Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Messaging shouldn't feel this hard.
If you’re staring at a complex product, an oversaturated market, and a mountain of conflicting opinions from stakeholders, you aren’t alone. Whether you’re a founder trying to find your voice or a marketer struggling to align multiple buyers, the "messy middle" of messaging is where most brands get stuck.
On Better Messaging, Emma Stratton, author and B2B messaging expert, is pulling back the curtain on how to turn technical complexity into clarity. Drawing from a decade of experience partnering with hundreds of tech companies, from seed-stage startups to global household names, Emma shares the practical frameworks and real-world lessons needed to make people actually care about what you’re building.
[00:00:00] Emma Stratton: I am Emma Stratton and this is Better Messaging. If you want to stop second-guessing yourself and start writing better messaging today, you are in the right place.
[00:00:12] Emma Stratton: A couple times a year, I run a messaging training cohort with marketers from all sorts of different companies. They come together and join me for a month long training experience. We do a lot of fun stuff like workshopping, and of course I teach a lot of content, but one part that I really love about the messaging training cohort is that you get an individual one-on-one feedback session with me that you can use for whatever purpose you want.
[00:00:40] Emma Stratton: So folks will often bring an asset or something they’re working on, so maybe messaging, um, brand voice guidelines, launch materials, all sorts of things. But recently a marketer brought a pretty interesting and fun challenge to me. She came to me and wanted advice about naming a new product. So her company had a new product that they were launching and they were super excited about, and they couldn’t really decide on a name.
[00:01:10] Emma Stratton: So she showed me some of the contenders for the name, and quite frankly, I can’t remember any of the names and I think this happens a lot with product names and names in tech. They’re kind of odd and hard to remember, so I can’t remember the names that she shared with me, but I do remember. That they were kind of opaque names.
[00:01:31] Emma Stratton: That didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time. So I asked her if this product was the first product that they were naming, and she kind of shook her head and said, oh, I wish, let me show you all of our product names. And she went and brought up her company website and pulled the dropdown tab of all the different products that this company offered.
[00:01:53] Emma Stratton: And sure enough, each product had its own unique and special name. Again, I can’t remember any of these names. They were not memorable, and it’s also hard to remember names, but there was maybe I would say 10 different names of different products all on this dropdown. And I looked at that situation and I thought, “oh boy, you have a naming debt situation here.”
[00:02:19] Emma Stratton: So naming debt, okay, we’ve heard about technical debt, we know what that is. But there is a thing called “naming debt.’ And I see this quite a lot, especially with companies who have been around for a few years, who are growing. They found success. They’re launching products. Every time they launch a product, they give it its own name, almost as if it’s a new baby, right?
[00:02:42] Emma Stratton: A new baby that deserves its own identity. They’re giving each product a name, and that ends up creating a lot of difficulties for the marketing team. So today I wanna talk about my recommendation for naming your products. Now, naming is not technically part of messaging. It is adjacent. It is about words.
[00:03:03] Emma Stratton: But I have a thing for naming because in a past life I could have been a professional namer. I was kind of going down that track and I almost accepted a job as a professional namer at a naming agency. You probably are like, “what? There’s a professional namer.” Yes, it is a thing. And I had done quite a bit of naming previously to when I started Punchy.
[00:03:26] Emma Stratton: I did a lot of naming when I worked at a branding agency. So back in the day, I used to partner with clients like Proctor and Gamble, Colgate, Palmolive, and I would come up with names for new products. I think the only name that actually got through was a name for a moist toilet paper.
[00:03:46] Emma Stratton: I think we called them Washlets, that was part of my work. But I spent a lot of time working on naming new products and I got into a couple situations where I was helping to rename companies. And I gotta tell you, naming is hard. Okay. Naming is hard. I think it’s a dark art in and of itself. It is not easy to do.
[00:04:07] Emma Stratton: And if you’ve ever tried to name something, I think you know what I’m talking about. Naming is hard for a couple reasons. One of the reasons it’s really hard is that it’s super subjective, right? People have all kinds of associations linked to certain names. And I remember working with a namer in the past who called this Grandma’s cat syndrome.
[00:04:31] Emma Stratton: It’s like you throw out a potential name and someone’s like, “oh, my grandmother’s cat had that name.” Or, “oh, I had an ex-boyfriend whose friend was that name, so I don’t like that name.” People just coming up with memories and associations that they’ve tacked onto that name and why they don’t like it. So that’s something that comes up a lot with naming.
[00:04:50] Emma Stratton: It’s very emotional, it’s very subjective, very opinionated and people also get their emotions attached to it. I remember once I was working on renaming a SaaS company actually, and did it with the leadership team. I was running a whole naming workshop and one of the leaders was holding onto this name.
[00:05:13] Emma Stratton: And I actually, again, I can’t remember the name, but it was something Greek, like it had a, classical Greek edge to it. It was not at all aligned with this kind of hot news startup, he was holding onto this name almost like a precious baby and wouldn’t let it go throughout the whole naming workshop and insisted that it was on the short list.
