System 1 / System 2 Research

Listen in on this week’s episode to learn about the NameStormers approach to name selection and name testing. Inspired by Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Mike and Adelaide discuss the Nobel laureate and psychologist’s research on decision-making and his explanation of System 1 / System 2 research. Find out why the NameStormers leverage the System 2 name testing based on the modern consumer, why live polls are used during name presentations, and why the traditional focus group does not always provide the most unbiased insights. As always, feel free to contact us to ask any questions about our creative or research processes.

Episode Ten of “Naming in an AI Age” Podcast 

Adelaide Brown: 

Hello, listeners and welcome back to “Naming in an AI Age” with NameStormers Creative Consulting. This week we are talking about the system one/system two, research a little bit more and explaining our thinking, um, partially by way of Dr. Daniel Kahneman, um, the Noble Laureate and psychologist who researched decision-making that explained system one and system two thinking, um, and wrote all about it in his book, Thinking… Fast and Slow. So, we have Mike here, who is a big fan of Dr. Kahneman, to talk a little bit about how we decided to apply this kind of market research to NameStormers offerings, um, and to dive a little bit into the mechanics behind it. Hi Mike. 

Mike Carr: 

Hello. Hello.  

Adelaide Brown: 

Welcome. Um, so let’s kick it off. Can you briefly describe the system one/system two name testing that NameStormers conducts in more layman’s terms?  

Mike Carr: 

I’ll be happy to. And whether you guys use us or someone else, we feel really strongly that this is how one should test names and that all the other methodologies that are out there, some of which we’ve used for a long time just really aren’t as good. And the reason for that is system one is about reach, it’s about a subconscious, almost not, you know, you’re not aware, you’re just reacting to something. System two is more about rational thought, right? It’s more about really thinking about what that is or what that does or how I feel about that. And it requires more juice from the brain, right? And, and so the brain has sort of evolved to the point where it, it likes to default to system one whenever it can, cause it’s more, more instantaneous. It requires less energy and so that’s the natural way the brain works.  

And certainly, for naming, that’s the way it works, right? Most people don’t think about whether the name’s good or not. They just react to the name and it’s, it’s very quick, you know, it might be 500 milliseconds, half a second, it might be a second, but it’s a very quick subconscious reaction. And as soon as you ask the question, unfortunately, which is the question everybody wants to ask, right? Well, what do you think of this name? Is this name any good or not? Or does this name work for my product or service? Or all those questions, you’re getting a very artificial response because that’s just not how your target, your customer, your consumer would evaluate a name cause they don’t think about a name. And so, what we recommend you do, and what we do in our research is, we might still ask those questions, right? But what we try to do is observe and measure behavior.  

So, we might show you a package of a toothpaste you see at a Walmart or Target, and we might ask you, hey, is this new name something that would attract you and, and perhaps get you to try the toothpaste? And that’s a valid question but what’s far more important is if we show them a variety of names, is there a name in the set that everybody quickly clicks on and they don’t even know why, right? They just, oh, that’s, that’s a name. That’s interesting. So, they click on it, or they touch on it on their phone on their smartphone, and it, it’s like that instant reaction. They may not actually rate it as highly as some other name, but it’s a name that resonated with them immediately. And that is often a better name to go with for most of our consumer-oriented clients than a name that might score a little bit better, but only after a lot of thought. Because in most scenarios you never have that lot of thought applied, right? It’s just that quick. And if it doesn’t grab them, they never even think about the name and so it doesn’t make any sense or difference whether they like the name or not. They’re gone and they’re off walking down the aisle or clicking through the next webpage, whatever it might be.  

Adelaide Brown: 

So, to backtrack a little bit in our process, we’ve mentioned this rule before, why do you believe that we have clients evaluate names positively first in the name presentation sessions, according to you and according to Dr. Kahneman and all of his hypotheses? 

Mike Carr: 

So, when you say evaluate a name positively, give me a little bit more insight in what you’re after there. What’s, what’s that question again? 

Adelaide Brown: 

So, when we first present, names not being allowed to say anything negative. Um, I think Dr. Kahneman talks about that instinct for critical thinking.  

