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00:00:01
How Do You Find a "Brand New Name"?
53 Plays5 years ago
Listeners, did you know we're facing a naming drought? It's true!
Thinking up terrific ideas for your next branding project is the fun part. Finding an idea that hasn't been taken yet . . . well, that's the not so fun part. This challenge, among other branding issues, is why we're welcoming Jeremy Miller, founder of Sticky Branding, and author of Brand New Name.
Listen in for Jeremy's tips, to hear his story on how he got started in branding, and how the real genius ideas may be uncovered by your own team.
Want to connect with Jeremy online?
And be sure to check out Jeremy's books:
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Transcript
Introduction to B2B Mix Show
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Mix Show with Elena and Stacey. In each episode, we'll bring you ideas that you can implement in your sales and marketing strategy. We'll share what we know along with advice from industry experts who will join us on the show. Are you ready to mix it up? Let's get started.
Meet Jeremy Miller
00:00:19
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Stacey Jackson. And I'm Elena Jackson. We're the co-founders of Jax Marketing. In case you still haven't heard, we are also sisters. Stacey, what's today's topic about? Today we are talking to Jeremy Miller. He is the author of
00:00:37
Speaker
brand new name, and Sticky Branding. And he's also the founder of Sticky Branding. But Alaina, I know you're going to introduce him in a moment. But I bring him up to say that we're talking about his book and his tips for creating a brand.
Challenges in Branding
00:00:53
Speaker
Alaina, what do you think about branding? Is it easier today? Harder? What?
00:00:58
Speaker
Well, I definitely think it's harder because there's so many different companies out there and with the internet and everything, there's a lot of things that come into play. And when you're trying to find a name, it can be fun and exciting, but then you can also find it frustrating. So there's a lot of things that can kind of get you going and then bring you down when you're trying to get your, your branding off and on the right foot.
00:01:25
Speaker
That is true. And Jeremy's book, which I did read, Brand New Name, covers some of that. And he talks about that today in our podcast. So, Elena, why don't you introduce Jeremy? Jeremy Miller is a brand strategist, author, speaker, and the founder of brand building agency Sticky Branding.
00:01:42
Speaker
Jeremy entered the world of branding out of necessity. His family's business had nearly hit rock bottom so he was forced to review and rethink about how his company was run. Jeremy found that the issue wasn't the sales team nor was it the marketing process. The issue came down to the brand. His company's customers
00:02:02
Speaker
just couldn't distinguish his company from the competition. So Jeremy worked to reposition the brand and business successfully propelling it into growth mode.
Jeremy's Book on Naming Strategies
00:02:12
Speaker
And by 2013, he sold his family's business to focus exclusively on building brands.
00:02:18
Speaker
Jeremy embarked on the decade long study of how companies grow recognizable, memorable brands. He and his team at Sticky Branding have interviewed hundreds of companies across several industries to discover how companies grow Sticky Brands. Jeremy is the author of Sticky Branding and brand new name. Jeremy, welcome to the B2B mix show. It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the warm introduction.
00:02:42
Speaker
We really do appreciate you joining us. I think I read in your bio in the back of brand new name that you even beat out Oprah on a bestseller list. So that's pretty exciting. Wow. That goes on the resume. Yeah, that's a point of pride. So yeah, sticky branding when it launched was a number one bestseller. And we actually sold out all the hard copies that the publisher had printed in the first four hours. And that shocked everybody. Wow.
00:03:08
Speaker
Wow. Unfortunately, they didn't have any more copies for week two, but I got one week on the desktop. There you go. In the book somewhere did it say, you hit a car and you hit a car. Is that why they would just fool off the shelf? Exactly. You just have to put extra promotions and really engage your fans.
