“Professionals employed to provide you with [company] names usually [present] a thousand concepts. It’s not simply a day of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good concepts. It’s … scratching beneath the floor,” Rob Meyerson, founder and principal of Heirloom, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.
The impartial model strategist was previously head of naming at Hewlett-Packard and director of verbal identification at Interbrand.
Within the interview, he argues that constructing a model requires hanging a steadiness “between becoming in and standing out.”
Additional, he discusses the professionals and cons of making an authentic title for a monetary advisory versus utilizing the founder’s personal title.
His purchasers have ranged from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500 corporations, together with Activision, AT&T, Intel, Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co.
Based mostly within the San Francisco Bay Space, the place lots of his know-how purchasers are positioned, Meyerson additionally talks in regards to the good and dangerous causes for renaming a agency and opines on Riskalyze changing its name to Nitrogen.
Creator of “Brand Naming: The Complete Guide to Creating a Name for Your Company, Product or Service,” Meyerson has a brand new e book due within the fourth quarter or early 2024: the sixth version of the Amazon bestseller, “Designing Model Id” (Wiley), co-authored with Alina Wheeler.
ThinkAdvisor lately interviewed Meyerson, who was talking by cellphone from Pacifica, California.
He declares that “branding is the promise the corporate makes [and] the nice will it has constructed through the years.”
Listed here are excerpts from our interview:
THINKADVISOR: Monetary advisors have to differentiate themselves from each other. Why is it important to place nice effort into naming their firms?
ROB MEYERSON: Consider it as funding. Constructing a robust model is vital. And the title is a comparatively low-cost advertising expense with doubtlessly very excessive influence.
It’ll make adverts more practical and [can] final for the size of the corporate. So getting it proper upfront makes a number of sense.
Getting it mistaken may be very, very costly if it leads to your getting sued or having to rename or rebrand a number of years after launching.
Why would you get sued?
In case you use a reputation that’s similar with or too much like one other firm that’s offering related items and providers, they’ll ship you a stop and desist letter to cease utilizing that title.
So that you or your lawyer ought to do some vetting to verify from a authorized standpoint that you simply’re ready to make use of or personal the title.
Ought to you’ve a model technique in thoughts earlier than you select a reputation?
Sure. Ideally, it kinds the inspiration of the naming temporary that ought to show you how to decide what sorts of names are going to work — both names that sound like monetary advisories or names that sound utterly totally different and can show you how to stand out.
The naming temporary consists of the concepts you wish to convey by means of the title. A part of that’s taking a look at rivals’ names and understanding how one can stand out.
It additionally has the sorts of names that might get extra consideration or names that might mix in, which might make individuals have hassle remembering them.
What’s essentially the most difficult a part of naming or renaming a agency?
Partially, it’s naming the agency! Professionals employed to provide you with names usually [present] a thousand concepts. So it’s not simply a day of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good concepts.
It’s days or even weeks of scratching beneath the floor for attention-grabbing concepts.
An enormous cause we do that’s due to the authorized constraints round branding. You wish to keep away from the numerous names which have already been utilized in totally different industries.
Please speak additional about developing with an authentic title for a monetary apply.
It lets you categorical some artistic concepts. It offers you slightly extra flexibility, together with at level of exit.
You may say one thing about your positioning within the market, whether or not about ease of doing enterprise or innovation or a suggestion of scale [etc.].
The monetary providers business is conservative. Ought to an advisory’s title be conservative, or are you able to be artistic and provides it a kicky title?
It’s a query that goes deeper than naming. Anytime you’re constructing a model, you’re attempting to strike a steadiness between becoming in and standing out.
How a lot you stand out is dependent upon the way you’re attempting to place your agency within the market.
Suppose you wish to stand out?
In case you’re attempting to do issues otherwise and need that to be clear to your clients and prospects, you generally is a little much less conservative and provide you with a reputation that may show you how to be seen as cutting-edge and breaking the mould.
However for those who’re not doing these issues, if yours is simply, type of, the monetary providers agency that you simply’d count on, you then would in all probability wish to keep on with a reputation that matches in slightly higher within the market.
Many practices use the proprietor’s title of their agency title, corresponding to “Joe Smith Wealth Administration.” Your ideas?
Finally, it is dependent upon what the individual’s title is. Will it make you stand out and differentiate? If it’s a reputation that sounds much like [many] different individuals’s names on the market, it’s not an incredible concept.
But it surely does assist to maintain the deal with you and your private model. So for those who’re a one-person operation attempting to construct your individual model, it will probably assist.
On this context, what are another concerns?
Is your individual title easy sufficient that individuals will be capable of learn it, pronounce it, spell it? However is it distinctive sufficient? If it’s, say, “Joe Smith,” effectively, there are [numerous] Joe Smiths on the market.
