corporate branding and naming
California, USA 415-383-2255

Why we're here: corporate branding isn't exactly a walk in the park.

A Hundred Monkeys is a small, very high energy branding company that understands how brands work in the real world. We find ways to give brands the same kind of personality and attitude that people have.

We think corporate branding is tough enough without the gimmicks, buzz words and shake n bake formulas. We believe in common sense, making the right considerations, doing things in the right order, and saying "we don't know" if that's the case.

We are thoughtful, good at asking questions, getting to the heart of the problem, and translating what we have learned into branding that is compelling and provocative. We manage to do all of this without employing account executives or consultant-speak.

We think that planting ideas in people's heads is a very delicate process. If you're really good at it, you're probably a human being first and a marketing person second.

A Hundred Monkeys is a branding company with a knack for coming up with names that are provocative and human.

But good company names are only the beginning. Probably the biggest thing we want to say is that a brand is a living, breathing thing. You can't develop a brand identity from a list of attributes on a research report.

As naming consultants, we help you think about how you are different, and what that means for your positioning and branding. Then we help you find the best way to live in the hearts and minds of your customers.

We tackle corporate branding with a lot of complementary skills: research, strategy, naming, branding, concept development, creative direction, design, copywriting, advertising. Our experience in all of these areas gives us the ability to make things hang together that often don't. And to see the down-the-road possibilities of particular ideas.

We know how to structure a company naming problem so the right considerations are on the table and the decisions get made in the right order. This means that you need to have some strong and precise language around who you are and why you¹re here before you go about naming your company or product.

Companies who are looking at their branding strategy are at a crossroads. We look at creating a new brand as an opportunity to take a deep breath, to take stock of who you are and where you're headed, what new things you need to add to the marketing mix, what baggage you may be ready to leave behind.

Branding is really the core of everything you do that touches the consumer. It's not about finding good company names. It's really about something much deeper.

It starts with asking some tough questions: who are you and what do you believe in? And it ultimately embraces all of the things you do to connect with your customers.

The art of branding is fundamentally about connecting with people at a human level. If this makes sense to you, then you will see that branding is just an extension of everything you know about what makes human relationships succeed or fail.

So, naming and branding are really about:

Connecting with people so they can see the sparkle in your eyes and the passion in your words.

Understanding what really drives the attitudes and behavior of the people you need to reach.

Treating people with respect -- including the knowledge that everybody has their own ideas about what's important in life.

Sensing what people mean as opposed to what they say.

Seeing a relationship as an ongoing conversation, a lively give-and-take between you and your audience--of ideas and stories and feelings and experiences and points of view.

And something we all know and often forget: realizing that how you say it is a lot more important than what you say.

Partial client list

Where we come from

A Hundred Monkeys started out 25 years ago in Boston as Altman & Manley, one of the first hybrid design studio/ad agencies in the country. Since our work did not look, feel, or sound like advertising, it caused quite a stir. We did everything from branding to television campaigns, packaging to direct mail, exhibits to publishing ventures for such clients as Ben & Jerry's, Lotus, and Electronic Arts.

The core of our practice

We are front-end specialists, usually intercepting companies at the beginning of the branding or re-branding process, where a lot of make-it-or-break-it decisions get made. It is here that our experience creating advertising allows us to guide the early steps of the creative process, helping our clients explore consequences and anticipate possibilities that otherwise would never see the light of day. This includes everything from creating a written voice to supervising visual design.

In the news

Reuters
"Start-up aims to join telephone and wireless calls"

Wall Street Journal
"A Better Idea"

NY Times
"A Device Supports One-on-One Talking Among Appliances" by Matt Richtel

US News
"What's In a Name? Plenty, Experts Advise" by James M. Pethokoukis

Philadelphia Inquirer
"Taste has little to do with it" by Stacey Burling

Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The tricky business of corporate names" - by Christopher Montgomery

Oxford University Press
"The Making of a Name" - by Steve Rivkin

The Business Shrink Radio Show
"The Shaping of a Corporate Identity" - Interview with Danny Altman

International Herald Tribune
"Philips, seeking growth, tries an image makeover" - by Jennifer L. Schenker

New York Times
"Get Out of My Namespace" - by James Gleick

Akron Beacon Journal
"Building the perfect logo" - by Candace Goforth

The Memphis Commercial Appeal
"First Tennessee waltzes to tune of name change" By David Flaum

BBC
"Hunt is on for world's worst rebranding" by Maggie Shiels

CFO Magazine
"The new firm should at least be applauded for attempting to reset the name game" by Joseph McCafferty

