Naming Innovation 2

Morpheme – The Innovation Consultant is back. This time he’s helping Intrateck find a new name for it’s product. This is the sequel to Naming Innovation. If you haven’t already read it, we suggest you head here first.

Morpheme Strikes Again

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE INDECISIVE COO
“Do you know where I’m standing?” The voice boomed over my cell phone. “Umm, no sir.” “I’m standing on the vestibule of my flight, waiting for my turn to be frisked and you’re telling me that the launch of my product is delayed by a name? Are you mad Bhattacharya?”

I couldn’t forget the tone of the voice and it followed me home and back to work the next day. The disembodied voice belongs to Niren Gupta my boss, the CEO of Intrateck. After almost a year of working in stealth mode, Intrateck was about to release a device that would blow the socks off the wireless industry, and as Murphy would have it, the juggernaut snowball came to a sudden stop a month before the launch. See, we didn’t have a name for the product, and in the retail industry – especially the home segment the name meant everything.

I signaled to Padma that I don’t want to be disturbed for a bit. Shut the door on my cabin and sat down to think. An internal naming exercise had thrown up about 120 names and none of them could be substantiated. In the group discussions that we had, every single named turned out to have a flaw, some strategic some plain stupid. My logic is to just pick the most sensible of the whole lot and just go, see what the test audience has to say and roll it out. But Niren would have none of that. He needed the product out in time for the annual IT.com event, and a market test we just didn’t have time for.

Hey, don’t look at me. I’m just the COO.

Sigh.

My phone rings, its Niren again. “Sorry bhe. Bheja phirgayatha kal. I think I cracked our problem. Listen, I’ve just taken on a bunch of people I met in Bangalore. Morpheme. They specialize in helping out with things like this. I’m having them get down there to meet you. Take care of it will you?” “What’s the name again?” I asked as Padma tossed me some stickies and a pen. “Ha ha, Morpheme. Later Bhats, wish me luck and I’ll return with a lot of money.”

Niren was always like that. Well at least now we were rolling. I called in a couple of the boys and tried to figure out what was required to get the consultants some place to plonk, and busied myself with some other stuff.  A few hours later a knock on the door and Padma pops her head in. “The doctors are here” She grins. I raise an eyebrow and two people walk in.

“Hi, Anupama, Morpheme. Niren said we’d find you here.” Hmm. Dark, pretty and with a killer streak I noted. “Arvind Bhattacharya” I smiled, offered my hand and looked at the studious one. “Himanshu Patel, trick cyclist.”

“I fix the leaky faucets around here” I said. “C’mon in.”
“I can tell you right away that you’re doing at least 4 things wrong from what you are telling us Arvind” said Anupama, a crinkle forming on her pretty nose. “Example?” I said. “Well this whole consensus approval thing for starters.” She shot back at once. “Remember that that all our employees are stakeholders Anupama, we do need their buy in. Some of them have invested their soul into this product.”

“Let me explain what she’s saying” rumbled Himanshu. I liked this guy. So far he had explained what Morpheme really does and what the expectation levels ought to be. He had mentioned straight away that they weren’t an ad agency or creative boutique and that they wouldn’t just submit a bunch of names. “This is your business.” He said. “We just facilitate the whole thing and hand hold until your product gets out there.”

“See… let’s look at this process of naming for a bit. First let’s stop calling it a name and start calling it an ‘association’ right? Because that’s what it really is. You’d like to think of it as a label or a tag that marks a product, but a name is more than that. It’s an association that people make based on data they already posses.

“hmmm. I’m with you so far. So, going by what you say we’re in for a lot of trouble. How do we predict who associates the name with what?”

“ Yup. You put your finger on the button. let’s try an experiment. I’m going to toss you a word and we’ll do some free associations right? Here we go, Ourage.
“??. You mean orange don’t you.” “Nope, I meant Ourage though I see how you associate that with orange.” Sly bastard, I thought. “Ok I see where you’re going with this.”

“Right… See, we have to understand some fundamental rules about people and how they can be manipulated. Most people look at manipulation as nefarious or downright immoral. But persuaded just does not have the right meaning that manipulated does. So when a kid manipulates his mom to carry him or a teacher manipulates a student to learn, it’s just that. Manipulation.”

