Book summary “Hello, my name is awesome”: summary

Introduction

You often face a frustrating challenge when launching a new product, service, or company. Choosing a weak, forgettable, or confusing name can doom your venture before it starts. You might end up with something that makes people scratch their heads rather than smile.

Alexandra Watkins addresses this struggle by presenting a clear philosophy for creating sticky and lovable names. The central idea is that a great brand name should delight your audience while remaining easy to remember and spell. You learn how to evaluate names through the SMILE framework and how to avoid costly traps using the SCRATCH criteria.

The book guides you through a structured naming process from drafting creative briefs to executing online brainstorming sessions and conducting final group reviews. You will discover how to answer critical questions about your brand identity:

• What makes a name genuinely sticky and lovable?
• Which naming pitfalls must you avoid at all costs?
• How should you organize brainstorming and group reviews?

1. The SMILE Framework for Sticky Names

A great brand name should make people smile instead of scratch their head, driven by the five essential qualities of the SMILE test.

The SMILE acronym defines the essential pillars of a sticky name. These qualities ensure that the name evokes the brand, connects with existing knowledge, creates visual mental pictures, offers extension themes, and triggers a strong feeling. Eat My Words creates likable names like Burger King's Mac n' Cheetos and Neato robotic vacuums based on this philosophy.

Suggestive

A suggestive name activates the imagination by pointing toward the brand's core essence without needing to explain everything. Suggestive names use metaphor, symbolism, or clever coinage to evoke the brand experience. Well-crafted coined names must feel like real words while remaining intuitive to pronounce and spell. Portmanteaus combine two words into a memorable new mash-up.

Impossible Foods suggests plant-based meat substitutes without sounding like a sterile laboratory. Frank Zamboni used metaphors like Grasshopper for a turf roller and Black Widow for a vault dirt-filler.

Memorable

Sticky names stick because they easily merge into existing knowledge bases through familiar associations. Cognitive psychology shows that human memory relies on associating new information with familiar concepts, words, or songs. Meaningless jumbles of letters or arbitrary short names require too much cognitive effort and are quickly forgotten.

LeapFrog is easily remembered because people already know the childhood game, whereas scheduling software startups with invented names like Aladtec or Xoyondo are instantly forgotten. Squirrel monkeys forget an event less than 20 seconds after it occurs.

Imagery

Names that conjure vivid mental images make a strong impression and remain cemented in human memory. Using evocative words allows the brain to picture concrete scenarios instantly. Conversely, descriptive names with poor or disgusting literal imagery create negative mental associations that repel customers.

Norcal Waste Systems was formed in 1983 and operated for 25 years before changing its name to Recology. Neighbors originally donated 19 surfboards for the backyard fence at one facility. The company eventually shed its old title because it evoked negative imagery regarding garbage, choosing Recology instead to highlight recycling and environmental restoration.

Legs

A name with legs contains a powerful thematic core that stretches across multiple branding elements to generate extended mileage. A strong thematic name provides endless verbal branding opportunities, including taglines, promo codes, hashtags, blog titles, and merchandise. Conversely, poorly coined or desperate dot-com names lack the structural depth to support extended wordplay.

Lynette Hoy PR rebranded to Firetalker PR, allowing the owner to use titles like Fire Chief, operate out of The Firehouse, and offer packages like Fire Starter. Hooters sells 250 items featuring its name and slogans on merchandise.

Emotional

A significant percentage of buying decisions are driven by emotion, making emotionally charged names powerful revenue drivers. Forrester Research states that 50 percent of buying decisions are driven by emotion. Products with little physical differentiation can command higher prices and interest when their names make a strong emotional connection. Humorous, bold, or empowering names bring levity and make consumers feel good about their purchases.

Hotel Vitale experienced a 25 percent increase in wedding business simply by changing dry, traditional service names like Rehearsal Dinner to Meet the Parents and Post-Wedding Brunch to Bloody Married.

Business-to-business companies should abandon the fear of unconventional names because playful or edgy names signal passion and client focus. Many B2B companies mistakenly believe they must sound boring to be taken seriously. Unconventional, grin-inducing names act as a magnet for high-profile clients by demonstrating that the firm values creativity and authentic partnerships over self-importance.

