Transcript

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
Jeff, today we are going to talk about Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. You want to do that with me?

Jeff McKay:
Oh, my gosh. Vacation is having an impact on you. I can’t say that it’s a positive one, but it is having an impact. Okay. Do tell. What are we going to be discussing?

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, we’re going to talk about Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, otherwise AKA Yahoo. The topic today is naming, and that was actually the original beta name for Yahoo before it became Yahoo back in the ’90s, when it was just an idea of Jerry Yang and David Filo. You were kind enough to connect us with an expert on naming, so we are welcoming today Laurel Sutton from Catchword, and we are going to talk about naming.
I think serendipitously, as you mentioned, when we scheduled this, that there’s just a lot of conversation about names in the consumer lexicon right now, so the timing seems real good. Welcome, Laurel. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Catchword and maybe a little bit about how you got into naming in the first place?

Laurel Sutton:
Sure. Well, thanks for having me on. Thank you so much. I love to talk about naming, so I am more than happy to sit here and hold forth on that.
Catchword is a naming only firm. We’ve been around for, gosh, 20-plus years now. It seems just yesterday, but it’s been a long time. And we’re just devoted to naming. There are a lot of firms that do other types of marketing, they do naming and graphic design, but we are really just focused on the naming. And we’ve built quite a portfolio over those 20-plus years. Got started in tech because we started in 1998, which was when the internet bubble was happening. But we’ve since branched out into consumer packaged goods and other brands. We’ve worked with companies all over the globe, with Fortune 50 to miniature little startups in the Bay Area. So we’ve had quite the breadth of experience.
When Catchword started, it was just me and my two partners at that time. We all met working at another naming company. We had been hired over a period of time and got to know each other and discovered that we really, really love naming, but we really wanted to just do it our way on our own. And that was a time when it was when everybody just started their own companies because they felt like doing it. So we took the plunge and did that, and it worked out really well for us.
I was very lucky in that my two partners both had MBAs, so they understood what it took to start a business and to run a business. I was an academic, so I did not really have a good idea about that. I had moved to California from New Jersey to get my graduate degree in linguistics at UC Berkeley. And that’s how I got into naming. I was looking for some work, and a friend of mine worked at the same naming company and said, “They’re looking for someone to help with the naming and just generally stuff around the office. I think you’d be really good at this.” And I thought, “What is this, naming? It’s a profession. You can do this for a living.” So I interviewed, and I got hired.
And then it was kind of kismet because I hadn’t realized that that was a career path that you could have. Up until that time, I had thought I would stay in academia and only gradually began to realize it probably wasn’t a good fit for me because I don’t have the right kind of temperament to be a professor. So I was thinking, “What could I do if I’m looking outside of academia,” and this presented itself. And that was it.
Once I started doing it, I thought, “This is amazing. I am using all of my linguistic skills in this job every day in different ways.” And I still do. I think that is, for me, the best part about my job is that I use every aspect of my linguistic training every day in different ways. And it’s not just about creating the names. It’s about how you present the names and how you think through the strategic considerations that have to go with it. So that is my origin story.

Jason Mlicki:
I love the part of your story where you say [inaudible 00:04:09] got hired for you to do naming and some things around the office, because that’s how it was framed together, which it seems like how a lot of specialty skills sometimes get framed by people like, “Oh, well, just do some other stuff around the office because” … But I love that it’s become your career progression, and I’m excited to talk about this.
Jeff, why don’t you start us off? Where do you want to start this conversation? Because I will in full disclosure admit that Jeff both introduced the topic and introduced us to Laurel. So on the spreadsheet of right guests, Jeff’s put another one on his side, and he’s killing me in that contest.

Jeff McKay:
Oh, boy. Having been in professional services so long, I have had to name or had to market names handed to me that are absolutely atrocious. And those in professional services know what I’m talking about. When you get some non-marketing, client-centric person naming stuff, you get three- or four-word names and, quickly, into acronyms, and naming is just atrocious. I was introduced to Catchword by a friend to Mark Skoultchi, and in full disclosure, Mark has worked for some of my clients, and we continue to kind of be friends as a result of that.
I don’t want to talk about professional services acronyms. I want to go someplace juicy and new. Okay?

