The 6-Step Framework for Naming Anything with Katie Miserany, Global Head of Marketing at SurveyMonkey | Ep. 442

0:01Katie Miserany:Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. I am here with the chief communications officer and head of global marketing at SurveyMonkey, Katie. I'm excited to chat. We have a cool topic. And I think this is a problem we've all experienced where you come try and come up with a name and you have 50 ,000 names and you can't decide on one, which is one of the hardest things to do.

0:53So we'll dive into how to name, I'll say it in quotes, S-H-I-T. So like there's a kid in the room or something like that. So excited to share. Me too. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. Could you give a little bit of your journey? Like how did you get into marketing and how did you end up at SurveyMonkey? Yeah, I actually started on the communication side. So I was director of corporate communications for many years and moved my way up into VP. And then the CEO invited me to report directly to him and serve as his chief of staff and the chief communications officer role. And that one thing led to another.

1:37We had our CMO depart and the CEO asked me to take over the combined function. So I've been doing the head of marketing combined with head of communications for almost a year now at SurveyMonkey. It's been quite the journey and such an interesting time to step in and lead that function. I love that there's different paths to get to ahead of marketing. Like you can go through product marketing, you go through social, you go through, like there's no one path where like some professions you, you have to follow. This is the path to get to the top. So. The preordained journey. Yes, I know. And, you know, communications people are just having a moment.

2:21It's all over the news. Every article you read, it's like storytellers are back and look at this six figure storyteller job from Anthropic or whatever. But I think it's true that, you know, communications people, the brand storytellers are a really big part of the marketing function today. So it's been, like I said, just a really cool time to step in and learn everything there is to learn on the marketing side while also getting to lead the charge on that storytelling front. I want to go into, I know SurveyMonkey literally just launched a product called Launchpad and published like a blog called the six step framework we used to name SurveyMonkey Launchpad.

3:01So one thing you wrote is that a name should never have to do all the work by itself. Could you walk me through what that means in practice? Yeah, this was really fun for us to do because the solution itself, Launchpad, is basically a suite of market research tools. So you can, with no background in market research at all, go in and do your own name testing or concept testing. Or if you want to do, you know, like a price optimization study, this is what Launchpad enables you to do. And so it's prior to going to market with something, what are the things you want to test? and it's got all the rigor and the science baked into it.

3:42So, you know, the earliest career person can't screw this up. They're built-in methodologies. And we were like, we got to bring this thing to market with its own name. Let's use the name testing solution to majorly dog food this thing and figure out exactly what the market wants it to be called. And part of that journey for us was we had to think about taking SurveyMonkey from really what people think of as a single product company into a multi-product brand. That involves some soul searching and some, you know, architecture work and just really figuring out how does this solution fit into the larger scheme of things?

4:22And what's it going to mean to people when it's on the market? Who's it for? How do the colors and the logo and all the different design elements that go into it really fit together to help us tell this story? Yeah, I want to go, it's probably the step all the way back where you have to name something. I mean, SurveyMonkey is arguably a really cool name and it probably says a lot for itself, but also has, since it's such a good name, it's pigeonholed a little bit of like, you're only this type of company so i think now you have to like rework as a chief community like rework the story to be multiple products but i also want to know like when you're thinking of naming things like what is like step one step two step three um how does it come about like who's in the room like what becomes starts first the audience like where does it start Yeah, it's such an important question because all the creatives that are in the marketing team want to jump straight into ideation.

5:31So they get that PRD ticket or, you know, the description from product about what this product is. Maybe they see a demo and they want to jump straight into drafting lists of names and thinking about concepts and how it could all come together. we advise in that blog post that you got to start with the brief. You need to figure out exactly who this is for and how it helps them in their everyday life. I think being relentlessly helpful is a really important part of marketing today where you need to describe in detail for people exactly how you're going to make their life easier. You know, with AI and everything, it's just so easy to create content that's really shallow.

