Based on the final creative product client needs.
Descriptors and Terminology • Architecture Design • Naming/Renaming
How we provide creative consultation.
Facilitation and Interpretation • Problem Space Mapping • Comprehensive Screening
The types of analysis and evidence used to support our consultation.
Metaphor Mapping • Corpus Linguistics • Market Research Design
Descriptors and Terminology
If you've created something truly new, there is no "just call it what it is". Every single generic term for an industrial or technical product was at one point a novel choice: the syringe, chicken nuggets, social media. Smart innovators make strategic choices to align terminology to their brand and business goals, and to the adoption of their innovations in the marketplace.
Elliott Verbal provides rigorous descriptor development informed by linguistic theory, category analysis, and consumer research. This can be scoped from simple analysis-backed descriptive name creative, to something more akin to a full name development cycle, based on your needs.
Clients for this service range from enterprises to early startups, research institutes to non-profit organizations.
Company Naming and Renaming
If you're looking to name your new startup, or looking to rename after realizing you must, I offer two degrees of services: a Naming Sprint, and Full Name Development.
For tighter budgets, the Naming Sprint focuses on aligning on a core name strategy within your broader brand strategy, identifying clear naming whitespace, and giving clients well-vetted creative options, all within 2-3 weeks. Most clients for this service are early stage startups naming for the first time.
For greater support with the challenging task of actually making a naming decision, Full Name Development is a more comprehensive, industry best practices naming service that usually takes 6-8 weeks. This service is designed to allow for mitigation of bias and overly subjective decision-making that often plagues naming, and lets Elliott Verbal operate as facilitators. Most clients for this service are midsize orgs or Series B-C startups working to change their name.
Architecture Design
Elliott Verbal specializes in rapid development of scalable and coherent naming systems for startups and midsize companies. Brand architecture, nomenclature for complex product ecosystems, and naming decisioning frameworks are often strategic levers at enterprise scale. But growing orgs of any size will inevitably run into brand and naming architecture problems if they don't have active strategies to manage complexity in their portfolio.
Architecture services focus on developing systems for using naming to direct the flow of information and attention within your brand portfolio, and filling in those systems with actual names in a coherent nomenclature pattern. Scope and service packages vary by needs, but we aim to right-size development so that growing businesses can afford to get architecture help before it becomes a problem.
Most clients for this service are new brands or technical innovators who need multiple names at once, and want a growth-ready framework for names in the future.
Facilitation & Interpretation
Creative delivery, even when of high quality and backed by rigorous research and rationale, rarely produces automatic, easy choices. We view facilitation of the decision making process for verbal creative to be a critical practice area and primary service unto itself.
Structured goal setting, cross-functional alignment, interpreting the subjective concerns of diverse stakeholders into a shared language with a common set of terms—these are as important to naming and verbal branding as the actual creative development. We have supported naming decisions with 9-figure implementation implications, and know that building momentum and consensus throughout the process is critical to long-term success for high stakes creative decisions. Having designed corporate naming systems, we also believe that the process for making naming decisions should be adapted to the type of name or asset being decided on—not all sausage is made the same way.
Often times, the most critical perspective we provide for high-stakes creative decisions is separating signal from noise. Just because a critique is true doesn't mean it's relevant.
Problem Space Mapping
Our diverse range of branding and naming experiences has shown time and again one of the biggest traps of creative decision making: thinking there's always some other option. Especially when overcritical emotions and cold feet temptations aren't kept in check, organizations can waste tons of time and money saying "let's see some other options"---only to feel like they are seeing more of the same.
That's not a creative problem, it's a not-understanding-the-problem problem.
One of our specializations at Elliott Verbal is using a range of typological, taxonomic, and semantic analysis techniques to map out the limits of the opportunity space for solving a strategic creative question. Not only does this help facilitate decision making by keeping clients clear eyed about what they can and can't do, it makes getting to a final decision easier by not throwing resources down a path of diminishing returns.
Comprehensive Screening
Screening verbal asset options for trademark defensibility, linguistic and cross-cultural redflags, and digital availability is generally table stakes in professional naming and verbal creative. We manage relationships with third party vendors to conduct these screenings, and then support clients in understanding the variable risk profiles and tradeoffs associated with their options.
Importantly, Elliott Verbal kicks off every engagement with strategizing order of operations for screenings based on the needs of a given project. Based on the strategic goals for the asset being developed, trademark strategy might require little while digital screening for SEO/GEO may be of high importance. For example, strategic descriptive naming or terminology work may only require minimal screens to ensure that trademark officials will understand certain terms as legally 'descriptive', which standardized one-size fits all name development projects may miss.
Metaphor Mapping
Where other agencies sometimes come to clients with literally hundreds of creative options and say "do you like this?", at Elliott Verbal we draw on deep linguistic and semiotic expertise to work with clients on the conceptual underpinnings of their key brand assets, and get alignment on those before just looking at options for the final product. This is core to facilitation and problem space mapping, as described above.
Core to this conceptual territory development are methods based in metaphor theory, semantic mapping, and natural language change. Metaphor isn't just a literary technique, it's the basis for how we make sense of new things and experiences in the world based on our previous existing knowledge.
For true innovators, efficiently communicating the value of your innovation relies on placing it within existing, relevant meaning frameworks for your audience. We bring a creative and analytical rigor to that endeavor that is unmatched.
Corpus Linguistics
If your naming or descriptor decision making involves trips to the Oxford English Dictionary or Roget's Thesaurus... you're doomed. Meaning lives in people's minds, not in standard reference books. Not your fault, though, since the deeper mechanics of meaning in language aren't a topic most folks cover in school. We did, a lot.
Your major verbal assets are a bid to strategically change language in your favor, and you need better tools in that endeavor. At Elliott Verbal, we use approaches from corpus linguistics, which involves statistical and categorical analyses of huge compilations of texts (a corpus) to identify distributional patterns of words and phrases. This is a totally different approach to understanding word meaning, by viewing it as defined by its relative place in a larger web of language.
We use corpus linguistics techniques both for creative discovery and for strategic analysis. This could involve general English language (or other language) analysis, analyzing language use in particular industries or social groups, or looking at language trends in a specific market segment, all with the goal of identifying strategically useful patterns and building clear rationale for creative choices.
Market Research Design
It's only natural that many brands first thought on naming or verbal asset questions is "why not just ask our customers?". Unfortunately, it's not so simple, and most market research for naming or descriptor questions are so poorly designed that you might as well not do it.
Especially for thornier language questions, most market research firms are not sensitive to the unique context of asking metalinguistic questions of an audience—questions that ask people to think about why they react the way they do to certain words, which we as humans are notoriously bad at doing. These questions treat language as both the medium and object of investigation, which leads to poorly constructed research surveys, uncritical interpretation of findings, and false takeaways that are meaningless or actively harmful.
Elliott Verbal specializes in helping clients design and conduct market research on verbal assets—names, descriptors, architectures—that doesn't suck.