Laurel Sutton:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. Laurel, one of the things I know, and I think this is important for our listeners to know, one of the things that I love about Catchword, and this is not a promotional video, this is just CMO talking-

Jason Mlicki:
Well, if it was a promotional video, it’d be a really bad video since there’s no visual component.

Jeff McKay:
Of a promotional podcast.

Jason Mlicki:
There you go.

Jeff McKay:
Oh, gosh. Mixing channels. Catchword has a really great process and methodology, and that’s one of the things that Mark really used to win me over. So I want to talk about process, and I don’t want to go real deep, but I want to talk about how you can have a great process and partners or marketers can still choose bad names. It’s dumbfounding to me.

Laurel Sutton:
The process part of it is because you need to have good input in order to have good output. And the fundamental issue with naming is that everybody thinks they can do naming because in real life you do do naming a lot, right? You name your kids, you name your pets. Some people name their cars, some people name their houses. So naming is something that people are familiar with. And when people think, “I’m good at naming my kids,” they think it transfers over to naming businesses or products, but that’s not always the case.
Naming a business or a product has far more restrictions on it than simply naming your new dog. There are issues about who it needs to appeal to, there are linguistic issues, there are trademark issues, there are domain availability issues. There’s a whole constellation of strategic concerns that you need to take into account when you’re developing a name. So if you have garbage in, you’re going to get garbage out.
So we are very clear with our clients that they need to have a good understanding of who the name’s aimed at, who does it need to appeal to, and what are all those real-world specifications that need to affect the name? So we’ll interview them. We’ll set a brief. We’ll do tons of creative. We’ll come up with literally thousands of name candidates. We’ll whittle them down and do some pre-screening. We’ll present to the client fairly large groups of names, like maybe 50 at a go. And eventually, we’ll get down to a list of maybe 10 that the client feels comfortable with that really hit all of the messages that we’ve set in our brief and that then get passed on to their lawyers for the full trademark screening.
So it’s a big winnowing process. It’s not just writing down four or five names on a cocktail napkin, and then thinking, “Oh, we’re done. This is great.” It really is a process of taking a large group and going down and down and down until you really get to the core of what you’re trying to express.
The bad names happen … Well, just to say, where I see it going wrong often is when people disregard process, where they come in at the last minute and they say, “Hey, this has been great. You guys have done terrific work, but you know what? I just came up with this while I was skiing the other day, and this is a much better name.” That’s-

Jeff McKay:
That never happens. That’d never happen.

Laurel Sutton:
That’s literally a story from my life. And they think just because it came to them in a stroke of inspiration that it’s better than what we just went through with all that process. And mostly it’s just not. It really isn’t.

Jeff McKay:
So what you’re saying is it’s not the namers that are smoking dope and drinking scotch, it’s the clients that are smoking dope and drinking scotch. Oh, gosh.

Jason Mlicki:
I was just going to say that presumably bad names [inaudible 00:09:10] from bad clients, Jeff McKay, but just … Is that what you’re trying to say? I think that’s what you were saying, right?

Laurel Sutton:
No.

Jeff McKay:
No.

Laurel Sutton:
It’s not that. It’s not that the clients are bad. It’s that they’re just not understanding what it needs to do. And to be honest, we all work in marketing, we know this, clients sometimes have egos that get in the way. And the desire of a client to show that something was created by them, to put their stamp on it is sometimes it outweighs the actual considerations of who the name should be for and what’s actually best for the brand. That’s just business, right? It happens all the time. It’s not just in naming. It’s in graphic design, it’s in strategic business decisions. So it’s something that will never go away, and you just have to accept it as a creative person. Graphic designers have to do it all the time.

Jeff McKay:
Wow, we could end right there. That’s a life lesson.

Jason Mlicki:
In your process, do you involve the client in the name generation window, kind of the process of developing names through naming exercises and such?

Laurel Sutton:
Sometimes we do. But again, it needs to be according to the way we’ve set up the process. So if they want to take the creative brief that we’ve written that’s specific to the name and that everybody has agreed on, right? We’ve all agreed, these are the messages, these are the ways that the name needs to be constructed. If they’re willing to take that and do creative, that’s fantastic. We would love to have that.
But if it’s just people coming up with names that don’t really have anything to do with what we’re trying to accomplish with this name, it’s not going to be very helpful. We’ll take those names and add it to the master list, but they’re not going to rise to the top the way a name that’s been carefully considered that is foundational to the brand will rise to the top.