Mike Carr: 

Okay. So, you know, one of the things this is, this is something that we sort of do in a different setting and I think it’s invaluable when it comes to how do you have a successful naming process at your company for a startup or if you’re an agency, is we try to take the negative off the table. That is, it’s natural for people to evaluate things as the critic. It’s the easier path to go down, yet the best names often have pretty obvious weaknesses. And so, it’s far more productive to, for it’s that advocate mindset or encourage people to sort of be the advocate for a name first as opposed to thinking about it more critically first. And so, we’ll, we’ll often start, like if we have a group of, of senior execs, right? And we’re asking them for their reactions, one of the things we want them to do is think about which of these names might work and why, right?  

If I had to pick one of these and advocate for, or talk about why it might work, let’s do that first versus let’s open Pandora’s lid of negative criticism. And before you know it, the ball gets rolling down the wrong side of the hill and everything’s gone before these fragile new baby names have a chance to gain any traction. So, by enabling that positive conversation first and getting people to think about this might work, they’ll talk one another into names that not everybody was that excited about initially. And then at the end of that session, at the end of that research session or that conversation, you then allow folks to sort of talk critically about, well, why might this name have some issues? And every name has issues. That’s the time to do it, right? It’s not to do it at the outset, it’s to do it towards the end so that all that positive comment can get out initially.  

Adelaide Brown: 

And so, there’s the also the adage, thing, that is applied to a broad spectrum of products or things, um, that they age like fine wine. So how does that apply to names that, um, people come up with before engaging NameStormers and how those can kind of often seem better to, the company chooses to engage us after we’ve presented a round or two?  

Mike Carr: 

Familiarity almost in all cases creates a huge bias towards the name. So, the longer someone sees a name, talks about a name, um, observes it in different settings, associates it with a particular story or a graphic, the name tends to come alive. So, for a lot of our technology clients, they’ll have internal project names on a new chip set or a new technology for a period of months or years before they are ready to launch it in quote, come up with the real name. Well, by the time it sort of percolated internally for a few months, it’s always the favorite name. And it’s not because it’s a great name necessarily, it may be even a below average name or pretty, pretty crummy name, but just by the fact that people have gotten used to it and they’ve sort of wrapped all this window dressing and they’ve embellished it with all these attributes, it, it just starts to resonate.  

So, it’s that familiarity is a huge boon and a huge help. And so, in presenting names, you almost need to come back to them, right? You present them initially, you try to get as much data on which ones of these are resonating, but then you encourage everyone- well take these names and drop them into all the different scenarios. You know, think about how they work in conversation when you don’t see them. Think about, you know, how they might look on a press release or a trade show booth or package or, or website or app page. And over time certain things will bubble to the top, some of those names will really start to come alive because of that context and that story and just the familiarity that that name starts to, to be imbued with.  

Adelaide Brown: 

So, after we present or go through our presentation rounds, why do we use live polls during, during our naming sessions?  

Mike Carr: 

Yeah, we do two things. So, what we try to do is get that instant reaction without any bias being introduced by people talking to one another. And this is the dynamic that that happens in more of a focus group or a small group setting, that whoever speaks first, especially if it’s the most senior person in the room, will start to influence opinions. And the more junior folks will be very hesitant to contradict or disagree with that individual unless it’s a very enlightened culture. And some of our clients have a culture that really does encourage debate and rigorous analytical, um, discussions, but many don’t, right? And so, it’s this idea that, look, what we do right after a presentation is everybody independently can sort of do a quick poll on their smartphone of just their own personal thoughts. It’s done anonymously. So, we don’t know who’s saying what, but they’re giving us, you know, their favorites without any discussion or interaction with their colleagues. Just how they sort of immediately reacted to the name.  

And then in showing those results, right? And sort of showing that, okay, collectively here’s what the group ranked as first, second, third, whatever. Now let’s talk about those. That sort of then gives you a clean read initially without anyone biasing anyone else. And then the conversation might end up with a slightly different list or a radically different list. And that’s great. Those are both valid ways to sort of test name resonance. But one is that very independent initial reaction where everyone’s treated equally then, then the other one is more of the traditional focus group kind of metric, where after a discussion, um, you know, certain names have sort of bubbled to the top, they’re sort of the group consensus names.  

Adelaide Brown: 

So, when developing names and then taking that further step into market research, why do you think, why does Dr. Kahneman reflect that descriptive names usually test better with traditional market research?  