I nodded. I could sense a lecture in Psychology brewing, I just didn’t know how literally.

“Now ever since Freud hit mainstream literature we have had a steady stream of pop science books that have shaped mass opinion over the years. Once Noumenality acquired a so called language, it entered mainstream consciousness. It’s like the proteins and vitamins revelation in the 50s. Before the component parts of food were discovered, people just focused on eating tasty health food based on folk or social historical knowledge. The discovery of aspects such as Vitamins, Proteins and Carbohydrates changed everything. See how that has affected mass opinion today. People calculate protein, carb and vitamin content with such confidence and matter-of fact ness that it’s mind boggling. The flip side is that people forgot the original basic connection between food and the organism, right?”

Wow.

“So, once popular books on Psychology appeared, people started forming interpretations based on so called psychological frameworks. It’s pretty amazing actually. You can spot many instances of this in everyday life. Normal people judging with a psychological bias. This fractured sense of perception based on half baked knowledge is great in parties or when you’re shooting the bull, but is pretty much useless otherwise. This has lead to an extremely functionalist way of thinking in urban social groups. We tend to think that people are a lot like computers.

See the human organism unlike computers perceives all at once. There is no camera called the eye, a microphone called the ear and a central processing unit called the brain etcetera when it comes to perception. People perceive all at once as only people can.”

“This has been a revelation all right, but what’s the connection with group consensus?” I said.

“A human being is more than a feedback machine. You could line a group of servers here and run a simulation and wait for feedback and then you’ll be getting exactly what you expect. But with people it’s a completely different kettle of fish. Remember that people have different motivations, desires, agendas, feeling, and emotional investments etc that get in the way of rational decision making. And can you really blame them?”

“When you ask people for feedback on a name you are setting a complex system to work. The human cognitive system of information retrieval in no way works like a computer. So for example when you say Ourage, a computer spots the error, but to a human being it could just as well mean Orange, even if he did spot the fact that it is Ourage. This means that people over analyze in double time and armed with almost 7 decades of pseudo psychological rationalization processes, argue sometimes even convincingly. See, a name’s just a name until you add context. Your product name for instance will never appear to a viewer, suspended all by itself. It will always appear in context. The idea is to pick a trigger word and follow through with an efficient pitch and collateral to form a CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK around the name to help the viewer form an INFORMED OPINION.

So when you ask for a group consensus you’re asking for trouble. When you say the word TREE, a computer breaks out its thesaurus. But a human being begins a complex process of ‘retrieving’ word, image, phonetic-sound, and other associated sensory data such as smells and tastes that go with the word-image. It doesn’t stop there… further searches bring abstracted data on trees, conceptual models, neural networks… a whole mass of information that is also rationalized instantly.”

“It’s something for one trained person to be aware of all of this activity, introspect, sort and sift through the morass to arrive at a decision. But when you try the same process with a crowd… sigh. See, the trick is to manipulate them to think that they are brainstorming about some thing else, and then to catch them off-guard with the name. Some way to limit over analysis, and to set a framework for a decent rationalization for the name.”

He squinted and pushed his glasses up a bit. I saw Anupama give him a fond smile.

“Right. I see that we’ve made a mistake so far. “I conceded. “Do you guys want to catch some lunch upstairs? I need a break too. Let’s meet back here in about an hour.

I went out onto the balcony to light a smoke, and absent-mindedly flipped through the fat dossier that Anupama had handed me when they first walked in. An embossed logo on the front cover said Morpheme.

I flipped the cover to get to the program details.

Morpheme 180 – It read. And then inscribed in small letters…

“Or  FIRESTARTER,  D A S H,  FRAME OF MIND, or even… THE ALL SEEING EYE OF THE INNOVATION MOVEMENT THAT CHANGED ORGANISATIONAL PERCEPTION OF FOSTERING INNOVATION.

The thing is, it works.

The program promised to do exactly what he explained it would.

Well, Niren brought us so far didn’t he? I don’t see us doing an about turn on this one.