Jason Mlicki:
All right. So I opened this podcast with a story about the naming of Yahoo, the web directory. I assume that’s a real story. It’s a story that’s been around forever. You may correct me and say it’s urban legend. But I shared it only because I think … I just want to ask the question, from your perspective, can a name make or break a product or service? And maybe if so, how or why?

Laurel Sutton:
Mostly the answer is no. The name will not make or break. What we like to say is a bad name isn’t going to kill a great product, and a good name isn’t going to save a terrible product. It has some effect on whether people might be attracted to the product or service. They might remember it more. But on the whole, if it’s a really good product, no matter what it’s called, people are going to buy it because they are not so swayed by what things are called.
Yahoo’s a good example. When that name was first introduced, and I remember that, a lot of people didn’t like it. They thought it was a stupid name. And if you look at where that word comes from, the etymology of it, going back to Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels, it’s very derogatory, right? The yahoos were the idiots in that book. So people thought, “No, this is no good. Nobody wants to be a yahoo. It’s insulting.” Now, I mean … Well, you could argue about the value of Yahoo now, but it has survived many, many years.
And the same could be said of other incredibly valuable brands. When Nintendo first introduced the Wii, that got tremendous pushback. And people said, “This is stupid. It sounds like wee like peeing. Why does it have two I’s? It’s impossible to pronounce. No one will ever remember that it has two I’s. What does it mean?” It got a huge amount of criticism in the press, and yet great product at the time, and it really just sailed on. So whenever people are saying, “Oh, this name is bad, it’s going to sink it,” I can point to so many counterexamples.
The places where you really want to be careful is when names are objectively offensive, and there are many examples of that. We’re living through a time right now when people are finally realizing that there are a lot of offensive and, frankly, racist names out there that should’ve been changed a long, long time ago, and they’re finally being changed, like the Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben examples. Those images, the language around them is incredibly racist, and they should’ve booted those a long time ago. Nobody’s going to stop buying Uncle Ben’s rice because it’s not called Uncle Ben’s anymore. It’s good rice. People are going to buy it.
I can give one example of a name that was so offensive that it actually did get pulled. The product got pulled and rebranded as something else later. And that was Reebok in the UK had introduced a running shoe for women, specifically for women, that was called Incubus. Now, do you know what an incubus is?

Jeff McKay:
Yes.

Laurel Sutton:
Okay. For those listeners who might not be familiar with that, it’s a folkloric name for a demon that comes in the middle of the night and basically sexually assaults women. And somehow they thought this was a good name for a women’s running shoe.
And there was a huge kerfuffle about it, and the product got pulled. And they apologized and they said, “Oh, we didn’t vet it.” Clearly they hadn’t vetted it. There was nobody in the office, I guess, who knew what it actually meant. So that’s a bad name. So don’t do that.
There’s a difference between those kinds of names, I think, and what we might call deliberately provocative names, which are names that skirt that border between acceptable to the mainstream and edgy. Right? In San Francisco, there’s a nail salon called Hand Job. That’s a good brand. I mean, it was created by a naming company, one of our competitors here in the Bay Area, and clearly they were going for something that was really edgy and funny and would appeal to a certain clientele. Hey, that’s their brand. It works for them.
The French Connection company, that clothing manufacturer for a while branded as FCUK, which supposedly stood for French Connection UK. It’s clearly meant to evoke … Do you allow swearing on this podcast? I didn’t know if I should say it or not.

Jason Mlicki:
I think we can make the mental leap on that one. We’re good.

Laurel Sutton:
Okay. It clearly represents one of the seven words you can’t say on television, let’s say that.

Jeff McKay:
Thank you, George Carlin.

Laurel Sutton:
Yes. And they did that on purpose, right? I mean, the story is that it was in the header of one of their faxes, and that may be the origin of it, but they saw an opportunity and they ran with it. They wanted to be edgy and appeal to younger people. That’s a deliberately provocative name, and if people find it offensive, they’re okay with that. They’re willing to take that risk. That’s really different from a name like Aunt Jemima, which was developed in a time when people didn’t think it was horribly racist and offensive and just because of inertia decided not to change it. And now they are, which I think is really good.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Jeff McKay:
Let’s talk about that a little more. What I hear you saying is naming, at its core, is very subjective, it’s very emotional. I know this from naming my kids. There were boys names that I really liked that my wife refused because it reminded her of some junior high kid that created a bad experience for her. So it’s an emotional endeavor, and great name is in the ear of the beholder, if you will.