Mike Carr: 

Well, descriptive names tend to be more of the system two stuff, right? That you may say, well, no, a descriptive name doesn’t require any thought at all. But that’s really not true because you know, you have to sort of decipher what the name is. And so descriptive names might often convey two things, right? They might relate to a, hey, that sounds, or that conveys a very premium image, and it also sounds very European. Well, for some people that may be a system one instant reaction if they’re really engaged in the category. But for a lot of other folks, it might take a little bit more thought. Or an example going back a few years is for search engines, there was a name called InfoSeek. And then Google came along. Well, InfoSeek is clearly a more descriptive name. Um, you know, it has “information” in there, it has “seek” in there. And that’s really what a search engine does, right? It seeks out information, at least at the time that’s what a search engine did. Well, it takes a little bit of thought, a little bit of system two thinking to sort of cipher, InfoSeek, um, and those tend to be the names that once you’ve thought about them, well, yeah, that’s a far better name than Google, right? Because it says exactly what it is, that’s the kind of name that I would want from my search engine. But the characteristic that Google had, and I don’t know this for a fact, so this is just a, an educated guess is it was a name that was so different than anything in the category, it aroused curiosity. And so, it garnered that immediate reaction like, what is a Google? It sort of sounded weird, might have sounded silly, it might have sounded intriguing, but you just didn’t know what it was.  

And it was so different at the time that it caught the attention, cut through the clutter, and elicited the question, what is it? Tell me more. I don’t understand it. Right? And so, it had that an instant, Ooh, that’s sort of cool, or Ooh, that’s sort of different, or ooh, I don’t know what that is versus that slower, oh, InfoSeek, okay, I get it. That’s a search engine. So that’s a little bit about, and that’s just one of many examples about, uh, the more descriptive name, which might be ranked higher because it says exactly what the search engine is or what it is as a search engine versus a name that might be not ranked nearly as high. I mean, I don’t think Google would’ve been ranked as, as well on a, on any scale in terms of conveying what it was. But in terms of that instant reaction, Google probably would’ve scored much better or much quicker, if you will, than uh, an InfoSeek.  

Adelaide Brown: 

Yeah. And now Google is used in common day talk probably every day, right? 

Mike Carr: 

Yes, yes, it’s built into our nomenclature. It’s in the woodwork. 

Adelaide Brown: 

So just to wrap things up, and I’ve summarized, why do we recommend the quantitative testing over the maybe more traditional or common themed focus group?  

Mike Carr: 

Well, today especially it’s, it’s really difficult to discern which name is truly the better name to go with. And the challenge with focus groups is they are inherently not geographically dispersed. I mean, they tend to be, if you do ’em the old-fashioned way, they’re, they’re in certain markets. You know, people come in after work, you serve ’em food or whatever it might be. And then there’s a 90-minute focus group session and it’s just really representative of people that live in that area. And so, you’ll sit typically see them done in just a few markets around the country or, or around the world where they might be. So, it, it’s a great deep dive. And so, focus groups are invaluable for certain types of research and understanding. But for naming where you’re really going after a much more representative sample of the, of the US or the key markets you’re in, you need more data points and you need data points that are all, you know, focused in just the major metropolitan areas.  

So you have a much higher level of statistical confidence in a quant survey where you’ve got a few hundred respondents versus a qualitative survey, a focus group, where you have a few dozen respondents, you know, you, you can draw some conclusions, but because the focus groups aren’t necessarily representative of the total universe of customers, you, you never really resolve that uncertainty as to, well is this truly the best name to go with versus these others that are on the table? And that’s where quant research really shines. It can give you that statistical validity in many cases that yeah, statistically this name is a stronger choice and here’s why.  

Adelaide Brown: 

Yeah, that makes, makes a lot of sense. Well thank you so much Mike, for speaking a little bit more to this process. If you are looking for market research testing, be sure you’re asking the right questions and know what kind of system the company your pursuing is using. Um, and we’d be happy to answer any more questions any other listeners may have about this process. Next week we’re gonna talk a little bit more about AI naming, um, and the new wave explicitly of AI name generation and also, um, more mainstream naming and the pros and cons of that. So, thank you so much, Mike for joining me this week.  

Mike Carr: 

Absolutely.