Dan’s Labyrinth: A Journey to the Center of Your Brand
A lot of people think naming is an eeny, meeny, miny, moe kind of proposition. You find something you like. It sticks, nobody screams. And your life returns to hellish normal.
If you’re just looking for a name, we know how to skate along the surface of the pond and catch a few choice morsels for you. Cool you’re done.
But if you’re thinking that your new name just might be the soft, juicy center of everything you do — the essence of the story you will be telling the world — you’re probably going to want a name that’s more than cool, something that causes a few more synapses to fire.
And you’re going to need some help finding where that luscious center of your brand is — you’re not going to find it just stumbling around. You’ll have better luck if you are open to making the naming process a bit more of a voyage of self-discovery — and if you have a decent guide.
If you’re ready, we call this deep naming. It doesn’t have to be Dostoevsky deep. But you do need to believe it’s out there somewhere and be willing to have yourself strapped to the top of a rocket.
We structure the process as a journey — a journey to what has to be an unknown destination. At the beginning of a naming project, there are a million possibilities. At the end, there is only one.
Our clients seek out our highly structured process because it builds in everything we have learned about naming. Having a clearly delineated path serves as a counterweight to naming’s inherent subjectivity. Getting completely lost is fun only for a little while.
Before we set out together, we want to get in tune with your point of view about the world and your business. To help us get some sort of compass reading, we ask you a set of deceptively simple questions about you, your business, your brand.
“It was like digging into a huge watermelon on a summer day, just breaking it down, piece by piece. They kept drawing us back and back, from the playground of our inner child to the reality of our business model. It was an almost mystical experience.”
— Gary Seifert, Director of Internet Services, 98.6
Our job is to open your eyes to new possibilities. We create rules like, don’t fall in love. We create objectives for the names to achieve so when we get to a place that looks like it could be the center of your brand, we can apply a few simple tests to confirm our intuition.
It is because you have put so much of yourself into the process — and you have encountered some completely unexpected ways to think about your business — that when you get to the destination, you are in a very different place than when you started.
At the end, the answer may feel obvious. But it was definitely not a straight line from A to B — you took a uniquely winding path. You couldn’t have gotten there any other way. Good thing you didn’t forget the breadcrumbs.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NAMING GOES DEEP?
PENROSE: How far upscale can you take a cosmetology school? Ask Jill and Burt Kohler, owners of the Kohler Academy in Scottsdale, Ariz. They got a cease and desist letter from a toilet company threatening to put them under if they didn’t change the school’s name. The hidden gift: they got to reimagine their identity. Penrose could easily be the name for an elite private school.
TIDEPOOL: Tidepools are wonderfully contemplative places to observe the workings of nature. Green Dot Diabetes was a new nonprofit that wanted to make all the industry-siloed data from diabetes monitors a completely open source proposition. The name Tidepool is completely non-obvious. It brings a warm and friendly image to people who are dealing with a disease that totally sucks.
INKLING: Over a Christmas vacation, we went deep with the senior team at Standard Nine, a company creating a platform to digitize college texts. Our goal was to capture the spirit that drove the need for the software. We wanted to get inside the experience and imagine the lightness of being a college student minus the heavy books. We found the name somewhere near the intersection of the love of learning and the idea of incredible lightness.
ITHAKA: This is a big nonprofit in the academic arena. Somebody on the client’s naming team had a fixation on a wonderful poem called Ithaka. The poem, by a Greek poet, treats the 10 year return home of Odysseus as a metaphor for learning and life. The name came up in an early meeting. We liked the idea that an organization could take the name of a poem to redefine its mission. It became obvious to everyone that Ithaka was the deepest, most evocative way to go.
