THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Amy Daroukakis on Difference & Signal

Amy Daroukakis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amydaroukakis/] is co-founder of Culture Connectors [https://thecultureconnectors.com/], a global cultural intelligence collective linking brands to 100+ locally embedded experts. Over 20 years across 60+ countries, she has built strategy for Google, LVMH, Airbnb, and Unilever. Her Trend Galaxy Framework challenges the industry’s habit of mistaking ten cities for the world. She helped the Young V&A win Museum of the Year in 2024, and has spoken at Cannes Lions. She splits her time between Brighton, Athens, and Berlin. So I start all of these conversations with the same question. I use this in my work too. It’s a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story — it’s such a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But it’s really big. So I over-explain it the way I’m doing right now before I ask it. I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? It’s such a great question. And actually, I saw the conversation you did with Katie Dreke and loved it. So practically — I come from Vancouver, Canada. But I come from a father who was an immigrant who fell in love with what Vancouver was and literally jumped ship and ate pie for too long. Because that was what he could point to until some Greek guys in the kitchen were like, do you want anything else? I think that’s the roots of my roots, because working hard was indoctrinated young. I started working young within the realm of a restaurant. And it’s still the roots of the roots today because the reason I can talk to anyone and dive into a conversation was from waitressing. From growing up and being able to read a table, anticipate a need, bridge a conversation, help with a lull. All of that stuff came from waitressing. So that came from working with my father. Not to say that this was a joyous experience — I got fired as many times as I quit. But I can tell people, and I actually look for people who have worked in service. There’s a different level of humanity for people who have had to serve others. And you can tell those who cannot. I’ve ended friendships in a cab once where someone talked to the taxi driver the wrong way. Even in a restaurant, I’ve stopped a friendship. It becomes a real validator of the type of human someone is by how they treat someone else. So I guess I come from service. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Can you tell us a story about the restaurant where you started — your first job? So I talked about this initially when I launched Cultural Connectors, because my father was a trapped creative in the realms of the classic Greek restaurant. And that’s what you do as an immigrant, right? You land in things that are known. He landed into that. But he never just served souvlaki. He started tapas in the 90s — he had this Greek dim sum menu where you would pick out different tapas. But people were like, what the hell is this? They would walk out. Or he started whole wheat pizza in the 80s and thought it was the best pizza. So there was always an entrepreneurial edge to this restaurant. It was always served up differently. Experimental. Different. And I saw this trapped artistic creative within the realms of sameness. I realized in this heightened dizzy when building something at 4 a.m. — how your brain is at its best and worst — that he had given me all the tools to do different, but I had chosen same and started to work away from that. And what do you mean when you say the different and the same? What were you pointing at? So I started this thing called Cultural Connectors. In our industry, there’s a sameness and homogeny that’s always been really sold and really sought after. And it tends to be very global north in perspective. There’s a homogeny that comes when cars look the same and hotels look the same and voices look the same. So I did a love letter ask globally and 68 countries responded. And then there are 55 human truth specialists — in grief, loneliness, rest. We’re inside ingredients, and everyone is paid the same postcode rates. It’s community as much as commerce. And our industry hasn’t always been known for that. So the sameness comes from just getting really tired of hearing things like, this is great for your portfolio, or, well, they’re based in this country, so we should pay that rate. Challenging systems. And my father did that too in his own way, but in a Greek restaurant. That’s awesome. And I’m so excited to talk more about your work. Before we get to the adult professional stuff, I’d love to ask — do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be, young Amy as a waitress? What did you want to be when you grew up? Oh, my gosh. I really wanted to design drag queen clothing. I was just obsessed. I would sketch and draw. And I loved Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I’m now 46, so that was that moment in time when there was this immense creativity. I loved fashion design, all of those things of expression. I remember making hats, designing shirt colors. Just playfulness. But then I grew up with a very traditional father. If I had said, hey, I want to go to fashion school, he wouldn’t have supported it. But I went for fashion business. And that was supported. Yeah. So catch us up — where are you now? Tell us a little bit more about the work that you do. So I’m calling in from Brighton. Postcodes matter in this work because I live between Brighton, Berlin, and Athens. And it gives me this beautiful triangle. Brighton — I live right across from a nude beach. So I can’t take anything too seriously in terms of work. There’s a joyousness right now of how many naked people are out in May. But Greece matters because it’s the home of where my aunt now lives, in the house that was my grandmother’s. So I don’t talk about flying cars, because that contextually isn’t the edge of everyone’s conversation in a Greek home. Or in any home, to be honest. AI is not the lifeblood of every dinner conversation. And I think we need that realisticness — the importance of that. And then Germany is my husband. So I like to see him. He works for one of Germany’s largest cruise companies, so I’ve gotten to go on all these German cruises, randomly. So when I get asked by a German client, I’m like, I’ve