So stop trying so hard. The best way to be interesting is to DO something interesting. Instead of trying to find the shortest, easiest path for your branding message into people’s brains, create some fresh neural circuitry. Instead of telling people to get off their butts, Volkswagen actually made them get off their butts by giving them extra work to do.

Why would you take the stairs if you could take the escalator? Because walking on stairs that were turned into piano keys was a lot more fun.

Playing with people’s expectations is a game that any company can play. Take a cue from the bars on the Spree in Berlin. Guess what? None of them have names. So you have to do some exploring to find a friend and who knows what you’ll find along the way? Making life interesting by making it a little difficult is practiced to a T by Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco, the reincarnation of a Prohibition-era speakeasy. No sign to let you know you have arrived. And if you visit the website you will not even find an address. Do you think that makes it more attractive or less attractive?

The most basic life rules are echoed in the most basic branding rules. Nothing worth having comes easy. Then anybody can get it. And if anybody can get it, how valuable can it really be? Any girl worth kissing is going to be hard to kiss. It’s about desire. And if branding isn’t about creating desire, then what is it about? Why do you think there was a line for Orchestra’s Mailbox iPhone app? Because the developers were afraid the crush of expected users would break the servers? Maybe. More likely it was so headlines like this would appear on blogs all over the web: “Estimate Orchestra’s Mailbox App Waiting Time” or “Mailbox App Gets 800,000-Person-Long Waiting List With Promise Of ‘Inbox Zero.’”

This must be good.

Orchestra gave people some work to do. The work was figuring out how to get a better place in line. We are wired to chase things that retreat from us. It’s the exact opposite of what most companies do, which is to make everything easy as pie so you don’t need a ladder to get to the fruit, which is usually parked right in front of your nose. But if you can pick the apple any time, why do it now? Put it in your calendar for the day after tomorrow, or how about never?

If you share our belief that great branding starts with knowing what makes people tick, drop us a line — http://www.ahundredmonkeys.com/contact-us

If you haven’t read it, here are the Cliffs Notes:
Test your ideas before you pour money into them. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), then test and iterate it rapidly. Pivot if necessary. (This is admittedly a gross simplification, so if you’re looking for higher resolution, read the book.)

You don’t know until you try…

Considering the vast majority of startups fail, it’s easy to understand why Lean Startup methodology has spread so wildly. The problem is, a lot of people interpret “lean” as stripping your product naked and throwing it into the woods. Of all the things left out of a lean process, branding is usually one of the first things to go. This is a big mistake.

It’s a mistake because you have a brand whether you like it or not. It’s a lot like a personality in that regard. If you say someone doesn’t have a personality, you’re really just saying they’re boring. With your brand, this personality is the feelings and experiences people have when they interact with your product or service. People still have experiences and expectations when they’re interacting with your MVP.

Early on in the development process, the main role of branding is helping users understand what you’re doing and why they should care. You’re trying to find your voice. If you neglect branding at this stage, you’re building and iterating without factoring in how customers will experience and understand your product in the real world. The feedback you’re getting is tainted.

The little things can make a big difference

If Lean is all about building, measuring and learning, you should be doing the same thing with your brand. You should be doing Lean branding. Don’t worry about the standard branding deliverables that a lot of people get stuck on. No, you don’t need letterhead or a style guide yet. Hell, you might not even need a logo. Lean branding should be about understanding and learning from your audience. Do users get the offering? Do they respond to the way you’re messaging? You’re looking for the live wires–what generates passion, frustration, excitement? What gets people going? Play around, see what gets a reaction.

What you learn from a Lean branding process makes you much more informed when you build out your full brand. You know your audience. You know what relationship you want to have with them and what gets them excited. Now when you’re naming and designing and writing you have clear communication goals. You’re not doing a big reveal of your brand with little-to-no idea of how it’s going to be perceived by your audiences. You’ve done the work in the trenches, you already know how they’re going to react.

When you know where you’re going, it’s easy to be confident.

Great brands are great because they connect with us on a human level. They speak our language. Lean branding is a way to start the conversation with your audience and begin to build a relationship with them in a low risk, high reward way.

If you want to talk more about Lean branding, contact us here.

Now go away!

When you do brand strategy consulting, seeing bad branding hurts just a little bit more. You have more empathy for how people deal with the visual and verbal assault they are under all day and all night. The first line of defense people have is to put up a wall and hide.

