We also talked about the importance of agencies and design studios looking outside the traditional design schools, like SVA and RISD—schools Diego wasn't even aware of when he was in high school—for new talent.

I'm telling you now: If I was out to start a studio today, I would practically build it solely on young ambitious people led by a really great creative director, head of design. Because the level of talent who reaches out to me personally, because they see I'm the design apprentice on the [Collins] website—the level of talent is insane. They are so, so, so good. ... There's no doubt they can add value. It's just, they didn't come from the same places that all the other designers came from, and we've gotta be okay with that."

– Diego Segura

To learn more about Collins visit their website. You can learn more about Diego (and see some of his work) at diegosegura.me and you can follow him on Twitter. If you're interested in checking out Diego's book, The Dropout Manifesto, it's available on Amazon, as is his second book, To a Man Much Like Myself.

Dennis Hahn is Chief Strategy Officer at Liquid Agency, a brand experience, strategy, marketing, and design agency with offices in San Jose, Portland, and New York. Dennis is responsible for the methodologies Liquid uses to address the strategic challenges of clients like John Deere, HP, Microsoft, Motorola, Nasdaq, PayPal, and Walmart.

During the episode, you'll hear us reference a 2013 video of Dennis talking about brand experience, in which he says, "To activate your brand, you really first have to understand what the brand stands for. So, understanding the brand's meaning is a vital component of that. Once you've figured that out, then you can use the brand strategy as a filter for thinking about the different dimensions of the experience. And those dimensions can go into different areas, such as the digital experience, or the experience with employees, or the product experience, or even the service."

Dennis and I discussed the dimensions of brand experience he mentions in the video, as wells as Liquid's approach to creating a brand experience for clients, which includes a proprietary workshop approach they call "Swarming." Dennis describes Swarms as follows:

"Swarming is our workshop methodology, essentially. It's designed to attack a problem from a number of angles and unleashing the power of simultaneous collaboration between agencies and clients. It's really a co-creation model, and that's where we use the design thinking and lean startup principles to guide clients through that co-creation process."

We also spent some time talking about a related concept Liquid focuses on these days, brand culture, which Dennis says is "the best possible relationship that a brand can have with its customers and employees."

To learn more about Dennis, visit the Liquid site, where you can find his bio, some blog posts he's written, and more information about the agency and its approach.

Fabian Geyrhalter is the principal and founder of FINIEN, a Los Angeles-based branding agency. Fabian's also a prolific writer; you can find articles he's authored in Forbes, Inc., The Washington Post, Entrepreneur, and Mashable. He's also written two books: How to Launch a Brand, and his latest, Bigger Than This: How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand.

Fabian and I talked about his books, his agency, and the approach he uses with some clients to build out an entire brand platform from scratch in one very long day. We started off talking about his background as a designer and how it contributes to his work. He feels it helps him imagine the strategy coming to life in the real world-visually and verbally-which puts him "a couple of steps ahead."

After talking a little about the types of clients FINIEN helps, we got to a unique aspect of Fabian's process: the one-day strategy intensive. Throughout the day, he takes his clients through a series of exercises. As they work, they complete an interactive PDF on screen. At the end of the day, the PDF contains all the key elements of the brand platform: positioning, core values, philosophy, personality, mission, vision, target, and competitors.

"I figured, if I worked with startups, they are founders, they are entrepreneurs, they think very much like me; they want to get to the heart of their brands very quickly, and they don't have the time. Usually, literally, they don't have the time. They need to launch in a couple of weeks from now. Doing a couple-of-week exercise to talk about brand purpose, brand philosophy, and positioning is not going to happen with them." - Fabian Geyrhalter

Later in his process, he creates the brand's identity along with a variety of touchpoints needed to launch, which he refers to as the "brand atmosphere."

Next, we talked about Fabian's new book, Bigger Than This. He was inspired by brands like TOMS, which "are absolutely commodity-type products," yet consumers fall in love with them. He explored this phenomenon further, looking at many similar cases, and distilled eight "commodity brand traits." The book outlines each trait along with an example and some practical recommendations.

As usual, we wrapped up the conversation with some book recommendations and advice for junior people in the industry.

To learn more about Fabian, his branding agency, and his books, visit the FINIEN website. (Also, here's a hint: You can buy his books on Amazon, but if you want a signed copy of Bigger Than This, buy it through his website.)

It's the summer of 2021—one year since the murder of George Floyd. And if you’re wondering what that has to do with the season-four wrap-up of a podcast about branding, let me tell you: in early 2020 I had a plan for season four of How Brands Are Built. But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and protests around the world, my plan changed a bit. 2020 was already a pretty awful year for most people, and it just seemed to be getting worse and worse. So I started thinking about whether there was a way I could use this little platform of mine to do some good—or at least talk about something positive.

That led me to reach out to my most diverse set of guests yet, starting with Dr. Jason Chambers, who talked about the origins of racist brand names and what to do about them. I talked to female agency founders like Dava Guthmiller of Noise 13, Sunny Bonnell of Motto, and Emily Heyward of Red Antler about how they got started and the role of diversity in their agency cultures. The season ended with a two-part episode featuring Brian Collins and his agency's design apprentice, Diego Segura, who told me about one way to create opportunities for talented, but less privileged, designers and strategists. And along the way, I talked to Armin Vit of Brand New, Alina Wheeler, author of Designing Brand Identity, and Nirm Shanbhag of Sid Lee.

