“Professionals employed to provide you with [company] names sometimes [present] a thousand concepts. It’s not simply a day of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good concepts. It’s … scratching beneath the floor,” Rob Meyerson, founder and principal of Heirloom, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.

The impartial model strategist was previously head of naming at Hewlett-Packard and director of verbal identification at Interbrand.

Within the interview, he argues that constructing a model requires placing a stability “between becoming in and standing out.”

Additional, he discusses the professionals and cons of making an authentic identify for a monetary advisory versus utilizing the founder’s personal identify.

His shoppers have ranged from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500 companies, together with Activision, AT&T, Intel, Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co.

Primarily based within the San Francisco Bay Space, the place a lot of his expertise shoppers are situated, Meyerson additionally talks in regards to the good and dangerous causes for renaming a agency and opines on Riskalyze altering its identify to Nitrogen.

Writer of “Model Naming: The Full Information to Making a Identify for Your Firm, Product or Service,” Meyerson has a brand new e book due within the fourth quarter or early 2024: the sixth version of the Amazon bestseller, “Designing Model Identification” (Wiley), co-authored with Alina Wheeler.

ThinkAdvisor lately interviewed Meyerson, who was talking by cellphone from Pacifica, California.

He declares that “branding is the promise the corporate makes [and] the nice will it has constructed through the years.”

Listed here are excerpts from our interview:

THINKADVISOR: Monetary advisors must differentiate themselves from each other. Why is it important to place nice effort into naming their corporations?

ROB MEYERSON: Consider it as an excellent funding. Constructing a powerful model is necessary. And the identify is a comparatively low-cost advertising and marketing expense with doubtlessly very excessive influence.

It is going to make adverts more practical and [can] final for the size of the corporate. So getting it proper upfront makes a variety of sense.

Getting it incorrect will be very, very costly if it ends in your getting sued or having to rename or rebrand a number of years after launching.

Why would you get sued?

In case you use a reputation that’s an identical with or too much like one other firm that’s offering comparable items and providers, they’ll ship you a stop and desist letter to cease utilizing that identify.

So that you or your lawyer ought to do some vetting to ensure from a authorized standpoint that you just’re ready to make use of or personal the identify.

Ought to you may have a model technique in thoughts earlier than you select a reputation?

Sure. Ideally, it kinds the inspiration of the naming transient that ought to show you how to decide what kinds of names are going to work — both names that sound like monetary advisories or names that sound fully totally different and can show you how to stand out.

The naming transient contains the concepts you need to convey via the identify. A part of that’s taking a look at rivals’ names and understanding how one can stand out.

It additionally has the kinds of names that might get extra consideration or names that might mix in, which might make individuals have hassle remembering them.

What’s probably the most difficult a part of naming or renaming a agency?

Partly, it’s naming the agency! Professionals employed to provide you with names sometimes [present] a thousand concepts. So it’s not simply a day of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good concepts.

It’s days or perhaps weeks of scratching beneath the floor for fascinating concepts.

A giant purpose we do that’s due to the authorized constraints round branding. You need to keep away from the numerous names which have already been utilized in totally different industries.

Please discuss additional about developing with an authentic identify for a monetary follow.

It permits you to categorical some inventive concepts. It offers you a little bit extra flexibility, together with at level of exit.

You possibly can say one thing about your positioning within the market, whether or not about ease of doing enterprise or innovation or a suggestion of scale [etc.].

The monetary providers business is conservative. Ought to an advisory’s identify be conservative, or are you able to be inventive and provides it a kicky identify?

It’s a query that goes deeper than naming. Anytime you’re constructing a model, you’re making an attempt to strike a stability between becoming in and standing out.

How a lot you stand out will depend on the way you’re making an attempt to place your agency within the market.

Suppose you need to stand out?

In case you’re making an attempt to do issues otherwise and wish that to be clear to your prospects and prospects, you generally is a little much less conservative and provide you with a reputation that may show you how to be seen as cutting-edge and breaking the mould.

However if you happen to’re not doing these issues, if yours is simply, type of, the monetary providers agency that you just’d anticipate, then you definitely would in all probability need to keep on with a reputation that matches in a little bit higher within the market.

Many practices use the proprietor’s identify of their agency identify, reminiscent of “Joe Smith Wealth Administration.” Your ideas?

In the end, it will depend on what the particular person’s identify is. Will it make you stand out and differentiate? If it’s a reputation that sounds much like [many] different individuals’s names on the market, it’s not an amazing concept.

But it surely does assist to maintain the concentrate on you and your private model. So if you happen to’re a one-person operation making an attempt to construct your individual model, it might assist.

On this context, what are another concerns?

Is your individual identify easy sufficient that individuals will be capable to learn it, pronounce it, spell it? However is it distinctive sufficient? If it’s, say, “Joe Smith,” properly, there are [numerous] Joe Smiths on the market.