Attorney Leila Banijamali chose the name Bedrock for her legal practice instead of her own name, resulting in higher confidence, increased revenues, and better-suited clients.

2. Avoiding Naming Pitfalls and Deal Breakers

To avoid weak and problematic names, you must ensure your brand does not suffer from any of the seven deal breakers represented by the acronym SCRATCH.

Alexandra Watkins introduces the SCRATCH acronym to help eliminate disadvantageous names that require explanation, cause confusion, or limit future growth. You must check your options against these seven categories:

• S - Spelling challenged (looks like a typo)
• C - Copycat (resembles competitors names)
• R - Restrictive (limits future growth)
• A - Annoying (seems forced, frustrates customers)
• T - Tame (feels flat, descriptive, uninspired)
• C - Curse of knowledge (speaks only to insiders)
• H - Hard to pronounce (confuses and distances customers)

Speesees was an organic baby clothing company with a spelling-challenged name that sounded like feces and ultimately went out of business.

Founders must avoid the cognitive bias known as the curse of knowledge, which causes them to use obscure industry jargon, acronyms, or foreign terms that alienate ordinary consumers. Because founders are deeply immersed in their own product domain, they struggle to think like a novice, leading them to choose names that have no clear meaning to the general public.

Entrepreneurs named a startup for last-minute dentist appointments HealthSouk, assuming North Americans understood the foreign marketplace term souk.

Brand names should be broad enough to accommodate future business expansion and prevent the company from becoming pigeonholed as it evolves. Choosing a name tied to a specific product line, location, or price point forces the company to outgrow its identity and spend heavily on explanatory marketing.

Canadian Tire sells a vast range of general merchandise from A to Z, making its name restrictive and requiring ad campaigns to explain its broader inventory. Canadian Tire has 1700 retail locations in Canada. See Jane Farm raised 200M in venture funding in millions after rebranding to Plenty.

Names that are difficult to pronounce create psychological distance and frustration, causing customers to avoid engaging with the brand out of fear of looking foolish. Research shows that people associate simple, clear language with positive qualities, while difficult names hinder stock performance, political polls, and consumer adoption.

The Greek yogurt company FAGE held a first-to-market advantage in the US for 9 years but required pronunciation instructions directly on its packaging.

Domain Strategy and Safety Checks

Before finalizing a name or domain, founders must check slang definitions and combine words carefully to avoid generating unintentional offensive phrases or portmanteaus. Failing to check urban lexicons or how words mash together in URLs can lead to embarrassing public relations disasters and expensive forced rebranding efforts. Beaner's reached 70 locations before rebranding to Biggby Coffee at nearly a million dollars in cost.

A fishing shop named Master Bait and Tackle purchased the website masterbaitonline.com without recognizing the unintended slur.

You can protect your brand by running these checks:

• Google the name for troublesome meanings
• Look the name up in the Urban Dictionary
• Check how words appear when mashed together to avoid SLURLs

Securing an exact-match domain name is not mandatory for launching a successful brand, as creative workarounds and search engines eliminate the need for costly and meaningless short URLs. The author explains that many iconic companies launched with alternative domains or modifiers before acquiring their exact match, and warns against buying expensive, meaningless short strings or acronyms. More than 342 million registered domain names exist on the internet, and the aftermarket domain Bumr.com carries an asking price of 11395 dollars.

Tesla operated for its first 12 years without owning Tesla.com, initially using TeslaMotors.com.

You can secure a strong web presence using alternative approaches:

• Add a modifier prefix or suffix
• Use a domain name suggestion tool like NameStudio
• Try a memorable phrase
• Make your domain name a call to action
• Get a .net extension

Completing a structured creative brief before brainstorming is essential to define brand positioning, target audience, and stylistic preferences, preventing the selection of an inappropriate name. The brief acts as an ingredient list containing goals, consumer insights, competitor reviews, and explicit lists of words and themes to explore or avoid. Eat My Words utilized a detailed brief for a frozen yogurt franchise named Zenyo to target teenagers with a modern, hip hangout identity, featuring 200 skinny calories per cup.