00:03:27
Speaker
Well, we are excited to talk to you today about your book Brand New Name. So can you give our listeners a little bit of background about that book and who it's for? Sure. Well, technically it's for everybody. Every entrepreneur, every business owner, every marketer has to name something at least once. You think of it, you had to name your company name, you've had to name your podcast. These are all the types of things that we do. And this is an activity that so much of us
00:03:54
Speaker
do, but we don't actually think about it all that often until we actually have to do it. And when we have to do it, we realize it's an incredibly painful process. And that's really the origin of where this book came from. As you mentioned in the intro, I am a serial entrepreneur. I joined my family's business in 2004. I started Sticky Branding. I've gone through multiple iterations of my own business as well as working with lots of clients. And the naming process has always been this painful
00:04:23
Speaker
black art. And every time I went online or went to the bookstore to read what was available, all the content really was not very helpful. They would tell you what a great name should look like. This is what Apple is like, or this is what Amazon or Hulu. But they wouldn't tell you how to do that. And so what I set out to do was to really demystify it, create a proven step-by-step process that anyone can use to create an unforgettable brand name.
00:04:53
Speaker
in three to four weeks.
00:04:55
Speaker
You know, it's funny you mentioned that we probably went through some of this when we were naming our podcast and you're absolutely right. We would think, Oh yeah, we got the perfect name. This is good. And then we'd go to look it up and everything up. Nope. Somebody's got it. Or somebody else is using it. Or this was too close to this other one. And it was just such a frustrating process. And I know everybody has to go through that. And that's one of the big challenges you start talking about. And at the beginning of your book, right? Is that, you know, getting that.
00:05:24
Speaker
Finding that name is just one of the biggest things that you are going to have to overcome. So what is some advice that you would give people when they're feeling frustrated, when they're starting things up about and getting that new branding under underway to get to that point of rebranding the project and what kind of things should they be doing? Well, I think you're nailing the key issue that we face. Coming up with a great name is not the hard part. It's finding an available name.
00:05:54
Speaker
And this is why naming has become such a headache. If you think back to say our parents or our grandparents generation, they could pick a name and all it had to fit was the local market that they were in. Right. Completely different. Now we're competing on iTunes and Google and you might, or I'm here in Toronto, Canada, and I have to worry what's going on.
00:06:17
Speaker
in San Francisco or London, England or anywhere else. The world has flattened and everyone is competing for the same names. And for the first time in human history, we are experiencing a naming drought.
00:06:32
Speaker
we are actually running out of names with trademark basically the entire merriam webster dictionary and everything in between apple and caterpillar all these names have been co opted by companies so what does that mean for you and i well the first thing is.
00:06:50
Speaker
patience if you are going into this and obviously anyone who's building a business or brand is gonna have to name it then you have to have a process you're gonna have to think through. I am going into this expecting it's going to be challenging so i need a process and i have to work on it to make sure i get something that i'm proud of.
00:07:09
Speaker
And so part of what brand new name is doing is to support that. And the key to that and the key to overcoming the naming drought is you need to generate lots of ideas. Sometimes you need to generate 50 ideas or 50 names just to find one that's available. And that's the discouraging part. But if you can come up with lots and lots of options in a short period of time, then when it comes down to testing and selecting, it's less frustrating because
00:07:39
Speaker
Oh, that one's taken fine. You knock it off. You move it on. You call it a non starter and you go to the next one on your list. And if you've got a good process and you generate lots of names, then hopefully out of that you're going to have anywhere from a half a dozen to a dozen that you can test and select and push to the finish line.
00:07:58
Speaker
I think that's one place where we kind of messed up. We would have just a couple. We come up with a couple and then we go look it up and then we'd be like, dang it, it's already taken. And so our process might've taken a little bit longer because we didn't get a whole list of 50 cause we were like, oh, this is clever. Nobody will have this. And do you find a lot of people kind of go that process the wrong way like that?
00:08:22
Speaker
Yeah, if you start selecting and filtering from the beginning, it has two negative ramifications. One, it's defeating to find out that's already taken, but two, you also limit yourself from getting beyond the obvious ideas. And so what I encourage people to do is get beyond yourself and create a small sprint team or a creative team to help you.
00:08:43
Speaker
And in that, you want to get anywhere from three to 10 people. This can be your employees. That's an ideal if you've got a smaller, medium sized business or recruit some friends or partners or freelancers, people that you work with that know you and know your business and ask them to participate. And the challenge would be to over the course of five days, get everyone on your team to generate five potential names per day for five days.