[00:05:33] Emma Stratton: And I’ve seen this happen time and time again with naming. It is just very, very hard to get a bunch of people to agree on one name. And the bigger and more important the thing is that you’re naming the harder it is to actually do. So now that we’ve established that naming is super, super hard, now I wanna talk about what you should think about when it comes to naming your own product.
[00:05:58] Emma Stratton: So I get it, you’ve got this new product and you’re so excited about it. Also, internally, you have probably named this product. You refer it to a certain way and you’ve gotten used to it. It has an identity and a life to you. Should you give that product a name and go to market with it and market it with that name?
[00:06:17] Emma Stratton: Well, I always recommend “no” in most cases, okay? In most cases, I believe that it’s a lot more sensible and easy on your buyer to go for a more straightforward, descriptive name. The type of name that kind of gives you a sense of what the product is, rather than a made up brand branded name that is hard to understand or may not actually have anything to do with the product itself. Because here’s the thing about names.
[00:06:51] Emma Stratton: A name doesn’t really mean anything until you fill meaning into it. Imagine it like an empty cup, right? It’s just a cup, but you’ve gotta fill it with meaning for it to be meaningful. You know, actually, I don’t know if that cup metaphor made sense. It made sense in my mind, but just remember that. A name has to be filled with meaning and association in the beginning.
[00:07:16] Emma Stratton: A name is just a word. It doesn’t really mean a lot or do a lot. It doesn’t make people feel a certain way or think that much. They people have to start connecting it to a product and then they build their own association. So in the beginning, a name is just a name. Now, when you come up with a branded name, that kind of doesn’t have anything to do with what the product is.
[00:07:39] Emma Stratton: That is something that needs to be filled with meaning. It is another thing that a buyer has to kind of figure out. In addition to, what is your product and why should I care about your product? First, they have to get a sense of what it is from the name. So when you create a name, it’s another thing that you have to explain, that you have to get people to understand on top of what the product already is.
[00:08:04] Emma Stratton: And my personal kind of philosophy is to make things as easy as possible on the buyer. Make it easy for them to understand and grasp what your product is. Help them shop your site. Easily and don’t make it hard. When you pull down a dropdown that has all sorts of different kind of wacky product names, you’re kind of thinking, “what am I looking at here?”
[00:08:26] Emma Stratton: As opposed to when you have more descriptive names, you start to sort of set the stage for the different things that your products can actually do. So I recommend going descriptive. So let me give you an example of descriptive versus branded names in an approach and you can kind of see the difference between the two.
[00:08:49] Emma Stratton: Because where a branded name gets complicated is when you have many products with different names. That’s when things start to get ungainly and a bit complex, and then it becomes hard for people to understand how these products work together and what they actually cover. So let’s do a made up example, and I’m gonna pretend we’re talking about a data insights company named Hydro.
[00:09:12] Emma Stratton: Hey, I like that name Hydro. And I wanna give you an example of taking two different approaches. So Hydro has three different products. And if I were going descriptive and trying to be very true to what these products are, these are my three product names being very descriptive for Hydro. One is segments, the second is charts, and the third is playbooks, right?
[00:09:40] Emma Stratton: They’re one word, very clear. I kind of have an understanding of what each thing is about, right? Segments, charts, and playbooks. Now, if I wanted to go branded and come up with my own name for each one of those, instead of segments, I might call that “User View”. It’s kind of related to understanding my customer segments, sort of right?
[00:10:03] Emma Stratton: Instead of charts, I’m gonna say something like, “EZ Charts”, okay? e-z charts. See what I did there? And instead of playbooks, I’m gonna go for “Power Play”, ’cause that sounds exciting and it kind of has one of the words in it. So now, instead of segments, charts, and playbooks. I have got User View, EZ Charts and Power Play. Not as clear is it?
[00:10:28] Emma Stratton: Right? When I say segments, charts, playbooks, you have a sense of what these products can do, whereas User View, EZ Charts and Power Play, it is not as clear. You’re gonna have to really dive into those pages and start to figure out, okay, what are these products? So to me, that’s a missed opportunity. So when we’re talking about clarity, that descriptive product name is really helpful.
[00:10:49] Emma Stratton: But now I wanna get to that kind of marketing reality. I wanna bring in the company name because Hydro is the company and it’s the larger brand with more equity, or should have more equity then the products. So if we were to tack on Hydro in front of the product name, let’s see what that looks like. So if I do it with a descriptive way, it’s not so bad, right?
[00:11:12] Emma Stratton: We got Hydro segments, Hydro charts, and Hydro playbooks. Not bad. Two words. I get what each thing is and it links back to Hydro. Now if I do the same thing with the branded names, it gets a little bit more complicated. I’ve got Hydro user view, Hydro easy charts, Hydro power play. Now it’s kind of like, alright, what does that mean?
[00:11:37] Emma Stratton: I got Hydro in front and it’s not super clear and it’s a bit of a word salad and there’s just really not so much cohesion there. It just seems a bit random. Sure Hydro is is repeated, but user view, easy charts, power play, they all have slightly different vibes and they don’t really fit together like a family.
