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Ever wonder what name you should name your company? If you rebranded your law firm, what would you name it? And why?! Today we are talking with our naming guest expert, Alexandra Watkins who’s claim to fame is being responsible for naming Wendy’s “Banconator!”
In this episode Alexandra goes over tips for naming your business with a memorable name. There is a process! Then she goes over the mistakes that you need to avoid when naming your company. Jim and Tyson also talk to her about why a name that is reflective of the company is so important and not naming your law firm after yourself is a great way to get started.
Listen into this valuable episode and get the creative marketing juices flowing.
Episode Highlights:
00:56 Meet Alexandra
03:02 The qualities of a good brand name … hint, it’s not your name!
07:24 What NOT to do when naming your business
11:18 What to do when your exact match for a domain name is gone
13:03 The thought process to develop a good names
14:12 How to change your brand name midstream
17:09 The importance of not being boring …
Jim’s Hack: Post regularly on LinkedIn (Mon-Fri) and see the surprising benefit of what happens and that is the awesome resumes that the lawyers and paralegals submit to your company!
Alexandra Tip: To test your brand name to see if it passes the “test” use S.M.I.L.E. and S.C.R.A.T.C.H. technique (listen all about these technique in episode 481)
Tyson’s Tip: Use a bland white ceramic cup to drink your water or coffee from so that when you are on videos for marketing or on Zoom meetings you don’t trigger people with your Starbucks!
🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.
Connect with Alexandra:
Website – https://eatmywords.com/
Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/company/eat-my-words/
Book – https://amzn.to/3FviF0j
Resources:
- Join the Guild Membership
- Subscribe to the Maximum Lawyer Youtube Channel
- Follow us on Instagram
- Join the Facebook Group
- Follow the Facebook Page
- Follow us on LinkedIn
Transcript: Must Have Brand Name Qualities with Alexandra Watkins
Speaker 1
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome
Jim Hacking
to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Tyson music’s What’s up Jimmy Tyson? How are you? I am doing all right. We’re on our what fourth episode today, which is good. We’re, I think this is gonna be a fun one. Because the last one was sort of a branding episode. This one’s gonna be a sort of a brand new episode. So it’s a little bit different. But still, I think it’d be pretty valuable for our listeners.
Jim Hacking
Well, our guest today is Alexandra Watkins from eat my words. Alexandra, thanks for joining us.
Alexandra Watkins
Thanks for having me.
Tyson Mutrux
So this is a fun little topic. And I’m excited to talk about it. Tell us though, before we get into really the nuts and bolts of branding, but tell us about your journey, how you got into branding and how you got to where you are today?
Alexandra Watkins
Well, I started my career as an advertising copywriter and worked for big agencies like Ogilvy and Mather. And once in a while I would get thrown a bone and get to name something, and I love naming and I was good at it. But I didn’t get to do it very often. And then years later, I discovered that naming was actually a profession, and it’s part of branding or advertising and branding. They don’t intersect very often because they’re, you know, brandings really, in the beginning advertises at the end. So when I found out naming was a profession, I quit being a copywriter and told everyone I was going to name things. And people are like, you can’t just name them like, yeah, I can. And of course I did. And you know, have a best selling book and all that. So how eat my words my firm came to be as I was naming a lot of things that make people fat and drunk. And that’s where the name eat. My words came from and my claim to fame as I named the Wendy’s Baconator. And I did that as a freelancer for another firm. And that’s when I knew like I had to really have my own firm and get my own direct clients instead of working for all these big branding firms and naming agencies.
Jim Hacking
That’s so great. You know, my daughter’s name is Nora n o r, and I call her the nominator. So I appreciate the Baconator. That’s pretty awesome. Okay, so what does that mean? You name things like how does it work? What does that even mean? How can someone do that as a full time profession?
Alexandra Watkins
Well, companies come to eat my word that Need New Names for products, or companies need a name for people need a name for their new company. Sometimes a company has a spin off company or sub brand. And yeah, they just need help. So they complete our creative brief. And our team goes to work coming up with a bunch of name ideas for them.
Tyson Mutrux
So we see a lot of law firms, you know, starting law, their firms and they usually just name it after themselves. And you see, you know, names in law firms all the time. I wonder what the qualities are of a good brand name.