00:09:10
Speaker
And the thing that's so cool about this is it creates exponential ideas. I worked with a small organization in Ottawa just before Christmas, and they had 20 people participating in their sprint, and over five days they generated 1,048 names. Oh, wow. And the shocking one here is there was only 37 duplicates. Really?
00:09:35
Speaker
That's crazy. So what happens in the way the brand new name process goes is you get everyone on the sprint gets an idea, gets an exercise and the challenge five good names. And then you get to see all the names that were created yesterday. You share the list with everyone. That way you can build on each other's ideas. And this is the idea where rather than filtering yourself and say, oh, that's not available.
00:09:57
Speaker
You put that out there and then look at it tomorrow and see what other ideas you can generate. And if you keep challenging yourself over the span of, say, five days to generate as many ideas as you can, then you actually are working from a position of strength when it comes to selecting ideas. Hey, folks, let's take a break to hear about today's sponsor. And we are back.
00:10:23
Speaker
I like what you said about embracing employees in the branding project and helping unlocking the creative genius of employees is what you had written in the book was one of your aha moments about the branding process. When you're selecting who in your company to participate, do you think it should be an open process or from people from varying levels of the organization? Are you mainly looking at your subject matter experts? What's the best practice for getting the best results?
00:10:52
Speaker
Sure. So let's take a step back just for the listeners that are unaware of what the book is. So what brand new name is, is a brand naming sprint. It's done in three steps. Step one is to create a naming strategy. What are the objectives for defining success? Think of this as your blueprint. You wouldn't build a house without a blueprint and you shouldn't name your brand without a strategy.
00:11:13
Speaker
So you define that first and foremost. Step two is the five-day naming sprint, which gets everybody involved to generate as many ideas as possible. And then step three is a set of exercises and tools to test and select and whittle that list down to say
Employee Engagement in Branding
00:11:30
Speaker
three that you can choose at the end. Now,
00:11:34
Speaker
Who to involve in this? The key to the sprint is in employee co-creation, getting as many people involved as possible. Now, what we like to do is we segment the group into two groups. You've got your core team or your sprint team. My recommendation for that is to choose people who are creative, connected to the organization, and that you know will contribute and put time into it. This is going to be something that matters to them.
00:12:03
Speaker
And in that team should be at a very minimum the business owner of the person responsible for the brand and any core people that are going to be making the final choice because if they're contributing names they feel the pain of the process the other.
00:12:21
Speaker
side of this though is involve all of your employees and gamify that the difference between the sprint team and everyone else is a sprint team carries a quota five good names per day per person. But if you put it out to your organization and you put prizes on it, then that suddenly gets everybody in your whole company connected to the brand. And that actually creates so much empowerment and energy.
00:12:42
Speaker
I love that too because a lot of people are focused on the corporate culture, your company culture, and how you relate to that. I think that this kind of helps employees have a pathway into building up that company culture and relating to the company because they feel like they're a part of it. They're a part of something that feels bigger to them than just doing their day in and day out job.
00:13:10
Speaker
What are the things that HR and marketing need to be doing once that is all kind of put together do you have any tips for them on moving that brand forward. Internally and externally with the communication while you're doing the sprinter after you got your name maybe both.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah. Well, during the sprint, I think communication is key. And so what I like to do is to gamify it. So let all the people know we are creating a new name and we need your help. And the reason we're doing this is, say, to change the company name. I'll give you an example. I worked with an organization called A1 Shipping Supplies, which was a third generation family business and obviously named for the Yellow Pages.
00:13:54
Speaker
But in 2015, that's an embarrassing name. And so all the employees got behind this. They said, yeah, we need to change the name. We got to stop calling ourselves that. And so when you communicate that to everybody and then ask for their help, that's the first step. The second is reward it and celebrate it. And so one of the things we often recommend people do is when somebody contributes in an idea, reward it. Most people never have an opportunity to do this.
00:14:22
Speaker
So the firm in Ottawa that I mentioned earlier, what they did is anyone who submitted five names in a day got a $5 Timmies card. And so Timmies is Tim Hortons here in Canada. It's our Duncan coffee shop that everybody loves. But you could do Amazon cards, Duncan cards, Starbucks cards, whatever it is, give someone a reward for participating and make it public. And now that suddenly creates an energy and excitement.