[00:11:56] Emma Stratton: And this is what happens when you go for a branded name approach. Every time a new product comes, you give it a new name and it’s like “ maybe there’s not much of a strategy behind it or a naming strategy.” Every name is a one-off, and so they’re not really created with an understanding of how these names are gonna fit together in a naming architecture.
[00:12:18] Emma Stratton: Now, naming architecture, that’s something I learned all about back in my consumer branding days when I would work on products that would sit under the main brand name and how would they all work together? So, brand architecture, naming conventions could be very important back then. And they’re really important in tech now when we’ve got companies shipping so many products and new releases.
[00:12:43] Emma Stratton: And you wanna come up with a strategy that not only works for today. Is also gonna work for the future as you grow, maybe you acquire new businesses or you release new products. You want to have a system where it still works, no matter how much you grow, a scalable system, if you will. And this practice of one-off naming is not scalable.
[00:13:07] Emma Stratton: It’s a bit random. And really I’ve got proof to back up that this doesn’t work super well because I’ve been hired three times in recent years to help a company backtrack from that decision to brand all of their product names. So companies that again, got really excited about things they were launching and wanting to give them names and their own logos sometimes.
[00:13:33] Emma Stratton: And then they get to this point where the menu is just a mess under products and they need to clean it up and make it easier for buyers to navigate. So that is the data that I need to know that. It’s not really working to kind of go with the branded product names. So the three top reasons that I really recommend going this descriptive product naming; number one,
[00:13:58] Emma Stratton: it just makes it super easy for your buyers to kind of understand. They get an immediate sense of what the product is or what it’s for. So right after reading the name, they’re in the right ballpark and this is helpful, rather than random name that leaves them guessing, that tells them nothing, and they have to keep searching for that understanding.
[00:14:18] Emma Stratton: Anytime we can make life easier for our buyer to understand what we do, you gotta take it. So that’s the first reason. The second is that it gives you the flexibility to make changes to names when you need to strategically, and it doesn’t require like a massive rebrand. So as your product naturally evolves or maybe as things get kind of decommissioned and new things come in, it’s really easy to adjust and shift your naming convention when you’re just going descriptive rather than throwing out.
[00:14:52] Emma Stratton: Brands and logos and things like that. So it gives you more flexibility, you can make changes and it’s not a massive deal. And finally, this is probably one of the best reasons. Descriptive names are actually quite easy to come up with. And if you know the product well, you’ve got everything You need to be a good descriptive namer.
[00:15:12] Emma Stratton: You don’t have to hire a fancy. Professional namer, like I used to be or pay lots of money to a branding agency to come up with a name or go through the heartache of trying to come up with a branded name together as a group. It’s actually pretty straightforward to just come up with a, “here’s what this product does” name.
[00:15:33] Emma Stratton: In fact, recently one of these clients that I was working with on. Reverting back to a more descriptive naming convention. They were a group of guys that would be the first to say that they were not “creative.” I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think we’re all creative, but they would be quick to say that they were a numbers guys and not creative.
[00:15:52] Emma Stratton: But they did a fantastic job of coming up with descriptive names for their products because they understood their product and what it did. And so they came up with the new name and convention quite easily. And I think that would is the case, in most cases. So if you’re in a position right now where you’re kinda wondering which way to go with your product names, I really, really recommend going descriptive if I haven’t convinced you by now.
[00:16:20] Emma Stratton: It just makes life easier for the buyer, but it also makes life easier for you in marketing and even adjusting to future changes and not feeling so confined to a certain name or brand or logo use. And if you are in a place where you have lots of product names and you’re still not totally sold on going descriptive, why not try the exercise of thinking about how it might look if you did go descriptive instead?
[00:16:48] Emma Stratton: So it doesn’t have to be what you do, but just see if you were gonna go simple and go for a descriptive name, one to two words. You know, tops, that really just straightforward explains what the product is or what it does, and just see how that looks and compare that to what you have now. And you might just be convinced to take a simpler approach.
[00:17:13] Emma Stratton: Names are a funny thing. I think one of my first clients that I ever worked with in tech had the situation where the company had a name and their platform had a different name, and it was something that had started in the very beginning and they just kept going with it and it was very difficult to market.
[00:17:34] Emma Stratton: Two names, the company and the platform. And for many years they struggled with that because when you have a product brand and a company brand, you’re competing for that equity. When you have a branded product name, you’re kind of stealing away some of that equity. That could potentially be going to your company.
[00:17:55] Emma Stratton: So why not get all of that equity and connect it to your company rather than connecting it to a product? It will build your company brand. And I have also spoken to many customers at companies that have a product name and a company name, and pretty much every time they just call the product the company name anyway, and they don’t remember the product name.
[00:18:24] Emma Stratton: So in short. I really recommend going descriptive. Keeping it simple and clear. Not worrying about the razzle dazzle, but instead going for clarity to really serve your buyers. That’s really gonna help them understand what your product can do for them and move them a step closer to buying.
[00:18:45] Emma Stratton: Thanks for joining me for this episode of Better Messaging. If you like what you heard, go ahead and subscribe. Leave a review and share it with a friend. You can also follow me on LinkedIn. Until next time, keep it Punchy, my friend.