Alexandra Watkins
Law firms are some of our favorite clients to work with, because there’s nowhere to go but up, right? Because there’s so few, because people do name companies after themselves and law firms or, you know, obviously, lots of people want their name on the door, partners names on the door. And I’ll tell you really quickly before I tell you about great brand names and the qualities of them. We’ve named a number of law firms. bedrock, specializes in helping startups build their foundation, and we named terrain, which is does environmental legal. We named a litigation firm in San Francisco, tectonic because they’re shaking things up in French industries. So those are such as some of the law firms that we’ve named. So there’s five qualities that make a name great. An acronym for this I have an acronym for the good qualities and the bad qualities. It’s a smile is an acronym for the good ones. Scratch are the seven deadly deal breakers when to scratch it off the list because it makes you scratch your head. So the five qualities that make an M great the smile acronym is S stands for suggestive and not suggestive, and like a legal term, but that it suggests something about what your brand is or does so for instance, Amazon suggests enormous that M in smiles used to temper meaningful now it stands for memorable, so memorable. No, this I change it between editions of my book. So yeah, the M stands for a memorable meaning that your name is based on a familiar concept that people understand not something foreign. So yeah, I As the imagery, it’s really helpful if your name when somebody hears that or sees it can conjure up some imagery because it will make it easier to remember later on the L stands for legs, meaning that your name lends itself to a theme. So for instance, the name, eat my words lends itself to the theme of food and beverage. So for instance, we have package names, like the whole enchilada and supermarket special that ties into our name. And then the E and smile stands for emotional you want your name to make an emotional connection with your target audience. And law firm names don’t make emotional connections at all, if they’re just named after the founders, because what is your name? Really, anytime you name something after yourself, you’re giving up a tremendous opportunity to have a brand that says something about who your firm is and what they do.
Jim Hacking
So we recently changed our name. So my last name is hacking, right. And so a lot of people think that our law firm, especially when it was called Hacking law practice that we help people who got charged with hacking crimes, or computer crimes. But lately we’ve been we changed our name to hacking immigration law. And we’ve really started to play around with it. Because one sort of funny thing is that there’s people on the internet who call me the machete, because I helped cut through the red tape. But immigration like I didn’t make this up. This is just something people call me. And so we’ve been going with that hacking motif. And, and really it it goes well with us because I do part of what I do is I sue the government and I do sort of help people hack through this horrible bureaucracy. So we’ve just started playing around with it. But I’m just wondering what you think about that?
Alexandra Watkins
Yeah, I think it’s great. It’s it’s so rare that someone who has the opportunity that has a last name, like yours that could actually play off of it and their business, and I love the imagery of a machete. And yeah, cutting through the red tape. That’s great. And hacking is fun. And you know, law law can be really scary for people. I mean, anytime law scary for people that aren’t attorneys, you know, it’s terrifying. So anytime that you can take that edge off with a name that’s, you know, a little playful or with something that’s really visually evocative, like the machete, that’s fantastic.
Tyson Mutrux
So you mentioned scratch I’m really curious like what scratched and forks I want to hear what are the some of the things we should be looking out for to not do?
Alexandra Watkins
Okay, scratch. Again, if it makes you scratch your head, scratch it off the list, scratch down spar, the S stands for spelling challenge. That’s a really big one. Your name should not look like a typo. Your name should be spelled exactly how it sounds super important. You know? Don’t you hate getting an email bounced back? Or I’m looking at Yeah, like Tyson people probably spell your last name wrong. Right? I mean, we’ve all had it, whether it’s our first or last name, the street we live on. Like nobody wants to get a spelling error. The bursty and scratch sounds for copycat as you guys are in utter BS. In trademark law, you can’t be a copycat, right? And you know, we always say, why be somebody else when you can be yourself. And that’s more applying to the name not the legal, the legal, that’s a little too gentle or legal. It’s like no, it’s more serious than that, like you cannot copy somebody else. And our inscribe stands for restrictive and that’s when you have a name that kind of boxes you and doesn’t allow for expansion. So or you just outgrow your name. So for instance, 24 Hour Fitness, not all of them are open 24 hours anymore. So that’s a restrictive name. So we try to encourage people when they’re coming up with their names to look in their crystal ball so they don’t get locked into a name that doesn’t allow for future growth. So really imagine how you might scale in the future. Then I weighed the as downs for annoying and annoying is it’s subjective, obviously, but I think annoying is you know cutesy spellings of names or if your name is ambiguous, you know, nothing about your business should be ambiguous, especially your name, or if it’s missing vowels, you know, anything that might annoy or frustrate potential customers. Your name should be a welcome mat, not a Do Not Enter sign. The T and scratch stands for team and team names are kind of flat and boring. They can be a little descriptive. Again, we know a big nono when it comes to trademark law. So we encourage people don’t be a wallflower if you want to stand out and get noticed If you can’t afford to be shy, so don’t have a tame name, and then the second see and scratch down spore curse of knowledge. And that is where you know what your name means. But other people don’t. It’s often a name that’s in a foreign language, which just seems to be a go to for people like, Oh, I’ll name it, you know, whatever, in Swahili, like people don’t know, Swahili, or really most other languages. And then finally, and this last one, this next last letter in Leeds, really works with curse of knowledge as well, is the agent scratch and super hard to pronounce. And, you know, boring names are often hard to pronounce Sturla taobh. So many people pronounce it Sur La Table, because the word looks like table like why would you not pronounce it table. So there’s so many names that people mispronounce because they are in foreign languages that we don’t know how to pronounce. And your name should only be pronounced be, you know, intuitive to pronounce one way. Because if people are pronouncing your name different ways, that’s going to dilute your brand. So that scratch
Jim Hacking
so when I was listening to go through scratch, I was thinking about all these tech companies that have these sort of cutesy little names where they take out the vowels, or they add an extra consonant at the end, it just seems so ridiculous to me.