00:14:50
Speaker
And then when you choose a name, make a party of it, celebrate it. It's the moments that reward people for both participation and engagement that allow them to experience the brand. And for most employees, they've never been given an opportunity to do anything strategic or involved in the business. And the more we can connect people to helping them contribute ideas and solve problems,
00:15:15
Speaker
the more they engage not only to the brand, but to each other and the business. And this is, I think, the golden opportunity for so many companies is how do you unlock the creative genius of all the people inside your business?
00:15:28
Speaker
to grow your brand. If we're dealing with a world of constant disruption, you look at all the chaos going on in the markets right now with coronavirus and the stock market and oil price and all this kind of stuff, this is going to cause disruption to our businesses. But rather than looking externally for someone to give you the answer, why not look internally and leverage all the smarts and capabilities that your employees have to help you navigate and grow?
00:15:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. I think a lot of times, especially as the business is growing, maybe as owners or executives, people want to say, well, we're growing, so we've got to go outside to these experts. But sometimes the best ideas will come externally, I mean, internally from your employees who have been so dedicated to the company.
00:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I truly believe that. And I think if you're getting if you're constantly getting external ideas, chances are you're getting your competitors ideas, right? Someone else figured it out. Now someone else's marketing and selling it to you.
00:16:26
Speaker
Elena and I are sisters, if we didn't mention that. And we also grew up around our dad's business and Elena and I own our own business. So we understand some of the ups and downs about working with family. And I read your story in the book, Brand New Name. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about how that experience with your family business led you into a career in branding?
Jeremy's Personal Branding Journey
00:16:48
Speaker
Sure. Well, I think everything in my career has come out of necessities, the mother of all invention. And what happened in my case was, so my parents ran a IT staffing or a recruiting agency. And they founded the business in 1989. And when I was in high school at some point, I don't fully remember the story, but I know my mom's told it a few times, where she said, I want to declare, when I grow up, I'm going to take over the family business.
00:17:17
Speaker
And I think they both panicked a little bit and they reached out into their friends and said, all right, our kids 15 or 16, but he's saying he wants to come into the family business. What do we do?
00:17:30
Speaker
And the advice they received from their friends was you want to create some barriers to entry. You don't want your kid to be the lucky sperm that feels entitled and just gets the keys to the castle. So for my brother and I, they set a set of criteria. We had to have a university education. We had to work in the real world for at least four years, have relevant experience, and we had to apply. There had to be an available job for us.
00:17:57
Speaker
And so four years to the day, I knocked on the door. I had a previous career in the software industry and I said, I'm ready to come on. And there was the space and time and availability for that. And so I came on as the director of sales and marketing.
00:18:10
Speaker
That was my dream come true. But this was 2004. And so in the HR recruiting industry, it's a cyclical business. Typically, when the economy is hot, everything booms. And when the economy crashes, the job market crashes. And so we go up and down. And in the early 2000s, you had a whole series of issues that slowed down the economy from Y2K ending to the dot-com bubble bursting and 9-11. And we thought all of that had ended
00:18:39
Speaker
when I came on board.
00:18:41
Speaker
But at the end of that first year, we had actually gone backwards in sales. And it was a painful, painful year. I remember it got so bad that I was running a sales team and we would implement pit time where we actually had the salespeople doing six hours of dedicated call calling a week just to keep the business going. And I remember sitting down with both of my parents after the Christmas party that year and saying, if this is what it's like to be in a family business,
00:19:10
Speaker
I can't do this. This is absolutely horrible. I need to go back and get a normal job. And this is when I probably got the best advice of my career.
00:19:20
Speaker
My dad said to me, it's not about the business you've built. It's about the business you're building. What are we going to build next? And that was the moment they gave me permission to reconsider what was going on. And I took a step back and I looked at our business. I looked at our customers. I looked at our industry and I realized what was the problem with our sales issues wasn't our salespeople or our sales process. It was our brand. Our customers couldn't distinguish us from anyone else.