Laurel Sutton:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff McKay:
So what I hear you saying is you need to determine what your risk tolerance is, you need to have a deep understanding of the people that you’re speaking to. But my point is this. An Aunt Jemima, given our current environment, you can clearly see that racism in that, in the light of what we’re seeing now. But there’s news stories of the family of the woman who became the first Aunt Jemima and the first millionaire Black woman, I believe, in America really loved that role and loved that name. And it really had served that family and its heirs quite well. So it seems to me like there’s a real tension between offense and appreciation, history. How do you wade through all that?

Laurel Sutton:
I’ve read a lot about the Aunt Jemima issue, and part of it is … It’s intersectional, right? This is a word in the discourse that I think we should all be very aware of. It may have been true that it was a great opportunity for … I believe her name was Nancy Green, the woman who was the model for Aunt Jemima. But what other opportunities did she have? It wasn’t like she had a lot of choice in this, and I think that is something that we have to contend with when we’re looking at these names. If there is only one avenue and it’s the avenue that’s between you and dire poverty, maybe you got to take that. And I’m not the person to pass judgment on people who are in different circumstances than I am.
I always think in these kinds of situations, you should ask the people who are most affected by it what they think and do what they want. It’s like asking what people have as their pronouns. What do they want? I’m not going to impose it. What would they like to be called? Americans who are Black, do they want to be called Black Americans? Do they want to be called African Americans? Let’s ask them and do what they want to do rather than saying, “Well, we think we know best.”

Jeff McKay:
I keep waiting for the phone to ring and have Notre Dame on the other end and ask me my opinion about the Fighting Irish. I’m a lover, right? I’m not some drunken Irishman that goes out to bars and fights. And I’m not a leprechaun. So I wish they would call me and let me give my opinion on them. Those are all over. We see that with like the Washington Redskins. Jason, up in Ohio, is it Chief Wahoo?

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, Chief Wahoo. But I think Chief Wahoo, which was the mascot for the Indians, but I’m pretty sure that they’ve sunset that logo within the last year.

Laurel Sutton:
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki:
But you’re right, it took them a very long time to commit to removing that logo.
I think it’s interesting that, and I don’t know how far we want to go down this path, but my sense is that when you talk about sports teams and naming of sports teams, that there’s a little different dynamic there in terms of the emotional relationship that the fan base has with those names relative to a typical company or a consumer product that probably does change some of the dynamics for those company decision-makers. I’m not defending any decisions they’re making. I’m just saying, I think that there’s a rabidness to sports fans sometimes that far exceeds how much love someone has for a consumer brand, at least in my experience having seen how Cleveland fans behave or Boston fans behave. It’s a level well beyond most consumer products, but I don’t know if that’s something we want to weigh into or not.

Laurel Sutton:
I think you’re right. But the point remains, if they wanted to change the name, they could. And it’s just that they don’t want to.

Jeff McKay:
The reason I keep approaching this is it’s important to enable our listeners to how to sort through this because they’re naming products and there are different opinions within a given firm or a company about what something should be named. And oftentime, I think in professional services, because so many of these decisions are made in committee, that you get to a point where you’re trying to appease everyone that you end up with a name that’s not even worth the effort to get to.
So what are the ways that you can kind of wade through this? It’s very complicated. And I think about, Jason, the sports stuff. Here in Illinois, Chief Illiniwek is gone for the Illini. But in Florida, the Seminoles are going really strong. And I believe the Seminole tribe really supports that name as well. I could be wrong. But how are people to make sense of this, Laurel?

Jason Mlicki:
No pressure, by the way. Easy question. It’s a softball.

