Transcripts
1. Intro: Naming things can be
really, really difficult. Never mind naming
a child or a pet, but just naming a brand or a product can be
super challenging if you're a creative and
you sometimes struggle with naming your products
or services or businesses. This video is for you,
a fair warning though. Naming a kid or a pet will still be as challenging
as it was before. I can't help you with that. My name is Jacob Magnal and
I'm a service designer. That means that I take problems
that a group of people have and I try to solve
them using design methods. Now I want to apply those
same methods in coming up with good names for companies,
brands, or services. In this course, we will go through the basic
types of names. We will look at what type
of names work well in one context and which ones you might want to avoid in
certain situations. And then we'll look at a
good workshop format for consistently
creating great names for services, products,
and businesses. I am going to try to be quite
general so that you can apply this to whichever naming
problem you run across. But I am going to look at my Youtube channel and the
surrounding business around that and see what
I can do if I can come up with some great
naming suggestions for that. All right, let's dive in.
2. Why Use Design Methods for Naming?: One question that you
might ask is why use service design
methods specifically to create a good name? And I think that's
a great question. In order to answer that, we
have to talk a little bit about what a name is and
what it does for you. I think it's important to look
at names for companies and products a little bit different compared to how you
look at names for people. A person has a name and we use that as a label
for that person. And that is true
also for companies. But a company name
can do much more. For example, it can
convey an emotion, or it can tell you something
about what that product does or even a value
connected to your brand. It can set expectations and even make us feel anticipation
when we see it. And if you look at a
name through that lens, it's very similar to a service. And if something is a service, we can use service
design methods to create a solution for it.
3. Class Project: The class project for this
course is going to be coming up with names for our
businesses and projects. I am going to come
up with a new name for my Youtube channel
and my business. Right now, I'm calling it just Jacob Magna,
so that's my name. I think that works pretty well. It makes it easy to find
things connected to me. I'm going to go into that works well for my
type of business, but I'm also going throughout
this course trying to find alternatives that
might work even better. Potentially, I might
even change it out, but as for right now, it's good. Magnol or Jacob Magno. Where you can find my website, Magno.com You can
find me on Youtube, Jacob Magnol, and you can find me on Skillshare,
Jacob Magno. So it's very consistent
through these platforms, and I think this works well. But there are some advantages to different types of names, and I am going to explore
that throughout this course. And potentially even
change out my names, form of business, and
even my Youtube channel. If you have a service
project, business, brand, something
that you want to try this out on, that's great. If you don't, you can
follow me along and you can brainstorm a little bit around my Youtube channel or
my businesses and who knows, Maybe you will even come up with an even better name for my business and we can
change it to that.
4. A Case Study in Overthinking Naming: I would like to tell you a
story and talk a little bit about the danger of
overthinking a name. First, we just have to
talk about what a name is. For a brand, it's something that we can
interact with that can convey some sort of emotion, feeling, experience,
explanation. And it will tell us
what is that I'm interacting with as
a user or customer. One example that comes up
a lot is the name Apple. All the sources that
I have linked in the course description
mentions Apple somewhere. It's arguably the most
successful company in the world. And I'm just going to read you one of these branding guides
that I've been reading, tells us about the name Apple
when they jobs and vosniac, we're looking for a
name for their company. They wanted something that
could convey the adjectives. Simple, warm, human, approachable, organic,
and disruptive. I mean, that's great, fantastic
apple. And I get that. It's really important
for naming consultants, the people that had written all the excellent
literature that I've been reading
on the topic to be able to explain a successful
brand like Apple in terms of it being a well thought through highly effective name, but it could be banana. If you go into articles and you explore this
topic a little bit, and you look at the
reasons that Steve Jobs gave and Bosniak still
gives for the name Apple. You come up with three
different explanations to this. The first one is
Steve Jobs really liked apples. I
mean, fair enough. The second one, and I think
this one is important. It came before Atari
in the phone book. And at that time, phone
books were really, really, really important if
you wanted to sell something. And it was before Atari, so they could catch some of
the people that didn't have the energy to go
down all the way to Atari to look for computers. The third reason that they
state is that it was simply just better than any of the other alternatives
that they had. And I think I must
agree when I read one of the suggestions that they
had were matrix electronics. For me, it's not a great name. I'm happy they went with Apple. But why do I like Apple? Why do I think that
that's such a good name? Well, the point
for me telling you this story is that
I believe that the service or product
and the quality of it is much more important
than the name itself. I think you have to focus on
creating a great product. And then you can add a name. And as long as you like it
and you think that it's good, which I think Apple is, it's a fine name, but it could
have been something else. It's not better than me naming a product chair or
Yeah, again, banana. But over time, the products and the services that Apple has provided has built the brand
recognition of the name. And now I think Apple's, the fruit is fairly happy to be associated with the
electronics company Apple. And what I want to say with this is don't overthink the name. Find something
that you like that you can protect legally, that you can get the
social media handles for. And then go with
that and you will slowly start building
that brand recognition. So long as you think that it's a good name, you just go for it.