00:19:47
Speaker
But I had a problem with this. I was a sales guy through and through. I didn't know anything about branding, so I read everything I could get my hands on. And the challenge I found was all the books that I was coming across were written for big companies. And I was a small company. I had a marketing budget in the sales team, but I couldn't do what Apple or Nike does. And so I was trying to translate all of these things into my business, and I discovered it was a ton of fun. It was something I was passionate about.
00:20:15
Speaker
And so that was the catalyst that got me into the world of branding and that from that moment on, I was hooked and I started, I rebranded my family's business. I conducted a long-term research study and as soon as I actually sold the family business, I was able to use the proceeds of that to help fund the research to write my first book, Sticky Branding.
00:20:37
Speaker
You mentioned the quote I was going to bring up that your dad had said that, you know, thinking about the evolution and what are we going to build next? I think a lot of companies and businesses kind of get in there in like a routine almost and don't think about that. What are we going to build next kind of thinking and they don't think about it as an evolution. Do you, do you think that that's an issue that a lot of companies face? I mean, they're not always looking back and thinking about how they've evolved.
00:21:06
Speaker
Do you find that an issue? Yes, for sure. We'll look at, there's lots of lost brands, Kodak, Blackberry, others that they couldn't pivot when the industry changed around them and they couldn't get to the next stage. But I think it's especially true in family businesses because of the family dynamic. If you've got a strong founder, a strong leader, the next generation
00:21:31
Speaker
may not have permission to tinker with dad or mom and dad's dream and baby. Yeah. And that disk and you see the stories like you've got a 80 year old founder who's holding on to everything for dear life and caretaker children who can't deviate even though they see everything falling apart around them. Right. Yeah. We've definitely seen that in smaller family owned businesses because you don't want to offend a lot of times because this is you don't want to tell anyone, you know,
00:22:01
Speaker
Their baby's ugly in a way or that you're not you're just not paying attention because it can just be taken in such a negative way especially in those family businesses it can be a tough situation to be in to bring that up as part of your family history and
00:22:17
Speaker
And a lot of members work together, so it's it's personal as well as business. So I understand it, but it's good when families can have that honest conversation about, hey, guys, we need to evolve as a company and it doesn't take away what we've done as a family.
00:22:33
Speaker
Right. And it's humbling. I have to say I am extremely lucky. I'm very involved in the family business world and 60% of sticky branding clients are actually family enterprises. And what my parents gave me was truly a gift because they went in when I started with a very clear personal objective. And again, I didn't know this till later on, but their goal was to create a next generation entrepreneur versus a caretaker. And
00:23:01
Speaker
And it was interesting watching the dynamics because my father and I have very similar driver entrepreneurial instincts, but I would try something. I would ask for permission for something and I'd start doing it and his first reaction would be, no, that's not the way we do things.
00:23:16
Speaker
And my mom would be there saying, no, no, let's give him rope to see if he can do it. And so they were giving me permission and mentoring me to allow me to grow. But I never had enough rope to hurt the business. But there was the tension between the two of them to relinquish control, to allow these things to happen, to allow the learning to happen. And I think they were just so progressive because I don't know many founders that will do that. Yeah. Yeah.
00:23:46
Speaker
Alaina and I also worked for a family business as employees of another family. And we saw some of that tension there where, you know, maybe we don't want to upset dad, so let's not.
00:24:02
Speaker
Let's not say anything or do anything. That becomes a sad story because now the parents are creating caretakers. Yeah, but it ended up good for those guys. They did sell their business and made a lot of money, so they got through it. I was thinking in the book, you had mentioned that people buy based on you go to the store, you pick out your brand of
00:24:24
Speaker
detergent because that's the brand you always buy. But do you think that companies like Amazon Wish, eBay, whatever are kind of changing that because you can just go look for the cheapest price thing somewhere and it's kind of commoditizing? I guess that's the point of building a great brand though. Right. I think there's multiple kinds of shopping. So
00:24:49
Speaker
What I would suggest is we have behaviors that influence our purchase decisions. So in many cases, when you go to the grocery store, you've got your routine. You might start in the produce section and you go to the certain types of fruits and vegetables you buy, and then you walk the aisles and you get the things that you want. And you're probably not thinking about it all that much. And so where you have relationships is where you have a connection to a specific brand. There's comfort in that.
