Brighter Naming

Please describe your company.

We manufacture and provide specialty chemicals, products, and solutions to the road manufacturing industry, oil field chemicals industry, adhesives and publication inks industries, and automotive carbon industry.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the marketing communications director for the division.

What was your goal for working with Brighter Naming?

Our company has been working with Brighter Naming for more than five years now. The division was working with them prior to my being on board. Our division is very technical, very scientific. So, a lot of the people who were trying to come up with names for new product solutions were not coming up with a descriptive way to explain what the product does. Instead, they wanted to describe what the product is. So, they wanted to name it things like “tall oil fatty acid.” Well, great, but what does that mean to anybody outside of our four walls? We’re not really describing to any of our end users what this product can do in their mixture.

Brighter Naming helped us to achieve more of a descriptor for the names that we now select for our products. It’s a different way to go to business for us. Brighter Naming did a great job working with some of our chemists and scientific minds, and asking them, “tell me a word that describes what your tall oil fatty acid does.” Based on some buzzwords, they recapped what they were hearing and came up with a proposal of names.

It’s a pretty streamlined process, which is great. We were able to get some things done pretty quickly. 

Please describe the scope of their work.

They’ve got a process for how they help you to come up with a new product name. It could be as short as four weeks, it could be as long as eight weeks. What I love about Brighter Naming is that it’s not a process that’s going to go beyond that. Some naming agencies we’ve worked with want to come and sit down with your senior level executives, they really want to understand your competitive landscape, and they want to understand your product.

What Brighter Naming says is we’re going to trust that you have that, you know all of that. Your responsibility is to pull the right people together to really help launch this new product. Pick five to seven people that are going to be on the initial team to figure out or come up with a group of names that we believe will fit in the marketplace. Once we narrow that scope down to five or seven names, then we’ll identify the other key players in your organization that are also going to need to weigh in. It’s very effective.

The first meeting is with your core team that you selected. We fill out a worksheet prior to having our initial conference call. Everything’s done by conference call; I’ve never met the team before, but I trust them 100 percent. The Brighter Naming team will go through what they’ve learned about the product, and ask what they need to know about it. After that, within days, you get a list of potential words that may wind up being part of the name that you select.

We start to narrow that scope down each week, and the process is so simple. We pick our top 10 and everybody goes through and selects their top 10. Then, based on that, we narrow it down to five. Then it’s shared more broadly. At that point, Brighter Naming also does a screening to clear the names in certain countries that you’re going to be selling these products into. They do their due diligence with the names that are identified.

What I also like about that process is, sometimes our team might take bits and pieces of the ideas generated by Brighter Naming and create our own. It’s not, ‘this is what you have to choose from.’ It’s, "well, you liked this first part, and you liked this second part." There are a lot of good conversations that go back and forth. People who are on that team really feel like they are part of creating something. We not only created a new product in a lab, but now they’re really giving it life by making sure it has the right name. It’s a really good process for us.

What was your process for selecting Brighter Naming with which to work?

When I came on board, we needed a naming agency. Our corporate office had a list of naming agencies that they’d used in the past. They recommended that we seek out Brighter Naming if we were going to be doing product naming.

I talked to a few of the recommended agencies, and I always came back to Brighter Naming just because of the efficiency in the process. It was going to take a lot longer with an agency that we were using because they wanted to do the analysis and sit down and interview each of the key stakeholders one on one. Our business runs really fast, and we didn’t have the time for that. Brighter Naming is an agency that we were comfortable working with and, after I used them on my first project, I realized the efficiency, so I’ve gone back to them on numerous occasions for new product names.

Can you provide a sense of the size of the work they’ve done for you?

It varies. I started working with them three years ago. With Brighter Naming, it hasn’t just been one new product name at a time, but figuring out where that product fits within the market, and then coming up with a broader category, a parent name for those products. So, the scope of work that Brighter Naming has done with me in the last three years is a little broader than just saying, here’s a new product. It’s going into this market, and this is what it can do, so give us a name for it. It’s this is a new product in this market. It fits within this category within our business. We have 30 product lines in this category. This is the first of 30, and we’ve got to come up with 29 other children names that are going to fit within that category.

We’re not creating new products every day, so we probably launch one to two new products a year. So, it’s not consistent. They’re not on retainer with us.

What were the results of the project?

