Mach 5, Branding Woes, and Never Split the Difference
Hello!
Is it April already? 2023 is vanishing rapidly.
I’m on my way to London this morning to meet with some potential investors in a new project we are starting and to catch up with some existing folk working in the space that we are hopefully teaming up with to get things moving faster.
Part of the role at the moment is branding. Honestly the hardest part of launching new ideas is coming up with the name. I spent about 3 hours with ChatGPT searching for inspiration, but I’ve decided we don’t have an AGI on our hands yet and most of the names were just combinations of two to three words sandwiched together. Branding may remain the sole remit of humans for the time being.
I remember the exact moment when I decided branding was definitely work and no longer fun was when I used to offer branding and design services to some of the start-up companies in our incubator. After about 6 weeks of work, we’d whittled down the list of candidate names for a new technology platform down to about 3, but camps were divided and people were taking it as a personal affront that their preferred candidate wasn’t universally beloved.
After a sudden swing in opinion following a heavy ‘sales’ effort from me, everyone had managed to settle on the same name. Fantastic. We developed a logo and some marketing collateral around it to show how the brand might ‘pop’. This took about a week, we presented it back to the team and they loved it. Green lights across all members. The next step is trademarking and protection. We’d already checked a month ago that the name space was free… and it was, and had been for all of recorded history… until 5 days prior. Someone had trademarked it at the 11th hour.
We went back to the drawing board and came up with something everyone liked, but it never shone a light on the first brand.
Hopefully this round of ideation goes more smoothly…
This week’s video
The world first combined jet/ramjet engine capable of 0 to Mach 5… yes shh about the SR-71 Blackbird… this is awesome.
A good book for the weekend
Never Split The Difference (amazon link) I read this book this week on the recommendation of one of the founders I work with, as we are going through a few rounds of increasingly intense negotiation. The book is fantastic. Written by a former FBI hostage negotiator, it talks through the practical methods and life experiences of someone routinely at the heart of needing to “get to Yes”. Explaining how he was able to disarm even Harvard Professors, who literally wrote the book in the art of negotiation, by practicing a practical and emotionally attuned approach to conversations.
I hope you’re having a great week!
All the best,
Ben