Video FAQ

How does an Ink and Key naming project work? Short answer: You need to go to our naming page, select a package, make your payment, fill out our questionnaire and then work with my naming team and collaborate with them until you're ready to choose a name. Longer answer: If you want to start a naming project with Ink and Key, then first you need to go to our website if you're not already there: inkandkey.com. Once you're there look under the Services tab and you'll find the Naming page. Once you're on the Naming page, then go ahead and select a package, make your payment, and then once we receive your payment we're going to email you our Naming Questionnaire. Once you receive that questionnaire, take your time filling it out, send it back to us, and once we get your questionnaire, we're going to send you our Next Steps email which gives you all the information you need about what you can expect next. On our end, when we receive your questionnaire, we're going to ask you for 48 hours to get ideas ready for you. If you have asked us for a non-disclosure agreement, we take care of that first and then my naming team starts onboarding your project. We set up your naming project on a Slack workspace. Slack is an online collaboration platform. You're probably familiar with it most people are who work with us but if you're not familiar with it don't worry it's very user friendly and if you have any questions I'm happy to help you with that. So, my team will onboard your naming project. They're going to start working on ideas for you, and then in 48 hours, you're going to get an invitation to the Slack workspace. If you have colleagues or partners or anyone else that would like to join the project with you, just forward them that link. And so once you arrive in the Slack workspace, you'll be in the general channel, which is kind of like the living room. You'll see the naming brief there, and once we see that you're there you'll need to give us a few minutes, but once we see that you've arrived we're going to start adding you to private channels which looks like a naming person's name with a little lock next to it. So each person on the naming team has a private channel in Slack and that's where they provide their ideas to you. So you'll go into each private channel, you'll review ideas with that person, you'll give them individual feedback, you'll give us group feedback in the general channel and then I'll be in there too to support you and we're going to work together and collaborate until you find the name that is a great fit for you.

How long does an Ink and Key naming project take?

Short answer: It depends.

Longer answer: It still depends, but I will say that we've had projects come in and out and be completed in 2 or 3 days which is lightning fast, and we've also had projects of course take a lot longer.

I would say that the average time for a really good solid naming project is anywhere between 2 and 4 weeks, so the speed at which you make a naming decision is going to depend on a lot of things.

One of the things that it's going to depend on is how many decision-makers do you have. If you're the only one that gets to make that final decision then it should move pretty quickly. As soon as you're ready to make that decision you can make it.

Now if there are a lot of other people that need to sign off on that name, it's going to take a little bit longer. And let me say something about that really quickly. If you have multiple decision-makers, please schedule a call with me before you start your naming project. And the reason why I'm asking you to do that is I can help you set up clear expectations from the beginning, so that by the end of the process, things will, you won't be frustrated, first of all, and also some of the things that I can I can give you a few tips that I can help you to set things up as you go so that it'll be smooth and easy and everyone is going to get the outcome they're hoping for. So do contact me if you have multiple decision-makers and I can help you with that.

Now, something else that can, if you sort of want your naming project to move quickly, which most people do, what you can do on your end is show up on Slack, talk to my team, give individual feedback, give group feedback, make a video for the team. That's really, really fun if you'll make a video and post it on Slack and just talk to the team and tell them about your brand, and show how passionate you are about whatever we're naming. Because anytime that you participate with us and talk to the team, that energizes them. They're excited because they're really working hard on those names for you.

So I hope this helps and if you have any other specific questions or you just want to talk to me about your specific timeline for your naming project, then feel free to contact me and we'll do everything we can to support you.

What about domains?

Short answer: We don't buy domains for you and we don't sell domains but we will provide domain options for you.

Longer answer: What about domains? Same thing I just said. We don't buy domains, we don't sell domains, but here's what we do with domains.

So when each person on the naming team provides a name idea for you, they're going to also say like "Here's the name and here are some options for a domain that will work well with that name." On your naming questionnaire you'll notice that we ask you a lot of questions about your preferences for domains.

For instance, "Are you okay with a modifying word or an industry definer that we can add to your name in order to get that domain?" "Are you okay to other extensions or do you want an exact match.com?" So we ask you a lot of questions about that.

We'll ask you, "Do you want to invest extra money in a premium domain?" Because a lot of the domains that are out there are purchased and people are selling them at a higher price. So we ask you all of those questions so that when we give you a name idea, we're going to give you domain ideas that are also a good fit for you.