STEP Inside Design
"Sanitized for your Protection" by Dianna Edwards

AllAboutBranding.com
"Cult Branding: Know Logo" by Mark Di Somma

Time Magazine
"Bottom Lines"

The Wall Street Journal
"Start-Ups Spend Time, Money In Search of the Perfect Name" by Martin Veitch and Karen Kelly

Fortune
"Identity - Philip Morris has a new name" by Grainger David

Forbes
"Even pros struggle with corporate re-naming game" by Adam Pasick

New York Times
"My Excellent Brylcreem Adventure" - by Michael Walker

New York Times
"How to Invent a Brand Name" by Josh Rottenberg

Business 2.0
"Branding, Waikiki-Style" by Owen Thomas

Fast Company
"How to Make a Name for Yourself" by Cheryl Dahle

TheStreet.com
"Easy Money: Creative Names Mean ... Everything" by David A. Gaffen

Brandweek
"E-I-E-I-Oh!" - by Todd Wasserman

Salon
"The name game" by Ruth Shalit

Toronto Star
"Hiding the C-word" by Lisa Wright

Building a brand

Every project is different. Some of them are heavily focused on naming. Others are more strategically focused and may not involve naming at all. All of our work involves a philosophical and practical investigation into the soul of a brand. We believe that asking the fundamental "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" questions lies at the heart of good branding work. This deep reflection is often overlooked or handled in cursory fashion by many consultants, leaving the client with tools such as robotic mission statements and lifeless lists of brand attributes.

We begin by getting to know you and finding out who you are and what you believe in, both as people and as a company. We need to understand your point of view about life and the business you are in, what's important to you and what's not, what excites you and what bores you. These are the same things that point to the character of a person; they also provide important clues to the potential ingredients for a brand.

Although brands are often created in a vacuum, they do not live in a vacuum. So we examine the world that the brand will live in. We look at it from many different angles. Who are you trying to reach? What are their fundamental attitudes, desires and needs? How does your product or idea fit into their lives? We look at life as a search for meaning. So what does your product mean to these people? How do they talk about it? What role does it play in their lives?

Creating a brand is a molding and shaping process. The goal is to create something that is alive, that has a personality and attitude all its own. Something that is not just designed to appeal to consumers in a totally obvious way. But intrigues them, makes them curious, starts a conversation, creates an emotional connection. We think branding is not just what you do, it's who you are.

How we think about research

While some of our competitors use oddly-named proprietary techniques for conducting research, we think that a solid deep-mining of curiosity is a better way to create results. Research is ultimately about talking to the right people and asking the right questions. And about what you do with the information you uncover.

We draw upon a variety of research techniques and formats, but we typically avoid the sterile setting of a focus group with its one-way mirrors and illusion of scientific accuracy. The truth is that science cannot drive the process. Creating an emotional engagement between your consumer and your brand is always going to be an art, not a science. Which is why our research is intimately connected to the creative process.

Over the last year, our research techniques have included written questionnaires, one-on-one interviews, street intercepts, mini-focus groups conducted in informal settings, group discussions, and interviews in consumers’ homes.

Our naming and branding competitors

Everybody and his brother are in the naming business. A lot of them talk a good game. So how did they approach the most important naming problem they ever faced -- naming themselves?

What it's like to work with us

"There's a Walter Payton confidence about what they do. They were actively, if not aggressively, challenging our business model and our thinking. They were asking questions and more questions until they got to the essence of what we do. 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 Siefert, Director of Internet Services, Medicalogic, quoted in Salon)

Letter from a disgruntled client

"Working with A Hundred Monkeys isn't easy. Most creative people give you exactly what you ask for, which is hardly ever what you really want. These guys get it. They have a way of using simple questions to drill down, and down, and down, until what's left is what really matters. Their strength comes from focusing first on the business, then on the communications challenge, and only finally on the words. Working with them makes me a better communicator. They make me think harder about what I'm doing and why."

(Nicholas Donatiello, Jr. CEO, Odyssey)

Naming

Naming is a competitive sport

This is your first shot at being different. It doesn't make sense to pick a name that makes you one of the trees in the forest and then spend the rest of your marketing budget trying to stand out. The right name can give you a strong, clear voice in the world. It can support and leverage your brand, and provide you with a deep well for marketing and advertising. You would be surprised how many names get chosen for internal, and not external, marketing reasons. Fight the competition, not yourself.

No black boxes

The path to mediocre branding is littered with patented processes, black boxes, proprietary techniques, scientific analysis and linguistic formulas. While they are intended to add a level of reassurance to a project, the truth is they don't work. There is no substitute for experience, hard work, talent, passion, and a deep understanding of how brands succeed in the real world.

