Mini episode: Brad Flowers and The Naming Book

How Brands Are Built

For the second mini episode of the podcast, I’m talking to Brad Flowers, founding partner of Bullhorn, a marketing company in Lexington, Kentucky. Brad is also the author of a new book entitled, The Naming Book: 5 steps to creating brand and product names that sell.

Regular listeners know that naming is an area of focus for me, so when I heard about Brad’s book, I couldn’t want to read it and ask him a few questions.

We started out talking about how there aren’t too many books about naming out there (here’s a list, which now includes Brad’s). Brad wrote his book because he’d had trouble early in his career finding something that documented a replicable process for his team. The five steps Brad recommends are:

1. Establishing Criteria
2. Brainstorming
3. Compiling Names
4. Expanding Your Knowledge
5. Deciding on the Final Name

Within each step, Brad includes short worksheets and exercises. One that I especially like comes right at the beginning, when he asks readers to pick any three brand names and post-rationalize where the names came from. Brad says it “gives someone the opportunity to take a step back and start to just recognize the names that exist and how they’re working, so that when you start to think about your name, you can understand that while Apple seems like a great name, on day one it felt like a really risky, and probably a pretty dumb name, really.”

We rounded out the conversation talking about the benefits of sometimes going “off brief,” how to ask other people their opinion on name ideas, and Brad’s favorite naming story (involving his five-year-old son).

To learn more about The Naming Book, visit thenamingbook.com. It’s available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.org. To learn more about Brad and Bullhorn, visit BullhornCreative.com, or find them on social media.