6:09And we wanted this to have deep roots to really be grounded in exactly how it's going to unlock things for people in their work life. So that's where we recommend starting. So you go from your brief, which would outline exactly who it's for, how it works, and then you earn the right to start to step into that brainstorming where you're thinking, okay, all the different directions we could take this thing. For something like Launchpad, which was, you know, like I said, this really rigorous scientific, It's got all 25 plus years of SurveyMonkey expertise baked into it. We started with a list of things that were really kind of scientific.

6:48So it was like lab or methods or signal, things like that. And then the team got to thinking about, okay, but what's the moment like? What are the emotions that you're feeling when you're about to launch something? You're feeling all that anxiety. so then they started working through like launch or go or some of these words like survey monkey no k-n-o-w that one got kicked out because of the homonyms but um it's it's that's a really fun stage when you just try to be as big and broad and expansive and think about the concepts and flesh them out and like you know what are the different words that you can have connotations around.

7:29And then you got to get to the really hard part, which is curation and figuring out, okay, of the hundred plus ideas that we've come up with, what's the short list? And that's where something like market research can start to be really, really handy. Yeah. And I think what's also really cool is, and I saw this in the article was that like, sometimes you really have to define what it's not and who it's not for. And, um, you really wanted to shy away from those like technical researchers, like, and you wanted to lean into like the founders, the marketers, the, the product managers, like the, the people who are, um, that it's easy to use this product.

8:13So, um, can you talk a little bit of like how like an audience, It's a little bit exposes what you can't say in a name as well, because you can't be overly technical because you have that market to understand. You have to be in a sweet spot to speak the language of your audience when they may. Yes, absolutely. We love market researchers and they love SurveyMonkey, but a market researcher doesn't need Launchpad. They've got the skills to just build it with SurveyMonkey itself. So they're like, I can build a Van Westendorp pricing solution. Like they don't need it. And that's where explicitly describing this is not for market researchers.

8:56They can do that on their own. That helps us drill in on exactly what we want to do. And if you go to the Launchpad website, I think the team did something really clever where, you know, they have the solution is named feature prioritization. And then in tiny letters, it says max diff analysis. So it's like, if you know what max diff analysis is and you want to pick it for that reason, you can. But most people, most marketers, founders, product people are going to be like, no, I need feature prioritization. That's the like value that we're getting from that. And max diff analysis is just like the technical name for the solution that we're offering.

9:33And that comes from identifying like exactly who your audience is and then who it isn't and who you should be talking to. I also think this exercise you do with naming is like something a lot of teams skip in the part of like building a campaign or building, choosing a name or is like the validation step, step and asking your audience. So could you walk me through a little bit of like how you think marketers should validate ideas, validate campaigns before they just have this budget of a million dollars or just saying a wild number and then just do it without any of the validation or surveying your audience or spinning up something like this?

10:20Yeah, well, I don't know what your experience has been, Daniel, but I think most people have had the experience of working with somebody, whether they're on the product side or maybe a founder CEO who thinks they're Steve Jobs, wants to write the headlines for the website, wants to name every product. We kind of collected horror stories in the telling of this particular naming journey where people are like, yeah, you know, we presented a short list of ideas in the meeting and then the CEO picked one in the elevator and that was the name. But there's a great quote. So one of our market research customers is Noom.

10:56If you're familiar with them, they do kind of like health and well-being and weight loss. They were launching a new product that was completely different for them. It was this mindfulness app, like feature in their app. And it was called the Mindful Art Break. And they wanted to know like what different people thought of different types of art. Art's extremely personal. So it's like how I would respond to, you know, Yayo Kusama or Monet or Rembrandt is going to be different than how you would respond to it. So they were putting all this art out and collecting feedback using SurveyMonkey. And the product manager who was working on this, Miles Johnson, he said, market research humbles you because you have a point of view or maybe your CEO has a point of view or your chief product officer has a point of view on what this should be and what it should be called.

11:44But until you get the feedback from the market, you don't really know how that's gonna go. And if you're gonna have an uphill battle trying to get adoption for this new thing, or in their case, like which art is gonna resonate with the general population when we're trying to provide them with this lovely break in their day to have like a mindful art moment. So instead of the product team or the marketing team deciding for people, they took that to market using our solution. They got 5 ,000 responses to help like, you know, just figure out what emotions these different pieces of art are gonna bring up for people.