But, having said that, here's what I recommend. I always always recommend a name-led project as opposed to a domain-led project. What I mean by that is that if we are leading the project with only the focus of "We have to get this specific kind of domain," If you give my team really really tight parameters, and like, for instance, you might say, "The name has to be six letters long, start with a B, exact match.com, a real word spelled correctly."

Obviously, those parameters are going to be so tight you're going to miss out on all these creative names that are outside that parameter. So what we suggest is keep the domain parameters pretty loose and open, and what that means is you're going to get more creative names. You might see some names that would never have occurred to you otherwise which is really an awesome thing.

And so I hope this helps and if you have any other questions about domains feel free to reach out.

What about trademarks?

Short answer: We're not trademark attorneys, we can't give you legal advice but we do have a partnership with a trademark attorney who can help you and we also offer preliminary trademark screening.

Longer answer: All those things I just said but here is what it looks like. When my naming team presents name ideas to you, we don't do lots and lots of research before we present a creative idea to you because if we do that it's slows down the creative process. So what we ask you to do as our client is as you're going through name ideas, if you see a name that has potential, all you have to do is just ask the person that presented the name. Like, "Hey Sheila, would you do a little research for me on that name?" You can ask Sheila, "Hey, will you look up, just go on Google and look up similars in the industry?" Like if you're in the financial services realm, then Sheila can go in and put in her suggested name idea along with some words that that will link it to financial services just so we can see are there other similar names in the industry that might kind of knock that off the list.

The other thing you can do having to do with trademarks is you can ask someone on the naming team or ask me, "Hey would you look this up on the USPTO website?" We're happy to do that for you and we can come back and just report to you what we find. We can't give you any legal advice or any legal counsel but we can say, "Here's what we found."

Now I will say we have preliminary trademark screening which is a wonderful service. 24-hour turnaround, Monday through Friday, and you will get back from preliminary trademark screening, you'll get back either your name as a GO name, a MAYBE name, or a MAYBE NOT name. And what this does it just helps you narrow down your list, so if you're between like 5 and 6 names it can take a few names off the list and I can give you more information about preliminary trademark screening.

The other thing is you will notice there is a whole section of trademark questions on these videos on our FAQ Video page, so I encourage you to go watch those videos and then you'll get to meet the trademark attorney that we are working with now at Ink and Key, and we do have a special offer for you that it's very generous that she has partnered with us to offer you a trademark package so that if you want to move straight from your naming package to like "I want to go ahead and and get this legal, I want to own my name, I want to register my trademark," then you can purchase that package from us.

If you have any other questions about trademarks, let me know.

Do we do audience testing here at Ink and Key for our naming projects? Short answer: No, because I think it's a waste of time and money. Longer answer: I don't believe that audience testing is effective. I don't think that for most people audience testing for names only gets you the outcomes that you're hoping for.

Most people when they want to do audience testing for a name they have good motives. They are needing some help and maybe some affirmation about the decisions that they're making. They want to make make sure that they're choosing the right name and they might just be a little bit unsure about that decision. They might be looking for some extra help and also they want to make sure that, you know, "I want my brand name to really resonate with my target audience." That's those are all really really good things but the thing is, when you're testing a name only, you're testing a word on a screen.

So that word that can become your brand isn't your brand yet. It's just a word. It's just a name on a screen. So the people that are doing the audience testing, and they're looking at a list of names, and people are asking them questions about it, they're forced to look at a brand name that's out of context of the entire brand. When we encounter brands in the real world we encounter them in context. In the context of, there's visual brand assets like a logo, there's a website, it might be in an ad, it might be on a billboard, it might be in a salesletter, it might be when we're talking face-to-face with someone.

And so we create associations about a brand based on all different attributes, but they're all things that happen in a real world context, and so when you ask people to, you know, you ask them questions, and you're asking them to test out this name and rate a name, possibly, you're going to get results that are probably not very accurate because what people do when they encounter something that is unfamiliar, if I am doing an audience test and I'm looking at a list of names, I'm going to see words that are unfamiliar to me.

So my brain wants to take this unfamiliar name and I want to attach it to something that's familiar and then what I'll do is I'll come up with whatever the first association is I can think of. So I might look at this brand name and then make my own association with something that it reminds me of, but that doesn't mean that everyone that looked at that name is going to have that same association. The association might be negative, it might be positive, but what I'm trying to say is that I don't think that for the most part, audience testing for naming is accurate, and I don't think it's going to get you the outcomes and results you're hoping for anyway.

So if you have more questions about audience testing I'll be glad to help. I think that the team and I can help you get the outcomes that you're hoping for without having to bother with audience testing.