IAM2634 – Head of Branding Helps Corporations With Product Naming

Grant emphasized that effective branding sits at the intersection of copywriting, creativity, and business strategy, helping companies translate their vision into a compelling brand narrative.

He outlines a simple yet powerful naming framework: start by clarifying who you are and what you aim to create (the business plan), identify your audience, decide the desired perception and tone, and then develop secondary branding elements that capture the core idea.

Grant shares that their smart dashboard surfaces the four most critical naming factors, curates ideas, and delivers real‑time alerts, enabling rapid, data‑driven iterations that large companies now prefer over traditional agencies.

Website: www.squadhelp.com, www.atom.com

Previous Episode: iam386-head-of-branding-helps-corporations-with-product-naming

Transcription:

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Grant Polachek Teaser 00:00
The simple breakdown is you start by thinking about who you are. This is a little bit abstract, but you have to think back to your business plan and understand What am I trying to create here? Then you take that and think about your audience. What is my audience?

How do I want them to perceive this? Some of the things we talk a lot about in branding are just the simple tone. So what tone do I want to set?

Intro 00:32
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:58
Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AMC EO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Grant Polachek of squadhelp.com.
Grant, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Grant Polachek 01:09
It's wonderful to be here, Gresh. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 01:10
No problem, super excited to have you on. And I wanted to read a little bit more about Grant so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Grant Palachek is the head of branding at an Inc. 500 company, squadhelp.com.

The world's number one naming platform with more than 20,000 customers from early-stage startups across the globe to the largest corporations, including Nestle, Philips, Hilton, Pepsi, and AutoNation. Grant works with a ton of CEOs as well. So Grant, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Grant Polachek 01:41
I am ready. I'm excited. Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 01:44
Awesome. Let's do it. So they kick everything off. I want to hear a little bit more about your background and what led you to just kind of be in your current position. Absolutely.

Grant Polachek 01:52
So I've, I've had a couple, a couple of different focuses throughout my life in my, my young career. I actually ran karate schools, which was a lot of entrepreneurship and It was management, but it was also really fun because we did a lot of life skills.

Helping kids learn the same things that a lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs talk about. The same things that if you hire a coach, a lot of them are going to be talking about. you know, the indomitable spirit, grit, sticking to things.

Then I moved in and started a branding and marketing company and did that for several years. We helped a lot of clients, did a lot of local, but some bigger projects.

And after that, I came on board with Squad Help to help with the branding project. So what we're doing right now is we're doing a lot of naming projects with many different companies, as you were saying.

And I pull on my experience. What's interesting about branding is I think there's a good mix between the copywriting, the creative, and also the, how do you want to run your business?

So I pull on a lot of my experience to help companies think through, how do I look at my business strategy and pull that into a brand theory, a brand strategy, and connect those two dots, which I'm really, really passionate about.

Gresham Harkless 03:27
Yeah, absolutely. And I always think, and I'm definitely sure, you know, you can definitely speak to this as well, that sometimes it's hard to get a full, I guess, your hands around exactly what a brand is.

But it's great to see that you guys have like a site and a process and a platform that allows those brands to kind of get at least that naming aspect there, which starts to, I understand correctly, starts to direct that brand.

Grant Polachek 03:53
Yes. I call the name, you know, it's really where the wheels hit the road. You know, you're, you're all in theory. You're, you're saying, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that.

I'm excited about this. You know, maybe you have some customers that you've thought about, but then you actually, put something on a piece of paper and you start thinking about, you know, how am I going to actually do that?

How am I going to tell this story? And that brand name really starts to bring everything from theory into reality, which is a very, very fun and exciting process.

Gresham Harkless 04:26
Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about that process. Can you tell us a little bit more on what people find if they go to Squad Help?

Grant Polachek 04:33
Absolutely. The big thing that I've noticed about naming is there's a lot of information online and most of it is well-meaning, but many of the tips and tricks are just, they're very pigeonhole. Like, I need a short name. So many people say that.

Grant Polachek 04:53
And it's not true. It's just not. In some situations, it can be a great thing to have a great name. But what about Mechanical Turk?

That's a really awesome brand, a great brand name. It's not short. And I could go through a million examples, but that's one of my favorites. So what I like to do is just take a broader perspective and think about the process.

And here's just a simple, and it gets a little more complex than this, but the simple breakdown is you start by thinking about who you are. And this is a little bit abstract, but you have to think back to your business plan and understand.

What am I trying to create here? Then you take that and think about your audience. What is my audience?

How do I want them to perceive this? Some of the things we talk a lot about in branding are just the simple tone. So what tone do I want to set? Is this a very preeminent brand?

Or is this a silly brand? Or is this a really modern and cutting-edge brand? There's a couple other options. If we can define what is going to appeal about my business.

When I think about connecting a product or a service to a group of people, this tone is really, really important. And then I talk about what we call secondary branding elements.

So how do I, how do I, what are the big ideas? This is a really, really large concept that doesn't have a right answer.

But for some examples, Shopify, wonderful company, love them. They said something really simple. We're at the start of the digital marketing era. They came out really early in that whole process.

We want to be the modern shopping solution. So they just wanted to put shopping right there. And they went, Shopify, right? So I want to put shopping into the forefront of my brand is a tremendous branding statement.

And it's very clear. But you can go the absolute opposite, very esoteric. Apple. There's many theories around here about Apple.

But what I think it's all about is I want to make what at that time in the 70s was very corporate and very, you know, sterile IBM, right? I want to make it han. I want to make it user-focused. And they went with an Apple because an Apple is something that everybody's held in their hands.

Everybody's baked in a pie. So it became very real and very connected, very warm and inviting, all those characteristics that they wanted to bring to the forefront of their brand. Not descriptive like Shopify, but they still have a very strong, I want to bring this to the forefront of my brand.