12:19And I think that's such a great saying. Market research humbles you. That's how you validate like, am I right or is the CEO right? Or is the head of product right? Market research can give you that information to go in and say like, well, you know, 5 ,000 people, 4 ,500 people in SurveyMonkey's case, 5 ,000 in Noom's case, think this. And that's just incredible data to go and do your storytelling and your internal socialization with. Yeah. I just wrote about yesterday and like my newsletter and I said that it's kind of the same, but if someone says something's a bad ad or a bad campaign internally, like the market could only decide if it's a bad ad or a bad campaign.

12:58Like you internally, you could think it's the best campaign or the prettiest campaign or like the most sketched out but the market conversions and feedback and all that stuff is going to tell you that this is good or bad even if it's not good looking to you or not sexy to you it could the market's going to humble you so i think that's such a great um saying that that's the one thing in life where there's no test to like pass. Like the test is the market. Like you can, you could check all the boxes and still fail if you don't validate that one step. And there's so many examples of this back to defining your audience, who it is and who it isn't.

13:41I was just watching a video randomly served to me about Taylor Swift writing the song Love Story, which was one of her biggest hits of all time. She brought it to a man in the industry that she really looked up to. And he was just like, I don't get this song. I don't know about this, but that song was for teenage girls. So like that man was not the market, was not the audience and he was wrong. You know, it was one of the biggest hits that she's ever had. Or if you think about the Callaway golf and good, good, which is all in the news right now, had they concept tested that video before putting it out, I think they would have seen and predicted the outrage, especially among women that a video of like somebody pushing a woman over was going to generate.

14:23And you just avoid a lot of the swirl and the negativity that comes from putting something out that hasn't really been tested against the market that you're trying to influence. What are some things that, I mean, that you've used SurveyMonkey for that you thought was like home run or your team was like home run, but then the market humbled you or changed your opinion or you went, you zagged when you should have zigged because, or you thought you should zig and you zagged because the market told you in a survey that this is the path you should go down. Well, with the name of this solution in particular, Launchpad, we really wanted it to be one word.

15:05So our suite of offerings, there's SurveyMonkey, there's SurveyMonkey Enterprise, then there's SurveyMonkey Audience. SurveyMonkey Audience is our panel. So like the people that you want to get in front of when you do your market research, like most of the names, SurveyMonkey Rewards, if you want to like, you know, get rewards for taking our surveys, they're all like SurveyMonkey, one word. And it's usually like an action word. And so the product marketing team loved SurveyMonkey Launch. That's what they wanted it to be. I personally loved SurveyMonkey Methods because I thought it sounded really scientific.

15:38I was excited about the idea of launching a methods marketplace to go along with this. And it would sound, you know, like researchy and scientific. And then, but the data, Daniel, it was overwhelming. 4 ,500 people responded to our survey and they all loved Launchpad. They were like, that is your name. That is the perfect name for this solution. And we couldn't ignore how overwhelming that response was. So in the naming of this itself, we all were trying to zig and the market was like, no, you need to zag. And it was cool when we put it out, we made this kind of like silly documentary about the journey of, of naming the product and all the responses to those videos as we put them out on our own socials or like boosted them from the company account.

16:21It was just like, you landed on a great one. That's, it was just so validating to see that what we saw in the market research was also playing out among the people who are receiving it in real time. I mean, this is like a reason to do what you're saying you should do, but I also want to know, I think one thing that this new product does that is a little different is you have all those years of historical. And I think one of the hardest things to do for a marketer that's maybe not have a background on market research in there, maybe one person, team or two, is the design of what makes a good survey and what questions will help me validate this.

17:01Am I asking too many questions or too little questions? So could you talk a little bit like how that helped like prior survey, like AI knowledge, the brain and SurveyMonkey helped design the survey as well to make sure you like had the right questions to ask to the audience? Yeah, it's the kind of thing that we're uniquely positioned to do well to be helpful to people because way back in 2016, before AI was discussed in any popular way, we built this tool. We called it SurveyMonkey Genius at the time, and it took all of the years and years. SurveyMonkey launched in 1999. So we're talking decades of data about what makes a good question, how to write specific questions in a way that get the outcomes that you're looking for, how to structure this stuff.