People put up walls to protect themselves. Against people they don’t like, things they’re afraid of, stuff they don’t want to hear about. Screening your calls—that’s a wall. Not watching the news—that’s a wall. Not saying hello to people—that’s a wall. A wall is a way of saying “enough!!*%*#—I don’t want you in my life, I don’t need you in my life. I don’t even know who you are.” Sometimes this behavior is self-defeating but generally people are prepared to pay the price.

People put up walls to protect themselves from companies, too. Any company that puts an insert in my New Yorker, you’re dead. The first thing I do is rip out all the inserts. I do have to admit that one of them made it over the wall last night. It was an insert for Marc Maron’s new show on IFC that caught my eye as I was giving it the heave ho. I read the entire thing, but only because I’m a big fan of his interviews. So even when people put up a high wall, there is hope for companies.

There was a time when this wasn’t necessary. In the old, old days, when a peddler arrived at your door with pots and pans and combs and mirrors, there was no need for a wall. He might have been the only person you saw that week. He was both the program and the commercials. But these days we need pretty high walls. There are so many incoming messages that we need a way to control the volume. Fewer and fewer people are watching old fashioned television where they pour the commercials right into your head. When you watch a show on your computer or with the help of a DVR, the odds shift a little in your favor.

Good show, awful branding. Except the other night I was watching Mad Men on Comcast On Demand and they actually tried to force me to watch the commercials. I was incensed, but they actually had me watching the stupid commercials where they use the characters from the show to sell you Lincolns–a very unclassy technique on a very classy show. But AMC comes on like a bunch of carnival hustlers, so that is not surprising. Good show, bad branding, awful on-air promotion.

Are your favorite brands guilty of this? You and I could teach these people how to make it over the wall, but why should we give away our secrets? You don’t have to do brand strategy consulting to figure out what’s going on. The more they know about us, the harder they try to find new ways to influence our behavior. Now when I buy gas at the Shell station down the street, they make me push an extra button to tell them I am not even vaguely interested in getting Safeway reward points when I buy gas. They make me push the button every time, like they are hoping that I will miss a beat and say YES when I always tell them NO.

This is part of a series called Branding is Just Like Life. This admirable exercise in restraint was brought to you by A Hundred Monkeys. We build ladders to help you make it over the wall.

Approach

PulseTracer came to us with a multi-faceted naming problem. They had tried to rename their company and product on their own but all the names they came up with seemed to only fit one use case. Our approach was focused on finding higher ground. We needed to find a name that was big enough to fit the features and aspirations of a complex brand.

More important than all the sensors and technology was the role we wanted to play in people’s lives. So while the technology might change and new products might surface, the brand’s top level communication with customers could be consistent. Working through our naming process, we zeroed in on Basis. The team liked the name because it symbolized a basis for wellness. It alluded to the underlying foundation – the rhythms and biofeedback that make us feel the way we do.

Strategy

Basis is a great example of a naming problem we run into a lot. There’s a natural tendency to try and pack as much meaning as you can into a name. People want company and product names to encompass everything they’re about. Since Basis is capable of so much, it’s easy to fall into the trap of looking for a name that draws a circle around everything. This is why so many companies are named XYZ Solutions – problem is, everyone’s in the solution business.

So instead of looking for a name that means everything, go up a level and look for a name that fits your personality and point of view. Because in the end, those things are going to be a lot more stable and far reaching than the specifics of your product offering.

Taught by Eli Altman, Director of Strategy, A Hundred Monkeys

Monday, June 3 from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM at PARISOMA

Who should take this class: Citizens of states that begin with the letter C. Mennonite midwives. Hardwood floor salesmen. Small town sheriffs. Nine out of the eleven species of badgers. Actually, this class is geared towards anyone who is currently branding a business or looking to do so. It would also be a good fit for anyone interested in the early stages of building a brand.

Just the sight of certain people can cause you to hit the eject button.

Do you know anybody who has to be right all the time? If so, you probably don’t make a habit out of spending a lot of time with them. Being wrong is part of being alive. If you can’t make mistakes, how can you learn? If you can’t say, “I don’t know, I’ve been wondering about that myself,” how can you get close to people? Aside from being obnoxious, this kind of behavior can make you pretty unpopular. So being right all the time is really a way for insecure people to create distance between them and everyone else.

