Being different is not for the faint of heart

Around 15 years ago or so, when people hired A Hundred Monkeys to name their company, they would often say, “I’m looking for a name like Yahoo!”

That was around the time Yahoo! was considered to be the most valuable company in the world.

No one says they’re looking for a name like Yahoo! anymore.

Five years ago, I often heard, “I want a name like Uber.”

Of course, that was before one controversy led to another and everyone decided to #DeleteUber. Needless to say, I haven’t heard that one in awhile.

So when someone says, “I want to be like _____” what do they actually mean?

They’re saying: I want their success. I don’t just want to be a part of the conversation — I want to start it. I want to transform people’s lives the way they have. I want to play this game at the highest level.

They’re saying any one or all of these things. But in a way, they’re not really talking about the name at all. Or, at least, not in a way they could ever actually put their finger on.

See, what they’re responding to is the feeling that they’re experiencing something unlike anything they already know.

You can’t just be like that. You have to actually be that.

Before it was officially incorporated as Yahoo!, the world’s portal to the internet was called Jerry and Dave’s WWW Interface. Remember the 90s? When the internet was something you surfed? In the ecosystem as it existed back then, Yahoo! was different — very different. It was a proclamation! It had built-in punctuation! It was not an acronym. It did not simply describe being online.

Before it was Uber, the app that changed how people get from A to B in cities the world over was called UberCab. As anyone who ever tried to get a cab in San Francisco before Uber came along, there was nothing cab-like about this service. Dropping the Cab from the name helped to emphasize this. Uber alone was short and sweet — an increasingly important attribute for names that need to live within a set number of pixels.

It was Oscar Wilde who once said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” Of course, Wilde was inherently inimitable.

You can’t imitate originality. You have to be original.

Like authenticity, originality isn’t something you can appear to have—you either have it or you don’t. And you have to want to be different. Forget everything you learned in middle school about how to fit in. Then take a look at what makes your company uniquely yours and no one else’s.

In this way, naming has a lot in common with fashion. If you want to set trends, you need to be a little out there. You won’t always succeed (think: shoulder pads)—but taking the risk is necessary if you want to be a trendsetter.

Next come the fast followers — the people who don’t have what it takes to create trends, but are the first to recognize and reproduce them. This is a skill in its own right, one without the caché of the trendsetter. Then there’s everyone who’s late to the party—on-trend at best, at worst passé.

If you do your job right, your name won’t just be something new for the people you’re trying to reach — it’ll be something new for all of us — including you.