17:56And there's also, we have a team of survey scientists at SurveyMonkey who are the experts in this. They have like PhDs in surveys. It's incredible. And they baked all of their expertise in there too. So when it came to something like, okay, you want to do marketer, you want to do ad testing, or maybe you work at an agency, you want to preview how this ad is going to go with your market. They designed it so that you can just upload your image and explain your targeting, who you're going for, maybe a couple of things that you want to test. And then SurveyMonkey just makes the rest of the study for you and we'll field it and we'll give you the results.

18:34And the AI will even highlight for you, like, this is what's trending among men, aged 18 to 24 or among working professionals with these specific targeting criterias that you baked in. So I always say you can't screw it up. That's the beauty of this product is it just has all that expertise baked in. You just are putting in some of the key inputs that you care about. And then we do the rest using, you know, all the decades of expertise and the things that only SurveyMonkey can really do, which is write an amazing survey that's going to get you the results that you're looking for. I want to actually go back to one thing, because I'm interested in your perspective, because you are a storyteller and you come from that communications background and still doing it.

19:15A lot of people might say that like, there's no such thing as a bad name. You could just describe it in the messaging, like the messaging or the storytelling will give it a good name. Like, what do you say to people who say like, there's no such thing as a bad name? I think they're definitely bad names. And I would say the bad names are things with connotations or connections that you don't intend, but that other people outside of your echo chamber are going to bring to it. So, you know, there are kind of off the wall names. Like if you think about a brand like Liquid Death, where it's water in a can and they named it Liquid Death, like that is a pretty quirky choice.

19:57And I think by all accounts, it worked for them. It's got this real brand pull and they're doing something different and pretty cool. But, you know, if you named it something that means something within a specific community or in a culture or it's offensive to women or something and you didn't intend for that to happen, that is where I'd say like you can have a bad name for sure. And like that's the kind of thing market research helps you catch. I think the best names, though, they're just names with a lot of intention. so if people can tell that you're naming your product or service to communicate something to them like liquid death where they're like they're not your typical water company that is what they're signaling and there's depth to that there's authenticity to that I think then you can tell a really cool story but it also helps to know what you're up against and so if you're picking a quirky name or kind of an off-the-wall brand for something it can help to just be like what are we going to be up against in the market that we need to be proactive about shifting the conversation around or to lean into?

21:03I mean, we have kind of an example there with SurveyMonkey where several years ago, back in 2021, we thought the name SurveyMonkey was limiting. So we were having trouble like on signing six figure deals for SurveyMonkey Enterprise because we're like, oh, like people don't want to sign up with something called SurveyMonkey. It's too silly. So the company at the time actually rebranded and came up with this new identity that they thought would be a little bit more, you know, enterprise ready and that they could sell the enterprise solutions under. And when our new CEO came in in 2023, the very first thing he did was go back to the original name SurveyMonkey because it had so much brand cachet.

21:44It was so well known. And he was like, I would rather fight the good fight to make sure people know the full breadth of the offering at SurveyMonkey than to come up with this kind of watered down, very enterprise, you know, different type of identity for a company that a lot of people knew and loved already. Yeah, it's so hard to build up a brand, especially how long it takes to build up a brand. And to switch a name is such a, when you have all this, like you say, brand cachet, this momentum about it. I see this a lot when people acquire a product and then they like loop it into like their stack.

22:22And then that product had so much pull in the market. And then they rename the product and people are like, wait, was it this product? What happened to the old product? I'm just going to go somewhere else because it's confusing to me. So it makes sense. Like probably there was a lot of customers like, wait, is this SurveyMonkey or is this something else? Like, I don't know. Yeah, totally. It's like, imagine if Salesforce had renamed Slack into something like Salesforce chat. That was probably discussed in a room somewhere. And I'm so glad they didn't because there's a slackiness to Slack that's important that like people, it really resonates with people.