What makes companies insecure? If that’s true for people, is the same thing true for the brands that companies create? Are companies overcompensating for their lack of confidence, too? And, by the way, what is it that makes companies insecure? Is corporate insecurity like human insecurity? I think so. Many companies are afraid of telling you what they’re actually thinking. This is when corporate identity becomes a corporate mask. They are afraid of letting people see who they really are for the same reason people do: they don’t want people to make fun of them. So companies become religious practitioners of risk avoidance. Exactly the wrong strategy if your goal is to get noticed and expand your circle of friends.

The same things that make people insecure. What price do you think companies pay for creating this distance? Since their goal is to get closer to people, I would say they are paying a heavy price, probably without being aware of it. Or maybe, as with people, they just can’t help it. When people are face to face, there is a better chance that they can see the raised brows and rolling eyes of people who aren’t buying their behavior. Do you think United is a better airline after 13 million views of “United Breaks Guitars?” Somehow I don’t think so, but that is maybe because they choose to march under the “We’re big so we don’t have to care” banner.

Corporate identity a little too intimidating? Drop the mask.

Being good at branding is like being a good conversationalist. Many companies do not think having a real conversation with their audience is important. Having a real conversation means taking a risk. It means you have to shut up sometimes and just listen. It means you have to think about what people are telling you. And be open to changing your mind. It’s like inviting someone into your house. Do you let them in the front door? Do you serve them tea or coffee? Do you ask about the kids?

Is a little vulnerability part of your corporate identity? Being vulnerable is an important part of being human. And it’s an important part of having a brand that is human. Leaning on Wikipedia here a little, taking a pratfall is also good business. “The pratfall effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby the attractiveness of a person perceived as competent increases if the person commits a blunder.” So the message is, if people like you, then they like you even more when you make mistakes. Because you are demonstrating that you trust them enough to be yourself in front of them. Why is this so hard for companies to understand?

Corporate identity can be just as mysterious and complicated as human identity. We’ll show you how to get your brand on the human track.

Different logos make a name feel, well… different.

Looking at a potential company name by itself, most people tend to keep their thoughts close to the surface: they look at the definition, spelling, words the name rhymes with. Almost all names feel flat with no context. Especially when you start to compare these names in your head with competitive brands that have logos and colors and products – all working together.

It isn’t just small startups that have trouble picking names. We have worked with big international brands that have insisted on attempting to isolate the name as a variable. They separated it from visuals and packaging and any other feature which would accompany a name that ends up in front of consumers in the real world. Of course focus group participants have no problems waxing poetic on potential names for your company regardless of the context. You’re compensating them for their time and making them feel important. Why would they care that the names they’re looking at are being presented differently than every other company name they’ve seen in their lives?

The group think culture that’s pervasive in many companies today sucks all the air out of naming and branding. Nothing creative has ever made it cleanly through a focus group. Nothing creative has ever received unanimous support from a board of directors. This is why so many companies end up with names that don’t really mean anything – names like Verizon, Rovio, Alcatel. Because if you give people nothing to react to, they aren’t going to have anything negative to say. And ‘nothing negative’ sounds like a pretty good place to land when you’re trying to get ten people to agree on something.

This is why we do everything we can to set the stage for potential names. We show them in context, in conversation, on signage. It isn’t people’s fault that they can’t see the potential in a company name when it’s written in Helvetica on a sheet of 8-and-a-half-by-11. When you can see a name in context, you can start to see its electricity, its creative potential.

Let’s look at a few simple examples of how the context of an image can change how you think about a name:

iPad: When the iPad came out, everyone attacked the name. People said it sounded like a feminine hygiene product and an old steno pad. Obviously no one says this stuff anymore. Apple built a visual language and experience around the name that made people’s jerk reactions fall by the wayside.

Virgin: If Richard Branson took this potential name for his empire and ran it through a focus group or board meeting, how do you think it would fare? Spoiler alert: horribly. The name clearly has risks, but it’s great. Virgin is memorable and differentiated in any situation or endeavor. Without a strong brand to support it, the name would have been killed before it was born.

Pennyroyal: I made this one up. When you look at the name in the context of the images, it takes your brain to two very different places. You can make the name feel rich, or poor, or colorful or almost anything you want with the right surroundings.

So remember: the name is just the beginning – it’s only a word or two until you show people its potential.

Having trouble finding a company name with potential? Check out our naming page.