Keep it real

One of our greatest strengths is the ability to give a diverse group of people the confidence and insight necessary to identify and implement the most powerful solution to a naming problem. In the absence of a compelling process, branding aspirations tend to slip away, and consensus becomes the only goal. This is what leads companies to adopt anemic marketing vehicles such as Alero, Mirant, Enron, Hydrox, Agilent, Cysive, or Bravada.

Selected names

Raindance
web conferencing

Jamcracker
unified platform for IT management

Farm-in-a-Box
mail order windowsill farms

Cookin'
chain of stereo stores

Red Rocket
online playground for Nickelodeon

Ironweed
early stage venture capital fund

Cruel World
career placement service

Inkling
animation studios

Pooch Punch
the first drink for dogs

Calabash
division of Houghton Mifflin

Seven
wireless network integration

Rebar
global software services

Sun, Moon & Stars
ATM for Cambridgeport Bank

Canal Street
executive talent management

Open IPO, Open Book
publicly-priced offerings for WR Hambrecht + Co.

98point6
personal medical database

Left Field
advertising agency

Alfalfa
tax and financial planning

Freelance
graphics software for Lotus

Broad Daylight
expert Q+A on the web

Apples+Oranges
Macintosh database

All Thumbs
home repair videos

"26"
typography magazine for Agfa

Kiddo!
campaign to raise money for public schools

Sweet Dreams
Fanny Farmer Candies

Left on Elm
Training consultants

Jazz
integrated software for Lotus

Forward Observer
public sector market research

Front Porch
nonprofit services for seniors

Switchtower
technology platform for Raindance conferencing services

Inside a naming project

Client: SEVEN, Redwood City, CA

In 2001 we were engaged by Bill Nguyen, founder of OneBox, to rebrand his latest venture after the name ran into trademark trouble. At the time, the name was "Leap," not a bad name for software that makes it possible for carriers to offer wireless data access directly to businesses--except that Qualcomm had registered the name for its own wireless spin-off.

As with any naming project, it was in reality a positioning project. The key is to carefully form a positioning platform that connects with your audience in a unique and compelling way. At minimum, a name should help tell the world that a problem has been solved, a barrier has been broken, or a new attitude exists. In Leap's case, they were solving the problem that WAP had promised -- but failed -- to solve. Their audience, the telecom carriers and the investment community, had lost hundreds of millions of dollars buying into "solutions" peddled by companies like Leap.

Nobody wanted to hear the word "wireless" anymore, so the first decision was that "wireless" would not be part of the name. It was also clear that while being bold and confident was critical, sounding like a dot com start up would be disastrous. Further, the name needed to resonate with industry insiders as well as pique the interest of the business press, allowing them to keep PR and advertising costs down. Equally imperative was the idea that the name needed to work for anyone who saw it. At the end of the month the winning name candidate was "Seven." Here is the founder's explanation of the new name, as quoted in The New York Times:

Seven's abstract, slightly mystical quality, Nguyen reasoned, was the essence of its appeal. "It has so many different connotations," he says. "Seven Wonders of the World, seven days of the week, on the seventh day God rested. It's the number of perfection, the good-luck number.

There's also a data language in the telecom industry called SS7, which the companies we deal with will appreciate."

SS7 is the global standard by which information is exchanged over a digital network to effect wireless and wireline call setup, routing and control. WAP was never able to get the web and SS7 to communicate effectively. The name "Seven" is a confident confrontation of the problem, as well as a word that contains countless evocations in every culture.

Other recent work

Client: The Andrew G. Mellon Foundation, New York

Project: In 1995 the Mellon Foundation launched an independent non-profit organization to create and manage a centralized digital archive of the back issues of important scholarly journals. The service has been extremely successful. 1400 universities and libraries from 70 countries around the world subscribe, providing their students, researchers and faculty with unlimited site license access to these materials. In 2002, these users will search the database 16 million times and print more than 10 million articles. We have been working with the foundation over the last six months to figure out the smartest ways to leverage this success into a number of other ventures that will address system-wide access issues in the academic community.

Client: Front Porch Communities and Services, Burbank, CA

Project: Front Porch is a $150 million non-profit operator of retirement communities, housing for people with special needs, and home care services. The corporation and its name The InterNext Group, were the product of a recent three-way merger, a tough act to bring to a good conclusion. We were engaged to position and name it, develop a new corporate identity, and breathe some life into the marketing. We have just completed phase one of this project, working directly with management, employees and residents to research the existing cultures and define the personality of the new organization from the ground up. We created a 70 page website, print, radio and TV advertising.