And that comes from, you know, the, the, the actual product, the vision of the CEO and leadership and the customers they're trying to meet meant to connect with.

Gresham Harkless 07:47
I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce and it could be you or me can be for squad help. What do you think kind of sets you apart and make sure you need?

Grant Polachek 07:55
So squad help our, our real, real uniqueness is, There's kind of levels to it. We want to bring branding to people who couldn't afford it before. The best resources and the real viable resources in branding were agencies prior to the digital era.

And unfortunately, they're just very expensive. I've seen research that says the average cost of a branding agency is $20,000. That's a lot of money. And there's some great agencies.

I'm not here to knock any agencies. But it just puts the price point out of reach of most people. So the secret sauce in ours is harnessing crowdsourcing, but not just that, we also, our CEO is really, he's had some high rules in big companies and technology. He really brings a lot of the forefront of technology into this brainstorming and crowdsourcing process.

So we use gamification, we use machine learning, we use artificial intelligence in a really nice way to not only say, okay, we're gonna connect you with lots of people, but we're gonna support the process.

So we have like a smart dashboard that says, here's the four things that after doing this 20,000 times, we know are the most important aspects of having a successful process. And we're gonna just put them right in front of you each time you log in, so you know how you're dealing with those four things. With smart alerts, we're curating ideas and bringing them to the forefront for you.

So this was really the idea of high tech. And then when it comes to branding, the process of getting lots of ideas is very difficult. If you sit down and write names on a piece of paper, on a great day, you're gonna get a hundred of them. And we can just do that much faster.

And from a lot of different perspectives, a lot of the think times we hear about, I hired an agency, and again, nothing wrong with agencies, but I'm working with one person and we're just not clicking.

When you work with 100 people, it's fine that you don't click with one, it's fine that you don't click with 90, but it's very seldom that you don't find a few that are just really, really doing what you need to.

So just just i think for everybody if i've learned anything from my time with squad help voted we were voted one of the most innovative companies by Inc magazine i just think it's that the ceo and the leadership's ability to look at a problem.

And what's the problem? Our problem is naming is really difficult, it's becoming more difficult every day. And find not only one thing, not only can we use technology or connect with more people, but let's do this in a bigger way, let's layer, let's put technology and crowdsourcing, let's do it smart, let's really dig deep and analyze our findings.

And if I find something unique and special that you can do, I know a lot of people say that, but it's not in a whimsical way, like, let's just do something that makes us passionate, but let's really use data and use smart thinking and study.

And get the right people on board to create a solution that's different and that's helping people in a unique way. One thing that we've found and we're I think a little bit surprised when this started happening a few years ago is you know big big companies are coming to us for for their, away from agencies.

Because of the way that we've structured a unique solution. And I think the ability for, you know, just to disrupt is, of course, there like it was never before.

Gresham Harkless 11:55
Yeah, absolutely. And I love that aspect because a lot of times, I think the idea is that whenever you're able to create something that's great.

But if you're able to create something that reaches the masses and is at mass appeal where it's not too expensive or it's not nothing, you have that kind of media ground where you are able to take into account all those different things. It really is where it starts to reach so many people and have such a big impact.

Great that you guys are able to do that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a hack. And this might be something you already touched on or something maybe additional you could tell us about squad help, but what is something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Grant Polachek 12:34
I think that, you know, what, what we, one of the things that, that we really focus on is, is, I call it agile. I think we've, we, we bring, and a lot of people are talking about this, but just, just really looking at incremental improvements quickly, you know, that will, that will make a bigger impact over time.

And some of the things that go along with that are testing. Don't be afraid to try something that's not gonna work.

Gresham Harkless 13:07
I think that's a great hack.
And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a nugget. So this is like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Grant Polachek 13:18
One of my things that I really, really think is important is how we approach the people from our customers to the people we work with.

Gresham Harkless 13:30
Now, I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question. I know you work with a ton of CEOs, so I wanted to ask you, Grant, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Grant Polachek 13:38
I'll just dig into this one. One of the biggest things that I see in the world today is we talk a lot about analytics, performance, direct response, all of those things. And they're wonderful. I think the idea of marketing moving more towards analytics, that's great.

But, you know, there still needs to be that, you know, that ability to respect and put time into creativity and vision. Vision, what I mean by that is the ability to see something in the future, the ability to say, here is where I am now, and here's where the industry is now, or here's where my product is now, and here's where I want it to be, and kind of imagine those things out. So that's a big one.

Of course, you need to manage a team, and you need to, have a great product, so you need to have some expertise, but that the stepping, the moving away from too much analytics into vision.

Gresham Harkless 14:44
I definitely appreciate that definition and that perspective as well, and Grant, I appreciate your time even more, and what I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know, and then of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about Squad Help.

Grant Polachek 14:59
Just to wrap up the whole branding and naming concept, I would like to end with the clear statement of it's a process. It's a journey. Start with one place. Start with your business.

Trust yourself. I've dealt with so many projects, and I can't overstress, people come to the table and they say, I believe this is a great direction for my brand.

There's some testing that you want to do and you want to validate, but also you want to trust yourself and take that into account and move that forward and bring that to fruition. Squadhelp.com is our website.

We have all of the details about our services, 24-7 customer support, so we can answer any questions and get anybody started who's needing some help with the name, logo, tagline, various other tools, support offerings as well.

Gresham Harkless 16:10
Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate you, again, Grant, for all the awesome things you're doing and your time again today. We'll have those links in the show notes as well, but I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Grant Polachek 16:20
You too, Gresh. Thanks for having me. It was great talking to your community.

Outro 16:23
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co.

I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at Blue16media.com.

This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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