23:01And I think the name of these things and the identity around it when it's done very intentionally can be a real differentiator and something that people have a lot of loyalty for. What are some other ways you see marketers specifically using surveys to test? Like, what are they testing besides the name before it's launched in their launchpad? Yeah. So the solutions that we have, there's definitely the ad tests. There's also just concept tests. So if you're trying to get feedback on a headline, we're actually launching a new headline on the SurveyMonkey website this week. And it's so, so helpful, like I said, to just put it out there in market research testing to see even if you're totally committed to it because it's a brand play or whatever, like how are people going to react to this before it goes live on your website in this like high stakes real estate?

24:01we've got message testing kind of same premise logo testing name testing the other thing that people use it for which I think is kind of undervalued is price optimization so you know we've got inflation like the market's crazy there's tariffs what what do you do on the pricing side is I think harder than ever and you can actually run these market research tests again And the like technical name is a Van Westendorp price optimization study, but it'll tell you the optimal price point or price range that your target customers are willing to pay for your product or service. I think that's another great one that our friends in PMM use quite frequently.

24:45Yeah, my good friend Tamara always uses Van Westendorp and she like talks about it all the time. It's such a good and she's a product marketer. So product marketer, shout out to them. They know how to do that. And that's so important. And a lot of people forget how much pricing is a marketing strategy. They think it's one of those levers that marketers don't think about as much. But it's so important to, especially when economies change or you want to go enterprise or if you're trying to tackle a different ICP, it changes. Pricing, that pricing structure. could change a lot. There's that quote from Mad Men where they're like, brilliance in advertising was 99 cents.

25:34Someone came up with that. It's not a dollar, it's 99 cents. Like that's brilliance in marketing for sure. I wanted to add on to this because I think one, one thing that this also solves is a lot of marketers have good ideas. And I think marketers are no short of good ideas, but I think when they're coming to a leader like you, you want to have audience validation or some sort of validation that their idea is something that we should test or something. So I think this is also a really good product with someone who really feels strongly about a headline or very strongly about a campaign they want to run or very strongly about an ad creative or a brain campaign, but they can't get the budget yet.

26:24Like this is a great way to cheaply run like a test where they can put out to the market, like what do they think and then get back an answer. And if it swings the way that they want to, then they can come to like be like, Hey Katie, I, I surveyed like a thousand people in our audience and they really like this concept um here's the solution i want to run um gotta get budget for it it's like at least like gives more marketers the chance to validate ideas before like going to leadership or trying to push an idea through that might fail before it even starts yes there's a quote um i'm trying to see if i can find exactly you said it because i want to give attribution, but oh, Jim Barksdale.

27:14And the quote is, if we have the data, let's look at the data to make this decision. And if all we have are opinions, then let's go with mine, which I think is exactly what you're talking about there. We all like to think the best, air quotes, best idea wins in all these conversations, but often it's the person with the loudest voice or like me because of my title, I get to decide, but that doesn't necessarily mean I know what the best idea is. And so when we can get this data in the room, it's so helpful for marketers to break out of the swirl of opinions that we're awash in all the time. And I think it's unique to marketing too, a little bit in product.

27:52And so a lot of these features are good for product people, but everyone thinks they're a marketer. Even worse in communication because everyone on the planet is a communicator. We're all communicating at all times. And so people have opinions about what you're doing, what you're saying, how you're saying it, how it's going to appear. And the only way to break out of that swirl of opinions is say, we asked the market, the people were actually trying to target with this solution and here's what they said. So I think it's such a secret weapon for the marketers who are using it today. I want to know from your perspective and people who are trying to master this art of storytelling, because now AI has like watered down a lot of this stuff.

28:33It's like, so you came up, like Launchpad was the idea. I mean, the name. How did you start developing the story after you've like came up with like, I know that part of it was like, you had to come up some story to come up with Launchpad, but how did you like develop the story and like the communication of Launchpad to the market once you came up with the name? Like, how does that process come about? So for people who are trying to like improve this skill or marketing teams that are trying to improve this communication. It all started originally with our own brand health tracker that we have in the field.