Remember: you hired a creative studio, not a vendor
There’s a question we often ask ourselves around the studio at A Hundred Monkeys. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, because it reveals one of the primary—yet often invisible—forces shaping our projects.
Are we trying to give them what they’re asking for? Or are we trying to develop the best possible name for them?
Essentially, this is a question about the client relationship itself. Do the people we’re working with see us as experts who do this for a living? Who spend far more time thinking about the complexities of naming than they ever have or will? Who have a strong point of view on what works, backed by knowledge and professional experience?
Or do they see us as short order cooks, sending us off to quickly prepare our work to their specifications?
The latter is, as you’d imagine, a dynamic we are trying to avoid. Not only because it’s degrading to be told how to do your job, but also because those specifications are often incredibly vague, open to myriad interpretations, and therefore difficult to satisfy.
Names are not meals.
Imagine asking a cook to make you something like a popular dish, but not so similar as to be indistinguishable. And also not too spicy (subjective) or tied to any one region (impossible). And also you’re allergic to onions. You ask for a dish that everyone will love but that no one has ever heard of or tried.
Good luck!
But really, we are lucky—many of our clients hire us for the right reasons, listen to the lessons we have to share with them, and follow our process straight across the finish line. We can usually tell right away when this is the dynamic at hand. It’s something we try to filter for, but sometimes we just don’t know what we’re working with until we’ve already begun. At which point the entire energy of the project shifts, to something like: how do we get this team to a name that’s as good as possible within the mediocre confines of their constraints? Or, more simply: how do we get this over with?
Any good relationship requires open dialogue, and sometimes a bit of tough love. At the end of the day, we do what we do because we want to help our clients succeed in what they do. We want to set them apart, with a name for their brand they can really own and grow into.
To extend the restaurant analogy just a bit further: the most memorable brands will come from a naming omakase. There is no menu. No substitutions or modifications. All our clients need to do is show up hungry.