You should complete these steps in your creative brief:

• Define the goal of the assignment
• Summarize the project in a single sentence
• Establish brand positioning
• Identify consumer insights regarding behaviors
• Specify primary and secondary target audiences
• List competitors to avoid trademark conflicts
• Determine desired brand experiences and emotions
• Outline brand personality adjectives
• List words and themes to explore and avoid
• List domain name modifiers
• Review name style likes and dislikes with reasons

3. Brainstorming and Workplace Creativity

Effective brainstorming should be done individually in front of a computer using online resources, while internal corporate elements can adopt imaginative names to boost morale.

Online Brainstorming

Group brainstorming often results in a free-for-all where extroverts dominate, people try to please the boss, or groups force two names together into an amalgamated clusterf*ck. Brainstorming alone online allows the creator to follow unexpected links, use search engines, and generate dozens of fresh ideas without outside interference. Alexandra Watkins calls this process googlestorming, treating the internet as your primary research tool.

Online resources such as thesauruses, image search engines, glossaries, and dictionaries provide endless raw material to spark brand name ideas. Using tools like Thesaurus.com, Google Images, stock photo sites, and specialized glossaries helps uncover layers of meaning, visual metaphors, and industry-specific lingo that can be adapted into memorable brand names. You can access immense linguistic depth through sources like The Free Dictionary, which lists 2710 words for the cold entry, or discover 36364 results for an Amazon search of books containing the word cold.

Alexandra Watkins used a winter sports image search and a snowboarding blog called Shreddin' the Gnar 101 to discover the slang term chatter, which inspired a frozen yogurt store name concept.

You can direct your session using clear creative steps:

• Open your mind and let it become a playground for words, phrases, and images.
• Write down every idea, even those that do not feel right, and divide them into categories: Spot On, Maybe, and Sparks.
• Have your creative brief handy before you dive in.
• Start with a warm-up exercise of writing down at least a dozen starter words related to your brand from your creative brief.
• Mine thesaurus websites for synonyms and word sparks.
• Supercharge your imagination with image searches on Google or stock photography websites.
• Comb through online glossaries of terms and lingo for specific sports or hobbies.
• Explore dictionaries for definitions, phrases, and idioms.

Corporate Creativity

Corporations can use creative names for internal elements to boost employee morale, lighten the mood, and improve company culture. Giving imaginative names to conference rooms, cafeterias, internal creative agencies, corporate clubs, and ticker symbols breaks the monotony of the daily grind and makes the workplace more engaging for employees and visitors.

Etsy features conference rooms with musician-food mash-up names like Fleetwood Mac 'n' Cheese, Oreo Speedwagon, Sushi and the Banshees, and Nine Inch Snails.

You can transform mundane corporate designations with practical updates:

• Rename conference rooms using themes such as childhood toys, iconic dances, or tongue twisters.
• Test new names by placing masking tape over current conference room names.
• Adopt clever ticker symbols like WOOF for Veterinary Centers of America, HEINY for Heineken, or BOOM for DMC Global.

Allowing employees to adopt self-reflective job titles helps reduce emotional exhaustion and serves as a vehicle for identity expression. Research led by Wharton professor Adam Grant showed that when stressed employees in high-burnout environments are given the freedom to craft their own meaningful and uplifting job titles, it helps them cope with stress and fosters a sense of equality and pride.

At a midwestern chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, employees invented titles such as Fairy Godmother of Wishes, Magic Messenger, and Wizardess of Wishes. Research confirmed that 85 percent of employees interviewed said the new title helped them cope with emotional exhaustion.

4. Name Changes and Group Review Guardrails

Rebranding an existing business with a more magnetic name is entirely feasible. It offers a chance to refresh the brand, but you must weigh emotional attachments and logistical hurdles.

Business owners often fear losing customers. A name change can be successfully navigated through website redirects, social media announcements, email blasts, and search engines. Internal resistance and emotional attachment to legacy names are common obstacles. Alexandra's firm is currently renaming a bank that is one hundred years old.

The Institute for EthnoMedicine successfully changed its name to Brain Chemistry Labs to overcome the curse of knowledge. Edio changed its name to Headrush due to trademark issues.