5. Different Name Types: Before we go into workshopping our names for our
brands and products, I would like to talk a little bit about some
theory about names. Namely, I want to talk about the characteristics of
different types of names. There are four types of names that broadly covers
every situation. When you want to name something like a product or a brand. Not all of them will work
well for every service. But overall, I
think you will find every tool you need in order
to create a great name. When looking at these
four categories, we'll start with the
personal brand name, naming something after
someone or yourself. If we start with naming
something after yourself, you can think about
Disney or Ford. And maybe that can seem
a little bit lazy, but I think in the
circumstances where you're building a
brand around yourself, where you are the product like consulting or social
media influencer, there's a real merit to
actually doing it this way, naming the service that you're
providing after yourself. So if your product is you
and yourself and your time, you can't really go
wrong in this category, just take your first
name and your last name. But there are ways to sort of make this a little
bit more fancy. We can use the knowledge
that we will gain throughout this course to spice this
type of name up a little bit. Then the other category is you name something
after someone else. And the most
prominent example of this in this time is Tesla, named after Nicolas Tesla, which was a huge historical
figure in the field of electrical engineering
and a great name for an electrical car. This is a great way
to transfer some of the expertise and the legend of historical figure
to your brand. The second category is the functional or
descriptive name. What we're doing here is that we tell the user exactly what they can expect from interacting with your product or service. These names can tend to be a little bit long and
sometimes a mouthful. But they do have the
benefit of communicating clearly what people can expect from interacting with
your product or service. Examples of this is Deutsche
Bank or American Airlines, which you can tell by the
names what it is they do. I also love the example of a Youtube channel called
Living Big in a Tiny House, which is just fantastic. It tells you exactly what you can expect from
that Youtube channel, and I think there
is merit to that. But as you enter
more crowded niches, it can be very hard
to differentiate. For example, if I start a company called
Fishing in Lakes as a fishing social media
influencer kind of type of thing and then someone
else starts the lake. Fishing channel can be hard
to see just by the name. Which one of these
you should choose to get the best information
about fishing in lakes? Why would you choose the
electronics repair store over repairing
electronics store? There is no real reason
and for this reason, I think it can be good to avoid this if you're
in a crowded niche. Also, these names can
be a little bit hard to protect legally because
they're so generic. But if you have the social media and you're in a
less crowded niche, I think they can be
fantastic because it's so clear what
it is you're doing. So they are worth exploring. And again, if you
know everything about the characteristics
of these different types, you can also use parts of this in your name and
we'll get to that later. We are now getting to my
favorite category of them all, the experience driving names. Experience driving name tells
you about the experience and the values that you want
to convey to your users. And it builds up excitement and an
expectation on your brand. Without being so explicit as you are with the
descriptive names, I think it's a really
fascinating category of names. It can be a little bit tricky to find good ones, but if you do, then you can start
working towards building your brand just the way Apple
has done with their brand. This can be built based off
real words like Netflix, or Skillshare, or Safari. Or it can be invented like Kleenex, Pinterest, and Google. What these type of names
do is they make you understand something
about the brand that you are interacting with. It tells you about
the emotion and the value that the brand
wants you to feel. And I think a good
example of that is Uber, which had the vision
to be better and stronger than any other
company in their niche. So they went with the
German word, Uber. Another brand name that
I really love from this category is the
paper like tablet maker. Remarkable and you
can almost smell the quality and the productivity you would gain from
having their product. I think it's just lovely.
Then we're going to get to the final category
which is made up names. So these are words
that are derived either from Latin
or Greek words, or they're made up for the Latin and Greek
words. They are great. If you want to
sound very serious, if you have a pharmaceutical company or toothpaste company, something like Aquiant or Ventosophia could be fantastic
for your toothpaste brand. The other one, the phonetical, which is built out of sounds and there's a whole
art form into making words sound good when you
connect different sounds together and you can use these
sounds to convey emotion. For Hagen, Das is an
interesting example. I'm from Sweden and it's an American brand and
the name is built in order to create a feeling of it being a Scandinavian
quality to it. I can tell you that doesn't mean anything in Scandinavian, but that's what they went
for and I think it works. Another one is Kodak, which is an invented name. It was made in order
to be pronounceable, rememberable, and distinct.
