Naming

Introducing: New Gimme Hope Co’rona strain

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Perhaps you’ve read the news. From a Reuters article earlier today:

“Australia and several other countries joined nations imposing restrictions on travel from southern Africa on Saturday after the discovery of the new Charlize Coron variant sparked global concern and triggered a market sell-off.”

Ok, that’s not really what the news said. The new corona strain isn’t called Charlize Coron. It should have been called that. But instead, it got yet another boring Greek letter name, omicron.

A couple days ago, Ben Settle wrote this:

Yes, Google is one the best content title swipe files on the internet IMO.

My recommendation:

Look at hundreds of craft beer names.

Note the ones that pop out at you.

Then ask yourself:

“How can I apply this uniquely and creatively to my next piece of content?”

Since the Greek letter naming system sucks, I decided to try Ben’s advice out. I wanted to see if I couldn’t come up with a craft beer name for the new corona variant, something better than “omicron.” Maybe you can tell me if I succeeded with any of the options below.

A bit of googling revealed that many craft beer names are puns on celebrity names, stock phrases, or pop culture references tied in to the history behind the brewery.

Since this new variant was found in South Africa and Botswana, I hit upon the following ideas for the new corona beer:

* Covid Bustard (after Botswana’s national bird, the kori bustard)

* Antigen To Zebra (“all the animals you can find in South Africa, from aardvark to zebra”)

* Gimme Hope Co’rona (after the Eddie Grant hit Gimme Hope Jo’anna — Jo’anna is Johannesburg)

A second article I read said scientists are worried because this new strain has “a very unusual constellation of mutations.”

Unusual mutations? That makes my brain go in one direction only. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And since craft beers often feature nonsensical, goofy, high-energy names, this could be another possible name for the new brew:

* Cowidbunga!

Finally, the scientist who isolated this new variant said the “full significance of the variant is uncertain.” This reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman wrote about uncertainty and fear:

“The fear of an electric shock is uncorrelated with the probability of receiving the shock. The mere possibility triggers the full blown response.”

This Kahneman idea ties in well to my personal beliefs about corona. And if I had anything to do with naming the new strain, I might just give a nod to Kahneman and call it “Covid, fast and slow.”

But you know what? My point is not really anything to do with corona.

It’s not even anything to do with naming your products or content either.

Maybe you can see the point I’m trying to make. If not, then check out my email tomorrow, where I will almost certainly reveal Die Antwoord (another possible craft corona name?).

The Godlike “Golem Game”

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Legend says that during WWII, Nazi soldiers broke into the Old New Synagogue in Prague. The soldiers made it all the way up to the attic, where they were torn apart, limb by limb.

Silly Nazis. You don’t go into the attic of the Old New Synagogue. That’s where the remains of the Golem lie.

An even older legend explains:

Back in some ancient time, the leading rabbi of Prague created a living Golem. (Golem apparently means something like embryo or shapeless mass in Hebrew.)

The rabbi took a bunch of clay. He sculpted it so it looked like a big lump with a head and arms and legs. And he gave it life, by inserting a shem – a slip of paper with the name of God written on it — into the Golem’s mouth. The Golem sprang up and started lumbering around, doing the rabbi’s work.

Would you like to have that power? To take something big, vague, and as useless as a lump of clay… and turn it into a powerful and living thing which does your work for you?

You can do it, if you play what I call the “Golem Game.” I was reminded of it by Glenn Osborn a few weeks ago.

I’d written an email for this very newsletter with an offer of a free resource with a bunch of great old ads. To which Glenn wrote in to say:

Your response was HORRIBLE
On your “Old ad offer”
Because you did not NAME the collection of ads.

Fact is, my response wasn’t really horrible. A bunch of people wrote in to find out what the free resource was. But Glenn’s point stands. I would have done better, and probably much better, with a good name to call that bunch of ads.

And so I suggest to you the Golem Game. It goes like this:

You invent a name. To give your market a handle on a vague problem… symptom… enemy… mechanism… or opportunity they can’t fully grasp right now.

Then you take your name, you write it on a slip of paper, and you stick it in the mouth of that vague and useless lump. And you watch whether the name makes the useless lump come to life. If it does, your named and live Golem will do your work for you… carrying your prospects to the sales page and grunting “YOU BUY NOW!”

But if you didn’t write the right name on that slip of paper, well, then you try again.

After all, the Golem Game is a game, and the outcome of any individual round is uncertain.

If you don’t like those odds, then sit tight. I’ll write more about winning names in the future.

Meanwhile, I can point you to another free resource. It’s called Great Product Names for Dummies. I wrote it a few months ago. I’m a little ashamed of it because it gives away too much how-to advice. But who knows, maybe that’s exactly why you’ll like it. So if you feel like bringing things to life, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/great-product-names-for-dummies/

Great product names for dummies

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Today I spent some time looking up the worst book titles of all time, according to the Internet. Here are a few standouts:

– The Joy Of Uncircumcising
– You Are Worthless
– Reusing Old Graves
– The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa In Theory – And Practice
– How Green Were The Nazis?