Review Guardrails

Building group consensus on a brand name requires reviewing names independently at first rather than holding a chaotic group meeting. Distributing name lists to individual stakeholders for independent review eliminates intimidation and personal bias. Reviewers come prepared to champion their favorites rather than shooting down names to please the room or out of personal opposition.

Building group consensus on a brand name requires reviewing options independently at first, avoiding focus groups, and following strict guardrails before checking trademarks.

Focus group testing and polling strangers should be avoided because they collectively water down strong brand names into safe, mediocre choices. Strangers in focus groups lack the context of the creative brief and brand strategy. They reject edgy or unconventional names in favor of the least objectionable and most boring options. Famous strong brand names like Fossil, Lush, Coach, and The Body Shop likely would have been killed if they had been subjected to focus group testing due to negative literal interpretations.

Review teams need enough options and clear explanations of why specific words fit the strategic goals of the brand to make informed, objective decisions. You can follow specific practices during this stage:

• Make sure you have a few dozen names for the group to review.
• Write a few words of rationale next to each name on the list.
• Show how the name might be used in a sentence.
• Print the list and circulate a hard copy for each person to review on paper.
• Suggest that everyone review the names multiple times over a few days.
• Include the SMILE & SCRATCH test to support names and eliminate troublesome suggestions.
• Include your approved creative brief to remind people of agreed-upon goals.
• Do not share your name list with outsiders.
• Have an open mind and ask whether the name is right for the brand rather than if you personally like it.
• Refrain from negative comments and focus strictly on what works.
• Keep in mind that a name cannot say everything.
• Review the list multiple times, top to bottom and bottom to top, over a few days.
• Keep your list to yourself and do not discuss names with your team until the review meeting.
• Imagine each name in context on a name badge, website, business card, or product shelf.
• Refrain from looking up domain names too early in the process.
• Ask each reviewer to select 10 to 20 promising names from the list.
• Do not fall in love with any name until initial trademark research is complete.

Conclusion

The SMILE and SCRATCH frameworks work together to filter out mediocre ideas and protect brand equity by holding every potential name against rigorous creative standards. You must combine positive emotional appeal with strict defensive screening to arrive at a choice that endures.

Execute a successful naming project from start to finish by following these practical rules:

1. Define your brand strategy and core identity before starting any creative work.
2. Generate ideas independently using digital tools instead of relying on traditional group brainstorms.
3. Apply the SMILE test to evaluate whether your options are suggestive, meaningful, imagery-laden, emotional, and concise.
4. Screen every candidate against the SCRATCH test to eliminate spelling nightmares, copycats, hard-to-pronounce words, and other fatal flaws.
5. Review concepts individually using scorecards rather than submitting them to biased focus groups.
6. Check trademarks thoroughly and secure your digital presence before making a final commitment.

10 Key Ideas

1. A great brand name should delight your audience while remaining easy to remember and spell.
2. The SMILE framework ensures a sticky name is suggestive, memorable, rich in imagery, equipped with legs, and emotionally resonant.
3. The SCRATCH criteria eliminate disadvantageous names that are spelling-challenged, copycats, restrictive, annoying, tame, burdened by the curse of knowledge, or hard to pronounce.
4. Founders must avoid the curse of knowledge by dropping obscure industry jargon, acronyms, or foreign terms that alienate ordinary consumers.
5. Founders must check slang definitions and combine words carefully to avoid generating unintentional offensive phrases or portmanteaus.
6. Securing an exact-match domain name is not mandatory for launching a successful brand, as creative workarounds and search engines eliminate the need for costly and meaningless short URLs.
7. Brainstorming alone online allows the creator to follow unexpected links, use search engines, and generate dozens of fresh ideas without outside interference.
8. Allowing employees to adopt self-reflective job titles helps reduce emotional exhaustion and serves as a vehicle for identity expression.
9. Focus group testing and polling strangers should be avoided because they collectively water down strong brand names into safe, mediocre choices.
10. Building group consensus on a brand name requires reviewing options independently at first, avoiding focus groups, and following strict guardrails before checking trademarks.