This category is tricky. I think you need to practice, and I think you need to be
very well versed in language in order to be able to fully utilize the power
of this category. It can obviously work. There are a lot of made up brand names that are
super effective. And I would argue you can make a killing if you
have one of these names. But this is the category where I think it's actually better to leave it to the
professionals, the consultants of the world, the naming consultants
of the world. This is a category that
I don't fully master. So I'm not going
to teach you how to use this in my
workshop example. If you want to build
a name like this. I'm going to link
you some resources in the description and you
can have a look at that. But for me it's too tricky. And I like the other
categories enough to
6. A Note on AI: If you have seen
my other courses, you've probably
noticed that I do a lot of thinking and
talking about AI. You might be thinking, why not use AI and
just ask chat GPT or some other tool to come
up with great brand names. Based on the description
of what I'm doing, you might think that
my advice would be for you to do just that, but
I don't want to do that. Naming is important,
I want you to be in the driver's
seat. I definitely encourage you to use AI
throughout this process, but do so mindfully. I'm going to show
you some example of how I use AI to add
a little bit into this, but most of the work
is going to be based on your understanding of
your product service brand. In order for you not to
lose control to the AI, I encourage you to be mindful and careful with
how you introduce the things that come out of AI into this process
and do it with care. I'm going to do so and I'm going to show you how I do that. So that's my thought around AI. Let's move on to the workshop
part of this course.
7. Workshopping A Name: Now that we have a
good understanding of the different
naming categories, let's try to make
up some great words for our own services,
businesses, and brands. As I said, I'm not going to use the made up category because I think it's a little
bit too tricky for me. But I will be showing you how to collect and expand upon
the three other groups. Personal brand names,
descriptive names, and experience driving names. Open up a notebook,
Google Document, a Notion page, or a Miro page. I'm going to be using
Miro for this exercise, and I've created a
workshop template that you can use
to follow along. Also, you'll see my example
on the side of that template. Feel free to follow the
link in the description, to download that Miro template. It's free to use. You can do
whatever you want with it, modify it, use it for workshops. That's up to you. I just want to share this
template with you, and I'm happy that you're
taking the course, the first part of any good work. It is in my opinion,
the brain dump section. This works best if you
are a couple of people. I'm going to be
doing it on my own, but if you have a friend or someone that you're
doing the business with, someone that is inventive
and imaginative, it's great to bring them
along and you can guide them through this workshop or
watch this video with them. That will make it
so much easier. I'm going to do it on my own. I'm going to use AI a little bit just in order to get volume. In terms of ideas
for this first part, do not worry about the
quality of your suggestions. What we want here is
volume, Bring everything. If it's bad or if it's good, just bring it into the my
board and we can work on it. From there. We're going to
start with three buckets. And I've created the
buckets on the myre board. And you can just create them
yourself in your documents. If you don't want to
use mine, that's fine. But three areas where
you can dump your ideas. We have three
categories of names, and therefore we're going to use three different
types of questions. Prompt you into answering these questions and put
down suggestions of words and short sentences
that can go in to your names. Let's start with
just going through the different categories
just as a reminder, and then we can
take it from there. The first one, the personal
brand name category here, this one is quick
and it's quite easy. Take all the nicknames or names, or names of famous people that you think
could be connected to the business and just
add it there and that's it. That's how you do the first one. And we're going to use the same method for the next one and the second category for the functional or
descriptive name. The question that we're
going to answer is, what does your service do? And you can answer
this in many ways, and I encourage you to answer
it as many as possible. And it doesn't matter if
it's a little bit out there, but just put down much
descriptions of what it is your service product or brand does and you can
move from there. For the last one, the
experience driving names, we have a couple of questions
that we can answer. First of all, how do
you want the customers or users of the brand
to experience it? The second question is, how
do you want them to feel? And then what values do you
want to convey to the users? So now that we know everything we need to know about
the categories, take up a timer, put it
on a couple of minutes. I think 45 seconds to all the way up to
5 minutes is okay. Personally, I like doing it in shorter intervals and then iterate and do it several times. I think that pushes us to put
down more creative things, but it's okay either way. Now we want to come up
with as many answers to the questions under the
categories as we can, just to get that volume, to get more information that we can use to create
great names later. Probably some of the categories will be easier than others, and that's totally okay. Just do as well as you can
and jump between them. Probably we're going to
do the exercises several times before we find that
perfect name that we want. And if you come up with any
good suggestions later, just add them to the board
and we will be fine. The time limit is just there to force us to come up
with ideas quickly and not overthink things
because that's one of the things that
can really hold us back. Just get everything out there. When you feel like you
can't get any more answers, this part of the exercise
is over and it's time to go to the next part of
the exercise, which is
8. Refine: Now it's time to play around with these buckets
and refine them a little bit to make it easier
to come up with great names. What you do is you take the five to ten best
suggestions that you can find, and you just move them down to the next
area of the board. And from there we can
start iterating on them. We try to come up with
as many alternatives to say the same thing as
we can set a timer for a couple of minutes and try
your best to come up with as many suggestions of saying the same thing in
alternate ways. Now that you've done that, set a new timer
and we're going to be a little bit more
creative and free this time. And in the same
space on the board, we try to associate freely. We try to just bring
in associations through the words and sentences that we
have on the board. And we just add them as
much as we can here. We can be much more free
just add anything that you feel can be associated with
the words from the buckets.