Laurel Sutton:
The answer of course is just hire a naming company. But seriously, bringing in a third party, whether it’s a naming company or a marketer like either of you or a strategic branding company, can really help clarify those things because clients who work in especially large companies, the Fortune 50 types, are so inward-looking, right? I mean, they have to be, that’s their job, is to see what’s happening inside the company. It can be very difficult for them to do a 180 and suddenly look out and see who their audience is, who their customers are, and take that different point of view.
By bringing in somebody who’s not an employee of the company, it can really provide a fresh perspective, which is really helpful in figuring out, okay, what does this name actually need to do? How can it best support the brand? So we try to take the subjectivity out of it. It’s always going to be somewhat subjective, but it becomes the question of, “What does this do for the brand,” rather than, “Do I like it or do I not like it?”
We’ve developed plenty of names for clients that were not especially well-liked even as we went through those many thousands of names and winnowed and winnowed and came out to the final list of perhaps three or five. They weren’t anybody’s favorite name, but they were the name that got the job done. And if the client can see that and accept that they don’t have to be in love with it, they don’t even have to be in like with it, as long as it accomplishes what they need to get done from a business perspective, that’s a good name. And it will become a great over time with marketing and with equity and with dollars and experience. If it’s a good name paired with a good product, the name will become good over time.

Jeff McKay:
That’s one of the most valuable things that Mark taught me, is that names really are empty vessels and we put meaning into them. And I mean, we see that with Apple or Amazon or things like that. Because if you were to go to somebody and say, “Hey, name your firm Watermelon or Grape or Apricot,” they’d laugh at you. Who would name a company after a fruit? Yet the most valuable brand is named Apple. I know Jason’s going to give us the time warning here, so I have one more question and then I’m sure Jason will have one as well.

Jason Mlicki:
It’s funny, though, when you say that, there’s a software company in Columbus that I believe started out as CrossChx, C-R-O-S-S-C-H-X. Kind of awkward, hard to say. And I never thought much about them, and then they suddenly renamed, rebranded, and re-emerged as a company called Olive, and it’s a AI startup for healthcare organizations. And suddenly you took them much more seriously when they had really kind of put this new face on the company. And all of a sudden they’re getting more press, they’re getting more visibility. I mean, they obviously have more venture capital money, which isn’t tied to the name, but I think that was part of the whole story. I don’t know, I go back to this idea that names and name genres, actually, I think they do matter.
But one of my takeaways from Laurel’s comments that I think is really for executives is understand the etymology of the names you’re looking at, the names you’re choosing, because the example that she gave is such a specific example of executives being blind to what a name means. And I think that the risk that that firms probably have might be tied there if they have any names that they need to take a look at and really understand the history of those names, especially egocentric ones, and what they mean.
Before we wrap, I have one question for Laurel maybe [inaudible 00:25:38] what’s the worst naming criteria you ever got from a client?

Laurel Sutton:
Well, there’s a couple, and they usually tend to be for practical reasons. So when we used to do more hardware naming, the name would sometimes be restricted by the amount on a bezel that was on a product, so couldn’t be more than five letters. Like, “Oh, great. Okay. That’s going to be hard.” But it had to be because it was going to be printed on this little piece of plastic. So that was difficult.
We had a client once that was changing their name from a name that started with an A, and they really wanted the new name also to start with an A because they wanted some tie back to the old name. And that was very, very difficult given what they were trying to express with the name. It was really, really hard to do just names that started with A.

Jason Mlicki:
We’ve done some naming work. Not anymore. Years and years ago. And I had that same criteria [inaudible 00:26:36] a client, for a different reason. And their rationale was that they wanted to be at the top of the directory at a trade show, which was [inaudible 00:26:46] how long ago this was. And so that was why they wanted it to start with an A.

Laurel Sutton:
Yeah. Thinking about names, I agree with you, of course, that names are important. I mean, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think names were important. But I think, especially when you’re talking about name changes, your audience will give you a certain amount of latitude.
And the example that I’m thinking about where you really can’t do it for some reasons is when Philip Morris decided that they were going to rebrand as Altria. Right? They were doing it because they were forced to by the government for one thing, but also because they were really trying to rehabilitate their image from the company that makes products that will literally kill you if you use them into something that felt more, shall we say, altruistic?
And they put out press releases at the time saying, “Oh, we hired some firm to develop it, and it doesn’t mean altruistic at all. We’re just trying to come up with something that sounded big and important.” But it was so transparent that they were trying to elevate their image from what it used to be to what they wanted it to be. And nobody bought it.
It was a bad choice for them. I think they could’ve chosen basically any other name and it would not have seemed so, as I said, transparently self-serving, that they were trying to create a new image just on this one word. It wasn’t like they were going to stop making cigarettes or anything. They were just going to rebrand under this beautiful, new, lovely-sounding word, somewhat Latinate, somewhat sophisticated sounding.
That really fell flat. That is one example that I can think of where rebranding to try to erase the bad past didn’t work because they chose a very bad name to go with as their new name.