Ridiculous, right? But it’s easy to shake your head and point and laugh. Can you do better though?

Can you come up with a great book title that gets people to latch on to a book… pick it up… thumb through it… buy it… and mention it to friends, before they’ve even read it?

It’s a relevant question if you’re a marketer or copywriter. Because book titles are the closest mainstream thing to naming direct response products and offers.

If you like, I’ll tell you what I think. I think there are lots of ways to come up with good titles or offer names. Let me illustrate just one:

– The 4-Hour Workweek
– The 16-Word Sales Letter
– The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches

How good are these titles actually? ​​Well, the first and third are backed up by results.

Neither Tim Ferriss nor Joe Karbo were famous. And yet they managed to get their books to millions of people, largely on the strength of the appeals in those 4- and 5-word titles.

The second title on that list is a book by Evaldo Albuquerque. It’s about a very niche topic — writing long-form sales letters. And even so, it’s got a respectable 260 reviews on Amazon.

A part of that is because Evaldo is as close to a star as you can get in this field. Plus he has the backing of many copywriting and marketing influencers.

But his title certainly helps. And in any case, it’s an illustration of the point I want to make:

* You can write a good name through paradox.

“Paradox” in this case is a shortcut for flat-out impossibility (“The 16-Word Sales Letter”)… contradiction (“The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches”)… or subverting strong expectations (“The 4-Hour Workweek”).

So how do you use this? All I can do is give you an example.

​​Say you’re selling a solution that helps people title their books. So you start with “book title” in the name of your offer. And then you ask yourself:

What’s the opposite of that? What are things that people believe to be “musts” around this topic? What are people expecting?

Well, one thing people might expect is that a good title has to be short. So you could use the name:

“The 99-Word Book Title”

People might also expect that you have to be creative to come up with a good name. So here’s option two:

“The Dullard’s Way To Great Book Titles”

Finally, people might think that coming up with a title name will take brainstorming or a lot of time. So you subvert that:

“The 4-Second Book Title”

But perhaps the results still suck. Fear not. There are lots of formulas you can use.

​​For example, if your topic is tricky, overwhelming, or requires study or intelligence… there’s an easy way to turn that into a title that works. Just put your topic in your name… and then attach “for dummies” at the end. And if you think you need it, add a disclaimer:

“Great Product Names For Dummies: Not just for dummies — but for everyone who is intrigued by paradox!”

Well. Maybe you’re still not sold. Maybe you want more ways to come up with great names for your product or offer. Then here’s an offer of my own:

I write an email newsletter. Product naming is something I might talk about more in the future… or I might not. But if I do, my newsletter is the first place where any such talk will go. If you don’t want to miss that, click here to subscribe.

Persuasive vemödalen

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I’m staying in a beautiful coast town these days so I just went for a walk along the shore. The sun was shining, the trees were doing their thing, and the sea, a few cliffs below where I was walking, was shuffling restlessly from side to side. I got tempted — for just a moment — to take out my phone and take a picture.

“But what’s the point?” I told myself.

Because I realized a long time ago that the only time I think to take a picture is when I come across a scene that looks like pictures I’ve seen before.

“Gee, this looks just like a postcard. Better create another postcard myself!”

If you love to take pictures with your phone, my point is not to razz on you. Instead, I just want to point out, in case you feel like I feel — that so much photography is repetitive and redundant — that there’s a word for this.

The word was coined in 2014 by a guy named John Koenig. ​Koenig called this vague intuition many of us have probably had — he called it vemödalen.

​​So now, when you and I talk to our friends, we can call this feeling by its name and we can communicate it to others. We have a handle on it, and it’s much more real in our minds. (Well, it would be, if we could only remember the word vemödalen and know how to pronounce it.)

Before you start thinking I’m getting sentimental, let me turn things around to hard-core direct marketing. Specifically, something marketer Travis Sago shared once in a podcast, about how he does email marketing:

What’s different and what I found works really well and takes a lot of lifting off the writing is bringing out what symptoms do they have, what symptoms are they seeing or feeling or hearing in their life? What is he saying? What’s happening in their life and starting out with the symptoms.

[…]

I’ll have to admit, some days I’m just brain dead and I’ll just go with the problem. But it’s way more powerful to go with the symptom.

What Travis doesn’t say in this quote is that when he talks about a symptom, he will often focus on a “new” symptom. Not new in the sense that it just popped up… but new in the sense that nobody else has talked about it, and even his prospect might not have a conscious awareness of it.

​​Even better if you can give it a name. Kind of like vemödalen. That’s what Travis does — and he manages to convert something like 25% of his list over time.

But speaking of unnamed symptoms:

Do you know that feeling when you’re nearing the end of a novel, and you start to feel a bittersweet angst, knowing that the characters you’ve made friends with over the past weeks will disappear from your life? I checked, and it’s called lithatonophobia.

The good news is, you never need to feel lithatonophobia at the end of one of my blog posts. Because I write a new email each day with new marketing and copywriting content. And if you’d like to keep that in your life, here’s where you can join my newsletter.