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.
The new names make products easier to market and have improved their visibility among both employees and customers. Brighter Naming identified distinctive brand qualities in order to formulate high-impact labels. An efficient decision process and in-depth research showcased their expertise.