Naming and
branding
case
histories
"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."
Give a company a name that's a noun and a verb
Randall Kruep is a cowboy from Breeze, Illinois. We met him at the rooftop café at the Art Institute of San Francisco. He had a bundle of money from two big venture firms and was starting a company to tackle a giant problem in the telco space–how to connect the silos that run land telephones, cell phones and internet phones so a user can seamlessly roam between systems using the cheapest one available. A number of Silicon Valley rock stars came out of retirement to join the party and we got to know them pretty well. Renaming the company was an exercise in faith, because Randall didn’t know much about branding and he placed a big bet on our judgment. The name Stoke is a surfing term. “To catch a wave was (and is) to stoke the fires of the heart and soul. Hence the terms: to be stoked, the stoked life, degrees of stoke, and pure stoke.” (John Grissam, Pure Stoke, 1982).
Rename a company that wanted to be taken seriously
A company called Acme Software came to us with an interesting naming assignment. They did expert Q & A on the web, helping to answer customers' and employees' questions with a very sophisticated database constantly fed by a panel of experts. They had picked Acme partly because Wile E. Coyote used Acme Roadrunner Spray in Looney Tunes. They loved the connection, but they were afraid that people wouldn't take them seriously. There were half a dozen people on the naming committee, including the CEO, Louise Kirkbride. We had a great time with them, looked seriously at about 75 names, and finally picked Broad Daylight because it felt a little brazen and spoke directly to what they did, which was to shed light on people's questions. The VP of Marketing was Joe Rodota, We named the consulting company he’s running now, which is called Forward Observer.
Create a name for a new research product that’s about life in the home
Odyssey is our oldest client–the relationship dates back over 15 years. They are heavy hitters, doing bet-the-business research for the likes of Coca-Cola, GM, and News Corp. They describe themselves as follows: "Odyssey is the nation's only independent market research firm dedicated exclusively to studying the complex and changing relationship between consumers, technology, and at-home entertainment, information, communication, and commerce." Odyssey set out to do a twice-yearly national survey on consumer attitudes towards and usage of electronic commerce. So it was all about the home and stuff that came into the home. We wanted a name that was like the game that Groucho played with his contestants on You Bet Your Life. "Guess the magic word–it's something that's around the house–and win $100." For us, Breadbox was that word. We have done a lot of product naming for Odysssey, including Homefront, Hot Potato, and Sledgehammer.
Create a name for a non-profit educational foundation
Craig Frazier dragged me into this, but I'm glad he did. Craig is a fabulous illustrator and a good friend. When I moved to Mill Valley, he introduced me to this wonderful organization with a terrible name–The Mill Valley Schools Community Foundation. As you may not know, California is close to Mississippi when it comes to per capita school funding, so many school programs like art, music, theatre, and poetry get little or no funding from the state. The foundation begs parents for money and supports a lot of these programs. Well, Craig and I walked into a Board meeting with four names, and we walked out two hours later with Kiddo! Craig created the logo and the look, and we collaborated for five years on direct mail campaigns that raised millions of dollars for the foundation.
Create an identity for an online advertising agency
We met these guys in startup mode in a house they were renting on Seventh Avenue in Cole Valley, San Francisco. They were a hot young shop doing what was known as interactive marketing. They went on to do a lot of work for Amazon, Macy’s, Sun and other companies. And eventually the business was bought by J. Walter Thompson. It was a tough naming assignment because the company was called McMahon & Partners. And it appeared that the partners had different points of view about how edgy the name should be. We had met Fred, the creative director, when he walked into Altman & Manley looking for freelance work quite a few years back. He was pushing the hardest for the name change and for a name they could really hang their marketing on. Well the name we settled on was really perfect for an ad agency because the biggest question people always ask creative people is, "Where do you get your ideas from?" And the best answer is "Out of left field," which is that place in the brain where all the unexpected ideas come from.
Create a new umbrella for worldwide archiving initiatives
In 1995, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave birth to JSTOR (not our name!), which created a centralized back archive of a lot of important scholarly journals. JSTOR has achieved success on many fronts. About 5,000 institutions in 75 countries have signed on to this online service–last year over 16 million searches were performed and over 10 million articles printed. Working with publishers, universities, and scholars, JSTOR has solved some very complex problems, gained important allies, and become a model for organizations that want to digitize content in order to make it available to researchers and students all over the world. The Mellon Foundation wanted to create a new parent organization that would take what they have learned from JSTOR and use it to create a new umbrella for worldwide archiving initiatives. Working with William J. Bowen, the President of the Foundaton, and Kevin Guthrie, the President of JSTOR, we conducted a series of lively meetings that resulted in the selection of the name Ithaka.