065 - Alison Greenberg: What's in a Name?
Alison Greenberg is a naming expert, brand strategist, and verbal designer. As of 2023 Alison is the Co-Founder and CEO at RuthHealth. Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of aflow, a conversational AI studio designing and building AI-powered, NLP-backed chat and voice assistant experiences. Over the past 12+ years, she's helped brands find their voice in the marketplace.
Alison’s branding and naming work includes brands + agencies: McCann, VSA Partners, Siegelvision, Elmwood, OpenIDEO, Edwards Lifesciences, Stryker, Summit Health/City MD, Pfizer, General Motors, McDonald's, Hungryroot, The Helm, Fidelity, Llamasoft + others. (Alison Greenberg- LinkedIn.)
Alison Greenberg, Co-Founder & CEO of RuthHealth, and brand naming expert and strategist. Twitter: @ALiS0NLAURA
Emily spoke with Alison about her approach to naming products and brands with a few great examples from fashion to CBD. Plus, should voice assistants have a gender? And what makes a good chatbot?
This episode has good old fashioned branding, voice and conversation design (VUI), startups and women creating cool products for women, and the keys to designing a great chat experience for your customers or audience.
Bottom line: Naming is the way that you take language and make it work for a brand.
Topics & Timestamps
1:50: Alison shares her background and how she became involved with naming brands.
2:15: Language is a currency and in any form of advertising, marketing, or branding it is the core piece of the craft. Naming is the most condensed way to apply language to a brand. Naming is the way that you take language and really put it to work for the brand it’s poetry, but it’s also a strategic execution of ideas.
3:35: Naming can be subjective, so how do you objectively define the success of a name?
3:50: You can’t decouple a name from what it represents. The naming doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but the success of a brand is mostly qualitative. Is it succinct? Does it telegraph meaning?
5:20: Successful names often stop us in our tracks. In B2B naming you don’t have much of an opportunity to do that, but it’s becoming easier to be creative and innovative with naming.
6:00: Slack is a great example of this. It resonates with the user. People often say “slack it to me” or “slack me.” It’s simple and surprising: two criteria for a great name.
6:55: There’s a science behind why names with harder consonants such as k and z. Experts in linguistics study sound symbolism, phonosemantics, and phonaesthesia: the idea that the way a word sounds have lexical meaning and meaning in the way that they sound. It’s all about the relationship between sound and meaning.
'Phonaesthesia occurs when certain sounds become associated with certain meanings, even though they do not attempt to imitate the sound (as in onomatopoeia). ' 'Phonaesthesia has been described as a type of conventional sound symbolism.
Women in Voice is building community for women in this new technology space. Alison is chapter founder of Women in Voice NY.
9:11: Often, brands run into legal problems when trying to establish a name to their brand. One such company that Alison worked with is Where Mountains Meet. Brand owners approached Alison after being hit with a cease and desist letter for the brand name they were originally using when launching their sustainable women’s clothing business. See more about Where Mountains Meet on their Instagram.
11:05: calmbound is another female-owned business that Alison has worked with whose owners had a passion for language and creating a brand of CBD edibles curated with the proper dosage of CBD and available to people of all walks of life, i.e. veterans, elderly, etc. calmbound echoes the literal compound used in CBD, but also has a deeper meaning that resonates with the brand’s hope that users would be “calm bound” with their mental and physical health. See more about calmbound.
12:45: There is always a need for naming. Whether it’s podcasts or brands, the ability to be clear as well as memorable is a true art. -Alison Greenberg
14:25: Some of the most interesting perspectives can come from an intersectional and diverse background. When we’re thinking about voice, having a background in understanding the human element and how language and communication function on a level with human emotion is really helpful.
15:30: Being brief and getting your message across concisely is key. Brevity goes beyond just the way you look at brand communication. It has to be done visually and verbally because we are constantly being bombarded with information.
17:15: You don’t have a lot of real estate with voice. You have to use as few words as possible to get your message across.
Voice User Interfaces (VUI) are the primary or supplementary visual, auditory, and tactile interfaces that enable voice interaction between people and devices. A VUI can be anything from a light that blinks when it hears your voice to an car’s entertainment console.
18:34: When you’re building a custom voice experience responding in the fewest amount of words while maintaining a personality and conversational flow is a balance that you have to strike.
19:00: How do you bake the tone of the brand into pre-programmed chat responses while maintaining brevity?
19:19: You need to remove the formalities and just focus on conversation with chat. Telegraph meaning and utility. The whole point of a chatbot is to get something accomplished. -Alison Greenberg
20:35: Make sure that your chatbot voice is honoring that brand. A beauty brand might use emojis while an insurance brand would be establishing trust.
22:10: Bots and voice should use language to be solution creators, not just problem solvers.
23:10: Make it known that a chatbot is being used from the beginning. The BOT bill (Senate bill 1001) in California makes it illegal for bots to pretend to be humans online.
24:30: Considering gender with virtual assistants: The term virtual assistant is a better term for a chatbot. Using the first person plural can be a good way to stay gender-neutral.
25:40: There is no reason to give a bot a gender unless it’s strategic. For example, the brand Swoobie’s target customer is a female, so it makes sense for their voice and chatbot to take a female gender. In financial services, it doesn’t matter.
27:45: Staying gender-neutral with voice can be tricky.
28:48: Female topics can often be taboo, but some brands in femtech and sextech are starting the conversation around them: Lola, Cora, etc. Chatbots allow for these topics on women’s healthcare to be explored in an environment that feels safe and non-judgmental.
30:21: Book recommendation: Questions of negotiation are really common in the voice industry, especially for women. Alison recommends “Getting More” by Stuart Diamond.