Professional Services Naming:

Alfalfa

Nature of the Work:
Positioning and Naming a Tax and Financial Planning Service

Naming Consultant:
A Hundred Monkeys

Kelly Miller was a high school track star in Kansas. She put herself through Rice University working as a bartender and began a long career in public accounting. She spent most of her career with Price-Waterhouse-Coopers and Arthur Andersen, specializing in tax and financial planning for expatriates. She recently decided to go out on her own and decided to work with us because she liked our name. Kelly came out to San Francisco to jumpstart the project. We worked with her to define what was different about her approach and her business. We developed the name Alfalfa, which is a play on money, and also Kansas, where she has her office. We also felt that the name was fun to say and stands in pretty stark contrast to all the stuffy names of financial firms. We developed the story of her firm, hooked her up with a designer to develop Alfalfa's visual identity and wrote the website. We also do marketing consulting for her on a continuing basis.

Left Field

Nature of the Work:
Name an Advertising Agency

Naming Consultant:
A Hundred Monkeys

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 know as interactive marketing. They went on to do a lot of work for Amazon, Macy¹s, 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.

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