Alexandra Watkins
Absolutely. That’s where the smile and scratch came from. I lived in San Francisco for 22 years. And those names made me crazy. Yeah, and there’s so much wrong with startup names. And it’s, you know, it’s all driven by this obsession to have an exact match domain name like a.com. And you don’t have to have an exact match domain, nobody expects anyone to anymore. I mean, they’re all They’re all gone. So you know, we recommend that people have a modifier just add at, like, if we weren’t eat my words.com, we would be eat my words, branding, or eat my words naming, eat my words, brand names, that having a modifier helps with search engine optimization. So it’s not a bad thing to have a modifier. But somebody somewhere decided that that is what you had to do, you know, not realizing like, you know, Tesla for the first 13 years wasn’t at tesla.com they were Tesla motors.com, Facebook, or, you know, was the Facebook up until 2005, you know, Dropbox, get Dropbox Basecamp, Basecamp HQ, and all of those companies were willing to forego having an exact match domain name, and just, you know, know that if they wanted, they could purchase it later, when they, you know, had the funds to do so. Or that they just wouldn’t I mean, square is still at Square up.com slideshare slideshare.net.
Jim Hacking
Could you talk a little bit about the thought process and I know this is sort of what you do. So this would probably be sort of simplified, but what is the the approach you take in helping people develop what their name should be? Well, we
Alexandra Watkins
have them complete a creative brief, which is like a roadmap. So you know, what’s the tone and personality? They want to communicate in their name? What’s the style of name that they like? Do they like clever names? Like, you know, we named a GPS for dogs, retriever, and we named a Spanish language school gringo lingo, that’s gringo lingo is a more playful name, do they want a more serious, you know, b2b style name. So that’s really something to think about. And then the process we do is we never look at domain names and the beginning, we don’t look at domain names till the end. And most people start by looking for the domain name, like, don’t worry about the domain name. First, come up with a great brand name, you know, run your trademark screens, you know, do your due diligence with your, you know, trademark research, and then think about the domain name.
Tyson Mutrux
So Jim knows this. Not many people do. But we’ve been talking about changing our firm name and not going to mention what we’re talking about doing. But I worry a little bit about changing midstream because we’re about 12 years in and I worry about changing it because we’re talking about a dramatic change, like completely changing the name. So I guess what are your thoughts about brands changing their name completely?
Alexandra Watkins
It’s never too late to change your name. We just changed the name of a bank that’s more than 100 years old. The bank is a regional and award winning regional bank in Kansas. It’s in Syracuse, Kansas. That’s the flagship. There’s a number of them, but it’s called, it was called First National Bank of Syracuse. And of course, you know, it sounds like a New York bank. And we renamed them dream First, because they wanted to aspirational name that didn’t sound like every other bank. So that, you know, look 100 year old regional bank, you know, which you know, so much heritage behind it, people that work at the bank have worked there, you know, a quarter of a century, there’s people there that worked there longer than that. So it was, but they knew to be to kind of keep up with the times they needed to be more modern. So it’s never too late to change your name. And the good thing about changing your name is, it’s never been easier to do a name change, because you can do you know, domain name redirects, you can send emails out to people to let them know you change your name. So there’s lots of touch points to let people know that you did the name change, where, you know, 30 years ago, you wouldn’t have all of that, you know, it’s now it’s really never been easier. The hardest thing is, of course, you know, there’s never been more names trademark, but it with law firms. I mean, there’s, there’s, again, that’s why we like working with them. Because there’s so many names that aren’t trademarked. It’s really really fun for us, because it’s not the usual you know, nail biting like process of when we go through trademark screening and things are getting killed left and right.
Becca Eberhart
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Jim Hacking
You’re listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Our guest today is Alexander Watkins. She’s a naming expert, and we’re talking about law firm names. I was gonna I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the importance of not being boring. I say this with all marketing and all aspects of marketing. But when it comes to picking a name, can you talk a little bit about being interesting and not boring?