The first product they worked with us on is a warm mix asphalt additive that’s used in paving roadways all across the U.S. They helped to come up with that name probably five years ago, and what that product has done in the market is phenomenal. When we think of the success of new product innovations for our business, that product is the one that first comes to mind for a lot of people. The name certainly helped the marketing, the advertising, and the PR [public relations] we’ve done around it, and the success of the product itself. All of those things add to it. In the asphalt paving industry, our product is now a very common name. It’s been very successful.

We’re starting to get some traction with other names that Brighter Naming has helped us within our oil field chemicals line. Internally, the names are already getting traction. Salespeople are starting to understand the reasoning behind why we’ve named our products the way we’ve named them. It’s starting to get a little traction in the marketplace, too, but we’ve got to do our end and really help to promote the product, so that’s what we’re doing now. There hasn’t been a name that we’ve dropped since using Brighter Naming. Everything that we’ve created with them has a place in our business today. So, to me, it’s been very successful.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

We work with Athol [Foden, founder of Brighter Naming]. I think he is what’s unique about Brighter Naming. He has talented people all across the country who help him to do the analysis and the research and come up with the lists of potential names. He’s an expert, he gets the challenges of business, and he understands that not everybody has the time or resources to spend millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with product names.

He understands the value of a good product name, and he’s able to articulate that to whoever his audience is without seeing them. That’s another unique skill set he has. He does it all via conference call, but his expertise comes out. He makes people very comfortable with his level of expertise in this field.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

I don’t think so. Probably for me, it would be expanding my relationship with the folks at Brighter Naming. I haven’t had the need for this today, but I’m thinking about that.

Please describe your company and your role there.

We are a software company. We provide a supply chain visibility product to retailers. I’m the owner.

What was your goal for working with Brighter Naming?

We wanted a new, shorter, better name for the company. The prior name was Business Advantage Incorporated. It was really long, and the URL was really long. We wanted something more modern, shorter, and something that would represent more of what we do.

Please describe the scope of their work.

They had me fill out a questionnaire, and asked lots of questions on a variety of things including colors and types of names, and a lot of things that I hadn’t thought about. They had a questionnaire first, and they did some research, and came with a list of maybe 50 names. From that list, we came back with 10 names we liked, and a few more that came to mind as we looked at what they had given us.

We entered a back and forth process until we finally narrowed it down to the one we wanted. The names they originally came up with were also checked in terms of whether the URL was available, the name was available, and if there was any kind of conflict. Once we got into more of a refined list, they did an international check on those names. We made a choice, and they verified again whether there was any conflict and whether the name was clear. So, they were really helpful in honing down on the right name for us.

What was your process for selecting Brighter Naming with which to work?

I was just trying to find someone specializing in names, and that was a little hard to do. I found his company on the Internet. We read a bunch of stuff about him [Brighter Naming founder Athol Foden] and how he approached naming, and we liked what we saw. We saw some examples of other companies he’s named, and his philosophy, and just had a good gut feeling about it. Our gut feeling turned out to be very true in terms of working with him. He knows what he’s doing.

Can you provide a sense of the size of the work that they’ve done for you with a work hour figure or cost range?

He has the whole naming thing down to an art, so he’s very efficient. On our end, we probably spent maybe 20 or 30 hours ourselves. Because we were so responsive, I think we minimized the time he might have spent, since we were efficient also. I believe I spent $3,000 for the name. We also did a tagline, and I believe that was around $1,000.

How long did the work take?

The process only took about a week and a half, and we completed the project about a month ago.

What were the results of the work?

Since we just adopted it, I can’t tell you much except that we very much like the name. We love the tagline. It’s a supply chain visibility product where we’re actually making supply chains smarter, and the tagline ‘visibly smart’ just really rings, resonates. So, I think the jury’s still out on how successful we will be with it but, at this point in time, we're extremely pleased with it.

How would you describe Brighter Naming’s performance?

He was very responsive. What I really liked is, he would submit the information to me, and we would get on the phone and discuss it. We would discuss the names, he would speak the words, how it sounded, and the impact. All those different aspects of picking a good name that could be used. We may be using it internationally at some point in time as we grow, so we don’t want anything offensive internationally to any culture. We had multiple conversations to get the name and then the tagline, too. The tagline took less time, partly because I became very familiar with how to work them. It was a very easy thing to do, and something that would have took us years to do internally.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

I think the biggest unique thing is that they’re just experts in this area. They do it all the time. I tried to work with some local ad marketing companies, and the cost was going to be four or five times as much, and they didn’t seem like they knew how to do it. He just knows that naming’s his niche, and he knows it backwards and forwards, so it’s just second nature to him. He just knows his stuff.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

No. We’ll probably use him in the future to name some products, and do some other naming work. It went really well.