Client: Houghton Mifflin, Boston

Project: Houghton Mifflin, one of the country's largest textbook publishers, was creating a new division to focus on the business opportunity created by new laws that mandated continuing training for teachers. We worked directly with a senior VP who was charged with creating this new teacher training division. He was midway through a process with a branding firm in New York, and very uncomfortable with their recommendations. We were hired to re-think the problem, develop a new name (Calabash), visual identity, launch strategy, set of operating principles for all the marketing, as well as to write and provide creative direction for a complex set of course promotion materials.

Client: W. R. Hambrecht + Co., San Francisco

Project: The current revelations about IPO allocations for top executives of companies like Enron and WorldCom point up the inequities of the current IPO system. Bill Hambrecht, one of the founders of Hambrecht & Quist, approached us to create the identity for his firm and to name and develop the marketing for an auction-based system that would give all investors equal access to an IPO and allocate shares in a fair and impartial way. We named it Open IPO and created a launch campaign to institutional investors and designed promotional programs for the companies that were going public--all the while dancing around some fairly arcane SEC regulations about what you are allowed to say and do.

A Little About Us

Our mission statement

We will approach the problem without fear. Get it staked out, mapped, labeled, dissected. Find the messages that really matter. A point of view about the world. Expressed in words and images that are alive, authentic, compelling. And make sure that when the job is done there's a story. That's why we are here: to find your attitude, to give your business a voice.

Danny Altman
Founder and Creative Director

Altman was born in Coney Island in the middle of the last century. He grew up in Flatbush in the shadow of Ebbets Field, and was relocated to the suburbs of New Jersey, where he relived the Second World War, building models of aircraft carriers and fighter planes and reading every general's memoir he could get his hands on. Then one day, he picked up Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, and the next thing he knew he was picketing on Hiroshima Day in Passaic, New Jersey.

Under the cover of studying Romance Languages and Literature at Princeton, he started "The Experimental College" to teach forbidden courses, brought in underground luminaries like the Kuchar Brothers and Humphrey Osmond, headed the anti-eating club movement, and in his spare time organized the overthrow of the student government. After a brief stint at Columbia Architecture School ("I failed calculus.") he taught fourth grade on the Lower East Side of Manhattan through a series of teachers' strikes. He then decided it was time to settle down.

Altman learned to write copy at the feet of Jim Symon, a transplanted British copywriter who came to New York in the late sixties to shake up American advertising. Jim worked for Jack Tinker & Partners, where every creative team had its own suite at the Drake Hotel, and then started his own shop. His formula for writing copy was very simple: imagine that you are sitting at a bar having a conversation with a friend.

Altman worked as a copywriter at a number of New York agencies and then started his own firm. His partner was Bob Manley, an illustrator and sculptor who grew up in a fundamentalist family and watched his first movie at age 18. They opened an avant garde agency in Boston which grew to 35 people and did many groundbreaking projects, including the first TV campaign for Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. Altman & Manley convinced Erroll Morris to do his first TV commercial, lured photographers like Arnold Newman and Elliott Erwitt into commercial work, discovered unknown painters in East Village galleries and put them to work on client projects. "We had no fear, our clients loved us, and our friends at other agencies would always ask us, "How do you get your clients to buy work like that?"

Altman moved to San Francisco in 1989 to run the west coast office of the agency. After Manley died following a long bout with cancer, Altman started A Hundred Monkeys, and decided to focus on the crucial early days of a brand, when the mistakes could be fatal and the right decisions could really help it take off.

The Shinola Awards on the web

Every industry has its own awards, but there has never been any for naming. So we stepped into the breach. We were really looking for an excuse to examine how corporate language was muscling its way into our psyches and culture. Shinola was a brand of shoe polish in the 30s and 40s that engendered the once-famous expression, "You don't know shit from Shinola." We felt it was the perfect attitude for a no-holds-barred look at naming, where judges who are novelists, musicians, commentators, editors, cartoonists comment on the best and worst names in categories from toys to SUVs. One of the most popular Shinola features is Reports from the Field--our version of branding news from around the world. (www.shinolas.com)

Why does one chess player play better than another?

The answer is not that the one who plays better makes fewer mistakes. The one who plays better makes more mistakes, by which I mean more imaginative mistakes. He sees more ridiculous alternatives. The mark of a great player is exactly that he thinks of something which by all known norms of the game is an error.

-- Jacob Bronowski, The Origin of Knowledge and Imagination

Contact info:

A Hundred Monkeys
332 Miller Avenue
Mill Valley, CA 94941
415-383-2255

www.ahundredmonkeys.com