While I talked to guests about their agencies, books they’d written, or other topics specific to their areas of expertise, I also asked nearly all of them about what brands and branding professionals could be doing to improve the state of the world—in light of COVID-19, in light of racial injustice, and just in general. Are brands a force for good? Can they be? Should they try to be?

At the end of this episode, which features clips from every interview this season, I boil everything I heard and learned down into five ways brands—and branding professionals like you and me—can make the world a better place (sorry):

1. Be selective (and stick to your values)
2. Walk the talk
3. Wield your influence
4. Proactively pursue diversity
5. Don’t underestimate the power of your work

In the episode, I break down each of these ideas in detail.

Today's guest is Ken Pasternak, President of Two by Four, a full service advertising agency based in Chicago. On the episode, however, you'll hear me introduce Ken as President and COO of Marshall Strategy, a San Francisco-based brand identity and strategy firm he cofounded in 2002. A few months ago, Two by Four acquired Marshall Strategy, so Ken's role changed a bit. We recorded this conversation a little before that happened.

Ken leads major positioning, identity, naming, and brand architecture work. He's worked with clients like Apple, Symantec, MTV, Boeing, Sony, and UC Berkeley.

I've known Ken since 2007, and through the years we've partnered on quite a few naming and brand architecture projects. It was great to get to talk to an old friend and colleague-who also happens to be a brilliant brand strategist-and hear more about how he thinks about brands and brand experience.

We kicked off the conversation talking about Ken's interesting career path, which started out in Budapest. The common thread in his career has been storytelling, which took him from a degree in English literature to producing corporate videos, and eventually to brand strategy.

Next, Ken detailed his process for creating a great brand experience, including his definitions of brand and brand experience, and a few simple tools he uses with clients (including plotting potential brand experience touchpoints on a two-by-two with axes of impact versus effort).

Toward the end of the conversation, we talked about how Ken feels about Alaska Airlines acquiring Virgin America (hint: not great) and what they'll do to the brand. Then he recommended some books and gave his advice for new or junior brand strategists.

To learn more about Ken, visit the Two by Four and Marshall Strategy sites. I highly recommend you check out the Marshall Strategy blog, too-it's full of insightful, useful articles. Most recently, Ken's partner Philip, who you'll hear him mention during the episode, published a great article about what's changed-and what hasn't-in his over 30 years in the brand identity world.

Gareth Kay believes brands should show, not just tell Gareth Kay is cofounder of Chapter, a San Francisco-based creative studio. Before Chapter, he was Chief Strategy Officer at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the advertising agency known for work such as 1993's iconic "Got Milk?" campaign for the California Milk Processors Board. I was excited to talk to Gareth because, while he's a strategist, he doesn't come from the world of traditional brand consulting that I come from (and so many of my other guests come from). In fact, one of my first questions for him was, "What do you think the general perception of the brand consulting world is amongst people in the advertising world?" Gareth says advertising agencies are increasingly seeing clients that have already been through a brand consultancy, and "when [the brand consultancy's work] was good you would be a little bit miffed because [cracking the strategy] was something, as a strategist, you really loved doing." On the flip-side, he'd sometimes see brand consultancy work that looked "clever on a piece of paper but…frankly, it was un-executable or, worse still, was a piece of thinking that was clearly designed to get through the armies of different interests inside a client organization and it kind of got watered down…through rounds and rounds of meetings and consensus-building." I asked Gareth about an article he published in WARC, titled "The 'brand' word." When you think about how we throw the term [brand] about, more often than not we are describing something we do-a brand strategy or campaign, not the associations we are trying to create. … We use it too often to create a false sense of control and a mistaken belief that we manage the brand. The models we use reinforce this: the tools of temples and pyramids are about what we build, not how people respond to them. The tools we use to shape brands are not fit for purpose. They are used to create simplicity and consistency which run counter to a culture of complexity and change. This led us to a fascinating conversation on what agencies should be using instead of these "temples and pyramids." Gareth argues consultancies should:

• "Show the thing," a mantra at Chapter-essentially prototyping real-world applications to showcase brand ideas rather than trying to capture them with words alone, which he calls "a very lossy form of compression."
• Avoid wordsmithing. He quotes a friend, Russel Davies, "you'll be discussing whether a brand is funny or…humorous." "Is that really the best use of our time, of our money, of our resources?" he asks.

The brand model used at Chapter is a "Brand Operating System," the underlying code and principles that define everything a brand does. The framework includes three layers:

1. Belief: What does this brand genuinely believe in the world? This is the problem it's trying to solve or the opportunity it sees.
2. Purpose: What do you do as a brand given your belief?
3. Pursuits: Because we believe X (our Belief) and we're going to do Y about it in the world (our Purpose), we will do the following things. The Pursuits are normally three, action-oriented principles.

Gareth provided a detailed example of the Brand Operating System by talking through Chapter's work for Silent Circle. We ended the conversation talking about brands Gareth thinks get all the fundamentals right (Hiut Denim and Allbirds) and his advice to young strategists and planners. For more of Gareth's insights, read his posts on Medium and follow him on Twitter. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. Episode sponsors · Squadhelp. To begin a business name contest with hundreds of business naming experts, check out their services to get a fresh perspective on your company. · Rev.com. Rev offers fast, reliable, and accurate audio transcriptions. Right now, Rev is offering listeners $10 off their first order. Follow this link for your $10-off coupon.