9. Add a Splash of AI: Now let's use a
little bit of a AI to just expand on what
we have in the bucket. This is not mandatory,
but it can be useful to just use a
little bit of AI to add more content into the
bucket before we start to finest them and make
real suggestions for names. Especially if you are, as I am doing this on your own, then I think it can be super
valuable and a great way to just get a little bit more input so that you don't do
this fully on your own. But as always, when
you're using AI, be careful and take it slow
so that you understand everything that you add to your work that has been
produced by the AI. You should be able to
explain why you've added something that
the AIA has generated. Do not let it take control
over your process. What we can do and what I've
done is that I've taken the words from one bucket
and one refinement, and I have added that to the AI, and I've asked it to come up
with complimentary phrases or synonyms to the words
that I have in my buckets. It's great because now I have a larger volume to work from
when I go into the last, final step of this process. Add the ones that you like and then close down
the AI assistant. For me, I'm not going to
use it anymore today. It's time to sort and finesse. You can, of course, use more
AI throughout this process, but it's not necessary. The trick here is
to come up with as much as you can
on your own and then bring it to the AI
so that it starts from something that you have created that's going to make it much.
10. Finesse Your Name: The last part is
we're going to finest the results from the previous
parts of the exercise. From that, we make
name suggestions that we can test on other
people around us. Break off individual words, take parts of meanings,
put them together. Use your name and put it
together with some other thing. Make sure that you experiment
and you try things. You have great
foundations for name. If you follow these steps
throughout this workshop, I think that by just massaging this and
spending some time on it, this can be the most
time consuming stage. What you see behind me here is me doing this very quickly. And I would spend more on
this if I had the time today. But I want to be able to do this fairly quickly and
then go out and I want to test this on my
friends and my family and see what they come up with so
that I can take it back. And when I've done
that, I'm probably going to go all the way
up to the buckets again, and I'm going to add more
things there connected to what I've learned from
doing this the first time. And then go through the
whole exercise very quickly. Create more naming suggestions and bring it back
and test it again. That's the process of design. That's how we do things in a way that is consistently
high quality. I drag out my polstits and I remake them to create
great naming suggestions. Try to create a list of
five names that you really like and then five names that
you think are really bad. Then jumble them together and go out and test them on
your family and friends. I'm really, really excited to see how this
turns out for you. I would love to see your results if you would like to
post a name that you've come up with or
just a screenshot of the work that you have been doing following the workshop. I would love to see
that and comment on it. If you have any questions, please start the
discussion with me here. I think it's fascinating to interact with you guys
and try to help you. And make sure that you can
follow the exercises in a good way if you
have suggestions or you really like the class. What helps me a lot is if you can go in
and review this class. If you've watched it
all the way through, potentially you liked it and it would mean the world to me
if you could review it. It really helps you have to
do that on desktop as of now. But thank you. If you're interested
in more for me, you can check out my podcast, Designing the Robot Revolution. It's about AI and design. Or you can check out my
Youtube channel. Jacob Magno. I have really enjoyed creating this course and I hope that
you have some use for it. Thank you. Goodbye.
Jacob Magnell, Service Designer, Innovation Strategist