Jeff McKay:
I have a specific professional services course, and I know you need to wrap this up and get back to the beach, but I really want to know this, and I’m sure our audience wants to know it somewhat, too.

Jason Mlicki:
They don’t want to know it. I promise you they don’t want to know it. They just want you to stop talking. [inaudible 00:28:39] keep going.

Jeff McKay:
Okay. All right, Laurel. This is a somewhat loaded question, but I know you’re going to give a great answer. Okay? It’s like a 10-part question.
In professional services, most firms are named by a founder or two. And traditionally, when somebody makes partner or top partner or something, they get their name on the name plate, right? So you get these three- or four-word names, which are horrible. Clients tend to reduce them down to some kind of short hand, whether it’s Ernst & Young becoming E&Y or Arthur Andersen becoming Anderson or something like that.
What are your thoughts about naming professional services firms after partners, i.e., somebody’s last name? Or, go in a completely different direction and creating a word up or some other thing that has nothing to do with the partners it transcends? So that’s question number one. What are your thoughts on that?

Laurel Sutton:
The reason that people name firms after themselves is the same reason that, for example, lawyers will name firms after themselves or very small consulting firms for other reasons will name it. And I’ve actually given that advice to people. And it is because when you’re a small firm, people are hiring you. They want you, the person that they know. Maybe you were somewhere else, and if they can find your name in the name of the company, that makes them feel good, like you’re the one who’s doing the service for them.
Of course, it becomes a problem later on, as you point out, when it becomes bigger and maybe that person isn’t even there anymore. So then what do you do? Maybe you’ll have to change it or abbreviate it or something like that.
So I think as long as the founder is a person who is involved in the business and they’re known, it’s a good strategy to put their name in the name of the company because people will identify the company with them.
I think going in the other direction can work as long as you have a good name, and I’m putting “good” in quotes there because we just spent 20 minutes talking about what a good name is. It’s a good name if people can remember it, if it doesn’t mean something bad, if it ties back to the business in some way, if you’ve got a story to tell around it, that really helps people identify it with the purpose of the company.
Catchword is what we would call a suggestive name, right? It suggests something about the business that we do. It doesn’t say we’re naming company. There’s loads of naming companies that have “name” or “naming” in their names, and we didn’t want to be one of those. But we didn’t want to go all the way to the end of the spectrum and be like Apple or Olive or something like that. We wanted something that suggested, in a interesting way, the fact that we are good with words. Catchy words. So we ended up choosing Catchword for that reason.
I think when you choose a name that’s not immediately obvious to your audience, you better have a really good reason for doing that, because if it’s just a random word that really doesn’t have anything to do, and there’s no story to tell, how are they ever going to make that association? You’re making it harder for them to remember who you are and what you do, and you don’t ever want to make that hard for your customers. You want to make it easy for them to find you and easy for them to buy your services because that’s the bottom line, will they find and buy what I’ve got to offer?

Jason Mlicki:
Wiser words to end-

Jeff McKay:
Very.

Jason Mlicki:
… on I can’t think of. I really enjoyed this so much. Laurel, thank you for joining us today and sharing your wise words of wisdom on naming and process and thinking about naming, certainly in the current environment, and the risk associated with old names or legacy names for firms. I think it’s a really, really timely topic. And Jeff, thank you for introducing me to Laurel and inviting her on the show.

Jeff McKay:
My pleasure. And I’ll say again, go to catchwordbranding.com. We’ll also put a link in the show notes. And there’s two … Well, there’s lots of great resources on there, but two resources in particular. One is creating the perfect name and then I think there’s like 10 criteria of a great name. And Catchword is so cool they don’t even ask you to put in an email to get it. They just give it to you. So Catchword Branding, check it out.

Laurel Sutton:
Thanks so much. This was a delight. I love to talk about naming, and it’s so fun to get such interesting questions. So thanks for having me on.

Jason Mlicki:
Translation, strange, bad questions. That [inaudible 00:33:18].

Laurel Sutton:
No, this was great. This was wonderful.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal.com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.