How to Name (or Rename) Your Advisory Firm

“Professionals hired to come up with [company] names typically [present] a thousand ideas. It’s not just an afternoon of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good ideas. It’s … scratching beneath the surface,” Rob Meyerson, founder and principal of Heirloom, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.

The independent brand strategist was formerly head of naming at Hewlett-Packard and director of verbal identity at Interbrand.

In the interview, he argues that building a brand requires striking a balance “between fitting in and standing out.”

Further, he discusses the pros and cons of creating an original name for a financial advisory versus using the founder’s own name.

His clients have ranged from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500 firms, including Activision, AT&T, Intel, Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where many of his technology clients are located, Meyerson also talks about the good and bad reasons for renaming a firm and opines on Riskalyze changing its name to Nitrogen.

Author of “Brand Naming: The Complete Guide to Creating a Name for Your Company, Product or Service,” Meyerson has a new book due in the fourth quarter or early 2024: the 6th edition of the Amazon bestseller, “Designing Brand Identity” (Wiley), co-authored with Alina Wheeler.

ThinkAdvisor recently interviewed Meyerson, who was speaking by phone from Pacifica, California.

He declares that “branding is the promise the company makes [and] the good will it has built over the years.”

Here are excerpts from our interview:

THINKADVISOR: Financial advisors need to differentiate themselves from one another. Why is it essential to put great effort into naming their companies?

ROB MEYERSON: Think of it as a good investment. Building a strong brand is important. And the name is a relatively low-cost marketing expense with potentially very high impact.

It will make ads more effective and [can] last for the length of the company. So getting it right upfront makes a lot of sense.

Getting it wrong can be very, very expensive if it results in your getting sued or having to rename or rebrand a few years after launching.

Why would you get sued?

If you use a name that’s identical with or too similar to another company that’s providing similar goods and services, they can send you a cease and desist letter to stop using that name.

So you or your lawyer should do some vetting to make sure from a legal standpoint that you’re able to use or own the name.

Should you have a brand strategy in mind before you choose a name?

Yes. Ideally, it forms the foundation of the naming brief that should help you determine what types of names are going to work — either names that sound like financial advisories or names that sound completely different and will help you stand out.

The naming brief includes the ideas you want to convey through the name. Part of that is looking at competitors’ names and understanding how you can stand out.

It also has the types of names that would get more attention or names that would blend in, which would make people have trouble remembering them.

What’s the most challenging part of naming or renaming a firm?

In part, it’s naming the firm! Professionals hired to come up with names typically [present] a thousand ideas. So it’s not just an afternoon of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good ideas.

It’s days or weeks of scratching beneath the surface for interesting ideas.

A big reason we do that is because of the legal constraints around branding. You want to avoid the many names that have already been used in different industries.

Please talk further about coming up with an original name for a financial practice.

It allows you to express some creative ideas. It gives you a little more flexibility, including at point of exit.

You can say something about your positioning in the marketplace, whether about ease of doing business or innovation or a suggestion of scale [etc.].

The financial services industry is conservative. Should an advisory’s name be conservative, or can you be creative and give it a kicky name?

It’s a question that goes deeper than naming. Anytime you’re building a brand, you’re trying to strike a balance between fitting in and standing out.

How much you stand out depends on how you’re trying to position your firm in the marketplace.

Suppose you want to stand out?

If you’re trying to do things differently and want that to be clear to your customers and prospects, you can be a little less conservative and come up with a name that will help you be seen as cutting-edge and breaking the mold.

But if you’re not doing those things, if yours is just, sort of, the financial services firm that you’d expect, then you would probably want to stick with a name that fits in a little better in the marketplace.

Many practices use the owner’s name in their firm name, such as “Joe Smith Wealth Management.” Your thoughts?

Ultimately, it depends on what the person’s name is. Will it make you stand out and differentiate? If it’s a name that sounds similar to [many] other people’s names out there, it’s not a great idea.

But it does help to keep the focus on you and your personal brand. So if you’re a one-person operation trying to build your own brand, it can help.

In this context, what are some other considerations?

Is your own name simple enough that people will be able to read it, pronounce it, spell it? But is it distinctive enough? If it’s, say, “Joe Smith,” well, there are [numerous] Joe Smiths out there.