Alexandra Watkins
Sure. Well, I think like b2b is a great example. Right? So b2b, you know, business to business. But I always say b2b shouldn’t stand for boring, too bland. When you’re boring. No one notices you, you fade into the background. But when you have an interesting name, like, you know, hacking immigration, that’s an interesting name. And people I’m sure most people have no idea about your last name until they know that who you are, it just jumps out, right? It’s not like every like, if I’m going through names of immigration firms, law firms, and I see hacking immigration, I’m gonna immediately be attracted to it. Or you know, any other names that just like we named a cupcake store, the church of cupcakes, that’s an interesting name with great legs. So anytime that you can have a name that starts a conversation, then it’s a great name in a conversation in a good way. Not WTF like, what is that? What is xOP? And I mean, like, but more like, oh, eat my words. What’s that? Like? That totally starts a conversation.
Tyson Mutrux
I so badly want to run our proposed firm name by you. But I’m not going to I’ll call you afterwards. And we’ll chat some more.
Alexandra Watkins
Call me after run it by me. Yeah, no, I’ll tell you what to think. And if it’s not working, I’ll be honest. And I’ll give you some ideas of how you can make it better. Yeah, it will be my pleasure.
Tyson Mutrux
I love it. Very cool. That’d be great. You’re so awesome. We do need to wrap things up. Because we’re getting close to time. We want to be respectful of your time before we wrap things up that we tell people how to get in touch with you if they want to work with you.
Alexandra Watkins
Sure. I’m an eat my words.com are Alexandra and eat my words.com There’s no I in my name. Okay, and connect with me on LinkedIn too. And if you’re a trademark attorney, and you want my book, just shoot me an email.
Tyson Mutrux
Perfect. Thank you so much. We do have in the guild, we have multiple trademark attorneys. So that’s that’s awesome. So very cool. All right, we’re gonna wrap things up. Before I do. I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group. If you want a more high level conversation, join us in the guild, go to max law guild.com. And while you’re listening to the rest of this episode, if you don’t mind giving us a five star review. We would greatly appreciate it. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week?
Jim Hacking
Speaking of LinkedIn, my hack of the week is to post rarely in LinkedIn, we’ve started about six weeks ago, and maybe eight weeks ago, we post every single business day, so Monday through Friday, and we’re getting tons of great engagement and the surprising benefit that’s really come out of it is the awesome resumes that we’ve gotten so you know I always take a position with immigration. I always am happy to stick it in the eye of immigration. And then I like talking about our lawsuits and all that stuff that resonates with certain people. And it resonates with the kinds of lawyers and paralegals that we want to work here. So the one thing that’s been really surprising about our commitment to posting on LinkedIn more often isn’t so much the connections that we’ve made. And we’ve made great connections and our number of followers are up like 1300 people in six weeks. But the bigger thing is the actual resumes we’re getting unsolicited from people who want to come work for us. So it’s not something I anticipated from LinkedIn, but certainly something we’re happy about.
Tyson Mutrux
Nice. I can’t stand going on to LinkedIn, but I hear that there’s a lot of value in it. So we do a little bit of posting, but we need to up our game. So that’s a good reminder. Jimmy Alexandria, so we this is where we always ask our guests to give a tip or a hack of the week. Yeah, you got a tip for us a fired away?
Alexandra Watkins
Yes, I do. But I’m going to say that the name hacking immigration is the name of your firm is also attracting people that want to work for you, I am sure I am 100%. Sure. That sounds like a cool place to work. My tip is to if you want to test your name, you can run it through the smile and scratch test. Just go to eat my words.com and click on I think it’s like check my name or check a name or Yeah, test my name. Yeah, for you to us. We’ll ask you 12 questions about your name and give you tips along the way.
Tyson Mutrux
Very, very cool. I actually think that I was on this before. So I actually think I sent this to Becca, Jim I if I remember correctly, so that’s very cool. Awesome stuff. So for my tip of the week, I get this from Jim hacking my is to instead of drinking like out of like a Starbucks cup while you’re like recording videos, because we’re all recording videos these days. Get a nice little bland cup and put whatever you want in it. I’ve got water in this and just Jim’s got us he’s got a Darth Vader cup, but instead of like using like a Starbucks cup or something, you know, that’s, that could maybe trigger people like go like something bland. I’m doing a nice little white ceramic cup with nothing on it. So and I think it’s actually pretty good, Jim, I think it’s a good tip. So thanks for that. Alexandra, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. I can’t wait to run this game by I’ll reach out to you offline. Sounds good.
Alexandra Watkins
Thanks, you guys.
Tyson Mutrux
Thanks Alexandra. Have a wonderful day. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer but to stay in contact with your host and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.