00:25:16
Speaker
So if you're choosing detergent, maybe you choose tide or maybe it's gain, but you're probably not going to think about it. You just go to the island, take the detergent that you always buy.
00:25:27
Speaker
What Amazon is doing though is creating a slightly different shopping experience. Instead of being brand or category specific, you become looking for specific things that will solve your problem and you are using different signals to make choices. It could be the picture, it could be the rating, it could be the price. So if you needed to buy say plates, you probably don't really care what Amazon reseller is selling them.
00:25:56
Speaker
You're just looking at, is it the right color? Is it the right price point? Does it have enough five-star reviews? And if those check boxes are there, you make a decision. And so Amazon and Google and these big tech brands are starting to condition specific buying behaviors. And as brand marketers and as people trying to navigate this ever-changing world, what we have to recognize is
00:26:22
Speaker
every place that you sell has different rules and you've got to play to those rules in order to create your own competitive advantage. So if you just are known for like your own name and people are shopping on habit in a retail location, that may not translate to e-commerce. Good point. Well, they've definitely trained me on how to shop. Me too.
00:26:50
Speaker
Amazon Prime, I can't live without you. So we have one last question is a fun question. But before we get to that, do you have any other tips that you would like to share with our audience?
Building a Remarkable Brand
00:27:01
Speaker
I think the one thing I always like to say is in all of my research that the companies that grow the best brands make a choice to grow a great brand. And branding is a decision that you are going to serve your clients brilliantly. You are going to stand in the market and you're going to take pride in your company and your customers. And it's the companies and the founders and the teams that make that choice are the ones that put the most time into choosing the name,
00:27:29
Speaker
creating great content to doing exceptional customer service. So my encouragement to each and every one of everyone listening today is choose your brand, choose to do something that's remarkable because I guarantee that's going to come back to you with so much return, not only that emotional positive connection of pride, but in the great work that you can do for your customers and they will reward you with more revenue and more profit.
00:27:55
Speaker
Okay, so here is the fun question. If you weren't doing what you're doing now, which writing books and heading up the sticky branding, what would your dream job be? I can't write books and speak. If that's your dream job.
00:28:12
Speaker
I actually have my dream job. I really do have my dream. I really do have my dream job. I get to write books, speak at conferences and spend my days ideating and doing what I love. So I really wouldn't change much. But hey, if I get to redo it all over and I can spend my time at the ski hill and be a snowboarder, ski bomb, that's fun too. I would be OK with that. That sounds fun.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah, like I'm very good at apreski. Well, it sounds like you've already got your dream job, so that's awesome. And it's funny, a lot of the entrepreneurs that we've interviewed all pretty much say, I've already got my dream job. Isn't that why we are entrepreneurs? Yes, definitely. Yes.
00:28:59
Speaker
Thank you for joining us. We really do appreciate you talking to us about branding in your book, Brand New Name. If our audience wants to get in touch with you or follow you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Well, if you Google Sticky Branding, you will find me the website stickybranding.com. I'm on all the social networks at Sticky Branding, and the books Brand New Name and Sticky Branding are available wherever books are sold. But Amazon, that's the fastest place to go, right? And we'll include that in our show notes. Wonderful. Thank you. All right.
00:29:28
Speaker
So make sure you go follow and connect with Jeremy. And if you want to get in touch with me or Stacey, you can hit us up on social. On Twitter, you can find Stacey at Stacey underscore Jax. That's S-T-A-C-Y underscore J-A-X. And you can find me at Elena underscore Jax. That's A-L-A-N-N-A underscore J-A-X. And if you're not a Twitter fan, look us up on LinkedIn. And finally, don't forget, you can also leave us a voicemail on the Anchor mobile app or on our anchor.fm show page. Thanks for joining, guys.
00:30:01
Speaker
The B2B Mix Show is hosted by Stacy Jackson and Elena Jackson of, you guessed it, Jackson Marketing. If you need help with your B2B inbound marketing efforts, visit us at JacksonMarketingServices.com.