Likes Sonos.

Transcript context

…The story I like to tell is a story of Sonos. One, a great client team. I worked with all the founders. But at the time, they were stuck on being in a brand name that put them in the entertainment business. And so when we presented Sonos, which has many qualities to it, it was rejected because it doesn't have enough emotion to it. It's not entertainment-like. And we argued about that because I said, "This is outside looking in, but I don't see you as an entertainment company. You make speakers that allow for the flow of entertainment through these things. And Sonos is about sound." But it had a particular quality. It's called a palindrome, which really means that you can flip it and it means the same thing. In the case of Sonos, you could also turn it upside down and it was essentially the same. And so that got them thinking about this, but they were still has... So I left that meeting in Santa Barbara, and I came back and they were still struggling with it. And I got on a plane, didn't even bill them for this, went back down to Santa Barbara and met with them again and said, "I really believe in this name and I think it's the right for you." And at a certain point, one of the founders, Bob MacFarlane, who's just a wonderful client. I could see him thinking, and he said, "You know? We're trying to name this for ourselves, and what we really should be doing is naming it for the marketplace and the customers. And I think Sonos now is the right name. And I felt really good about that." He later wrote me a note about how I help to do that, and we use it sometimes in credentials presentations because it's such a nice note. But Sonos is something I'm so glad that I had this internal energy to, "I got to go down there and make a bid for this." I don't do that often, by the way, but I felt very strongly about Sonos. I love Sonos. I love the name. I have many Sonos products. How often does this happen where the client is just, "No, this is not the name. We have this bigger vision, we have a whole other idea of it." And then you convince them. Well, it happens all of the time. And it's a little bit bidirectional, right? Most clients, and I can understand this, they come to a naming project absolutely believing, with full confidence, that they're going to know it when they see it. And the truth is, it almost never happens. I think this year we'll hit 4,000 projects that we've completed. And it's interesting, we'll tell people in a very polite way, "You're not going to know when you see it." But I know they don't believe me. And even when... You could see them thinking that, "You know what? He was right. I really have to think about this. I have to process it." And part of that, part of why clients don't like the bolder names, the more imaginative names that we present is they are looking for comfort. And that's the opposite that what you want to do. And part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence that going bolder, and bigger, and being uncomfortable. I use the expression, "There is no power in comfort, not in the marketplace."…

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