Naming and
branding
case
histories
If there are a dozen people in the room and you all have to agree on a flavor of ice cream, it's going to be vanilla, not Cherry Garcia. Nobody's excited about it, but you can all agree on it. Our job is to make sure this doesn't happen.
Cloud cover
Cloud applications are all the rage but there's one little problem. No one has quite figured out how to efficiently manage them from the perspective of the enterprise.
Enter Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, two guys who had a lot to do with the success of Salesforce.com, with a company that is going to make the world safe for cloud computing. Their instincts told them that the word 'cloud' was simply too ubiquitous to be in the name. We didn't want to be playing the same notes that everyone else was. And we also wanted a name that had some strength to it. The name we decided on came from our work in aviation. Okta is a meteorological term: it's how pilots talk about the amount of cloud cover.
Rethinking learning by reinventing the textbook
After eight years at Apple, Matt MacInnis saw a huge opportunity to improve
learning. He saw the power of iPad
to revolutionize the way people learn,
and he knew that content, like textbooks, had to be completely rethought.
That's when he started a company he temporarily named Standard Nine. He
built relationships with the publishers
who also knew that they needed to
reinvent their products, and he knew that he'd need a student-facing brand
and name that would resonate not just with young people, but publishers and
professors, too. That's why Matt came to
A Hundred Monkeys. We were excited,
because we sensed
the importance of the company's mission. Matt assembled
four senior team members for the naming project, all of whom participated in
weekly sessions – even over the Christmas break. They reached a decision
around Inkling, and went for it. The name has proven to delight everyone
it
touches.
Help two guys make a name for themselves
Sometime in 1983 Bob and I found this funky ice cream in the freezer of a deli across from our office in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It was too much to resist. A few days later we were huddled in a freezing office in front of a big garage near Burlington, Vermont that Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenberg shared with a local trucking company. This is where they made their famous ice cream. Ben was the marketing guy and Jerry made the ice cream. Since they already had a lot of good ideas, they needed just the right amount of help. We filmed their first TV commercials with the two of them just as they appeared on the pint tops saying in unison, “We may not have enough money to do 30 second commercials, but we sure do make the best super premium ice cream you can find."
Find a name that captures the point of view of the audience
We were brought into this one by Millie Olson, the CEO of San Francisco ad agency Amazon Advertising, which is a funny story in itself. She decided to call her agency Amazon before Jeff Bezos moved to Seattle and she was thinking of the heroic women, not the river. They have courageously kept the name even though they have a lot of explaining to do. Their client was called Career Central and they worked with graduates of top business schools to pick up where the schools placement offices left off. Monster.com was just taking off and CEO Jeff Hyman wanted a name that would get peoples' attention and speak to his young professional audience. Despite the fact that one of his board members threatened to quit if we went ahead, he picked Cruel World and the man got the edge he wanted. We have named two other companies for Jeff, Canal Street, a talent management company, and Strong Suit, a company that does sales recruiting.
Name a company with a breakthrough technical product
When we started working with NBT Technology in May, 2003, it was four guys in a room on Bryant Street in San Francisco. The last time I looked, their market cap was $1.1 billion. NBT stood for, believe it or not, Next Best Thing. They knew they had to do better than that. Spearheaded by a former Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, they had a brilliant idea and they were really nice guys to boot. They worked well as a team (a problem at a lot of startups) because they had a history together. But getting across what they did was complicated. After the third naming session, it wasn’t happening so we came back to the idea that two of the top guys were fly fisherman. We started thinking about water. And how rivers are the pathways of civilization. And Riverbed was born. They were happy. We were happy. When you allow the personal side to spill over into the corporate side, it often releases a tremendous amount of energy. But it has to be done carefully.
Name the first drink for dogs
This was my first, and last, job at a big agency. It was Ted Bates in New York. Colgate was testing a drink for dogs (an idea which now seems completely logical) and they wanted us to name it and create a test campaign. We named it Pooch Punch, The First Drink for Dogs, decided it had to come in a six-pack, and were off to a supermarket in Hoboken where we filmed the test spot at night after the real shoppers went home. We got a dog to carry a basket down the aisle, stop at the Pooch Punch, knock a six-pack off the shelf and into the basket (a piece of salami hidden behind the six-pack was instrumental in making this happen), and carry the basket up to the checkout, where the guy at the register acts almost like this happens every day. It was a great product concept, but we used beef broth at the end where you show the dog licking it up, and Colgate was never able to formulate it as a shelf-stable product.