The Life Less Traveled

Interested in a cool and creative job? Amanda C. Peterson is a professional namer for Landor, a branding consultancy, coming up with monikers for snack food flavors, technology spin-offs and everything in between. After years of working in advertising planning and copywriting, she made the leap to worrying about Latin root words and trademark attorneys. For the names of hers you’ve heard of (Freescale, Photoshop Lightroom) there are hundreds of products and companies that get great names that never make it. Read on to learn about how Amanda became a professional namer and how you can, too.

Conception

1) How did you come up with the idea to become a professional namer?
As a copywriter, I’d help name quite a few things before - but in a random, ad hoc way. When a friend mentioned Landor was looking for a namer, my first reaction was, “People get paid to do that?”

2) Why did you want to be a namer?
As a writer, the challenge is to get your idea across using only words. In marketing, it’s use as few words as possible. As a namer, you get just one. It’s like the crossword puzzle version of marketing strategy. Fun and challenging.

3) What worried you about setting out to become a namer?
My background is in advertising and marketing. I never took linguistics or a variety of foreign languages. How would I be able to keep up with all the people far more word proficient than I am?

4) What excited you about setting out to become a namer?
After years of working in advertising where I had to try to work within long standing constraints, it was exciting to be there at the inception of a new brand, help lay the groundwork for the story they could tell over the years.

5) Were there people who thought being a namer was crazy?
There are people who still don’t believe it’s what I do, or that it takes any specific skills. I have to be very educated about the industry and research around naming so I can be a counterexample to the kind of bias people may have against naming as a profession.

6) Were there people who thought being a namer was brilliant?
I’d like to think my clients do – or at least see the value my team and I bring. I do think it’s a profession that no one sees the true value of until they try to do it themselves first.

7) Was there a specific moment when you though, “Yes, I’m going to do this!”?
Honestly, about two months after I started. It was a gamble and I felt out of my element for quite a bit at first. I began as a more junior namer, contributing ideas to other people’s projects. The first time I was brought in on a nomenclature project (figuring out a company’s entire naming system for all their products), it was like doing a Rubic’s cube. When I was able to find a few solutions and run through all the implications, I had this thrill as if, “Yes, there is a right and wrong answer for something like this and I’ve found it.” It’s the geekiest adrenaline high ever.

Implementation

1) Was it hard or easy to become a namer?
I wouldn’t say it was easy, but I was busy doing the best work I could on all sorts of strategy and verbal projects so that I was ready when an opportunity came up.

There are very few firms that doing naming professionally – and fewer that seem to create really good names, so getting hired there is often a challenge. Other people seem to find their way into freelancing through studying linguistics. And some start out casually through writing copy, finding a few opportunities and naming something high profile enough that they can say, “Well, I named this.” and clients and companies are happy to hire them.

2) How long did it take from conception of this idea to actually becoming a namer?
I found out you could actually make a living naming things (without doing the strategy or copywriting in addition) a week before my interview at Landor. I wasn’t leading my own projects or a skilled naming professional, however, for over a year. I was given some pretty rigorous on-the-job training to take my ad hoc flipping-through-reference-books method into a more thoughtful, process-oriented approach. Almost five years into it, I’m still figuring out the gray areas (like “What’s a glottal?”).

3) What’s your funniest memory of being a namer?
I was working with a client to rename something, and they were based in France. I had run names through preliminary legal screening, but hadn’t yet gotten results from the “native speaker check” to make sure they worked in all languages. I presented a name which included the word “Verge” and the woman from the Paris office cracked up. “You know that means ‘penis’, right?” I turned beet red. Luckily that client had a great sense of humor. We’ve had some amazing results from people in our other offices, so now I know how to say a variety of offensive things in languages from around the world.

Reflection

1) What was the most fun thing about being a namer?
The research. I’ve always had a fairly broad vocabulary, but I’m constantly learning about obscure topics, word origins, archaic terminology, imagery and metaphor in other cultures, history - you name it. When I’m mining for words or learning all about a client’s business, I get a chance to fill my brain with facts while I’m on the clock. Working with people who are scary smart and who get my obscure references is pretty amazing as well.

2) Would you do it again?
I have, in fact, done it twice. I went off to take a higher paying associate creative director/copywriter job at an advertising agency after a few years of naming. I missed the depth and the level of strategic rigor, let alone having my geekiness appreciated to the utmost. So, yes, I would certainly choose this as a career path again – even if I’m not sure what happens next. It’s like being a word rock star. Everything else pales in comparison.

3) What’s the biggest lesson being a namer has taught you about life?
How subjective words really are. We think of words as these immutable, solid things - look in the dictionary and that’s what it means and nothing else. But honestly, we can change what words mean, how they’re perceived, how they make people feel, even the imagery they conjure up, with the context and the tonality in which we use them. It’s made me much more specific about the words I choose to use, even when I’m talking to myself.

4) What’s your favorite memory of being a namer?
There are plenty of team celebrations that make me really happy, but related to the core of what I do? It’s always related to being faced with an impossible challenge and finally finding the solution. The best one is Frito-Lay’s O’Keeley’s. We needed a name that sounded like an Irish pub and I had put almost the entire Dublin phone book through legal screening. Absolutely everything - every Irish-sounding last name - was taken or too similar to something that was already registered. And then “I’ve Got You” by Louis Prima and Keely Smith came up on my random play. On a whim, I added O’Keely’s to the list (as it conformed to the structure) and submitted it. It cleared legal, became the name and they even created a Mr. O’Keeley for the front of the package and as a character to walk around the trade show. I found out later, of course, that originally her last name had been Keely - and of Irish decent.

Advice

1) What is your advice to someone out there thinking of becoming a namer?
Study linguistics. Get in on naming projects - even at a casual level - so you have something to show potential clients or employers. Make friends with a trademark attorney. Learn how to search uspto.gov like a pro. Learn a foreign language — or a whole bunch of them.

2) What book would you recommend to someone inspired by your story?
I actively dislike all the actual books on naming thus far. However, I would certainly read the Igor guide to naming (it’s a free pdf on their site), Hugh Macleod’s “How to Be Creative” (free on Gaping Void) and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (to stretch your brain). There are a ton of white papers, articles, research studies and so on, but you’ll find those once you find what in naming is really interesting to you.