Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedArielle Jackson: evaluation
18 Aug 2022 Lenny's Podcast The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital)
“My take on empty vessel names is they can be really memorable and they can be evocative of the emotion, but you have to do a lot more marketing work over time to make it mean something. So if I say Yahoo today, we know it's that search engine we use before we all switch to Google and we have the purple color in our head, and we think about what it meant at the time that we might have used it, but it took a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of time for that word to be in that.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Arielle Jackson
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 18 Aug 2022
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…That sounds great. Yeah. I'm really curious about a process. If one exists, that'd be really cool. So another question in my mind is just some names are just nonsense words like Yahoo and I don't know Google, I guess. What's your take on that as a name, that approach? Yeah. So words like that are empty vessels, they really don't mean anything. If you think about the name Yahoo, it's actually like really silly. It's like Yahoo. I always hear it like that. Google has a meaning for people in the know with the one followed by as many zeros. It's like a big number and it's a misspelling of that. So that one's a little less silly to me than Yahoo. My take on empty vessel names is they can be really memorable and they can be evocative of the emotion, but you have to do a lot more marketing work over time to make it mean something. So if I say Yahoo today, we know it's that search engine we use before we all switch to Google and we have the purple color in our head, and we think about what it meant at the time that we might have used it, but it took a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of time for that word to be in that. So they're doable. I worked on a company Eero. That has kind of what is almost an empty vessel name. Eero is for Eero Saarinen who was a designer. He did like these really beautiful buildings, architectural buildings. And then also some tables. You can get a Saarinen and table at Design Within Reach, but that name, nobody knows that unless you're in the design community. And so that name is effectively an empty vessel and they have to spend a lot and be consistent about making that [inaudible 00:17:16] mean a wifi system. I want to get to the process, but another question is why is it important for the name to kind of connect to the company and what they do? Is that just it feels nice to people or is there some kind of a bigger reason?…
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