been with 10,000 Germans — I know Germany better than you do. It peaks. All of this — the thorough thread and the red thread — is one foot in and one foot out. Acknowledging that. Knowing the limitations. I’m not the best expert for Germany, but I know somebody. I think you should always speak to lived experience. Mine is just a little more multicolored. Multi-postcode at the same time. I have a question — I want to ask about the origins of your cultural connection. But first, I want a little more information about the tradition of nude bathing in... oh my gosh. Do not think this is the norm and societal norm of the UK. There is still a layer of decorum. But in this one pocket that happens to live right outside my window, there’s this freedom. And the fact that I can see an ass pretty much at all temperatures of the year — I just think it’s really something that roots you in humanity. I once had this really important presenting call, and I heard all this noise. I couldn’t show anyone, but I said, I just have to stop and tell you — there are about a thousand people on bikes. They’re all naked in front of my yard. It adds laughter to the elements. And I think we can get so deep in our heads that — I don’t know, it’s my view of nature. It’s like touching grass, but in a form of nudeness that I really appreciate. Yeah, that’s remarkable. It must be quite something to preserve this space for people to do that. Everybody’s in agreement that this is... Yes, there’s an agreement to it. It’s one of those quirks of culture — these microcultures that live within, with written rules. There’s an organic border where people start to wear clothing. And sometimes another favorite hobby — this is the worst — I’ll see more conservative families start to go on the beach, and the kids are running to the ocean. And then there’ll be this turn back. And it’s this moment where you see the families retreating. So what’s the story of Cultural Connectors? Where did it come out of? What’s the origin story of the work you’re doing now and the network you’ve built? So I’d been described as having played outside for 20 years — two decades outside. I’d worked across 25 categories and been to 60-plus countries, but only in the form of Baskin Robbins. There’s only so much of a flavor you can get. The best example I can give: I was in Lisbon with a friend and she said, I’m going to take you to my favorite restaurant, but you can never tell anyone we’re going. Nobody can know where this is — we have to keep it local. Fair enough. And on that day, there were so many men with children taking them out for ice cream. They were out for dinner. It was this magical scene. And if I had just parachuted in without knowing anything about cultural identity, I would have thought, oh my God, the progressiveness of Portuguese culture, that men are so involved in children’s lives. It turned out it was Father’s Day. So this very special moment was just a moment. And that’s why we have to be careful with our cultural assumptions — parachuting into a market and saying, well, this is what it is, you start to lose the edge. So I’ve looked for voices in each of those markets that represent their local reality. Not just by country — though country is important because you start to learn what it means. Mapala, based in the Philippines, talked about the evolving identity with music and how a Filipino band was at Coachella for the first time. This is a musical culture, but for the longest time it’s always been in English. So what does that mean for change? You don’t learn these stories until you actually have a conversation. But just as important: categories. An expert in loneliness completely shifted a project I was working on — the future of work for 2030. If you’re thinking about Gen Z and workforce, what are the interconnection points you need to build in for a UX experience of onboarding? Where are the places of safety where we don’t necessarily have those moments? These experts — that’s why the insight ingredients are so important. When we were onboarding 25 people in the first year — it’s a new class every year, but some remain — there was this amazing woman, Ludo from Botswana, and she said, I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here because we move so slow. We’re a much slower culture. And the entire Zoom group globally went, oh my God, you’re supposed to be here. We all want to move slower. So where we’re getting lessons from — there are places in the world we haven’t necessarily looked for insight that are gold mines of imagination and rethinking. And the joyous part: I have a podcast too, where I interview them. I’ve done 53 now, which is insane. But it’s also the way I can do a culture casting for a client — similar to model casting. Here’s their thinking within the sensory signals. I have this framework called the Trend Galaxy — shooting stars, constellations, new planets, and unexplored universe — and each has a business implication. One’s for behavior change, one for campaigns, one for new product development. I need to test and see how they think, because the thinking part is so important. And then I send the podcast with the culture casting: forget the CV, I want you to see how they look on a project. That’s what I’ve been doing for a year and a half. Nice, congratulations. What’s an example of the kind of question that clients come to you with? One we worked with was an entertainment brand that had hired a UK-centric agency. And the client said, you won. But we do think you’re going to have homogeny in how you put messaging out, and we’re worried about sameness. So they came to us and we did a 10-market piece across the senses. What’s the journey from somebody in Italy compared to Finland when unlocking what could seed their creative concepts and campaigns? One amazing thing that came up from Italy was the WhatsApp message — because that’s a lifeblood of communication. How one person gets invited to a movie and then six show up but only three seats were booked. So they could use that as a seed. Or I asked everyone: what’s the film genre of your market right now? And for Finland, it was dark. Very dark. All the things you’d expect of Scandi. But then they could speak to that in a campaign — it’s dark outside, we’ll come in for darkness too. You move away from popcorn. Not everyone has the same journey to how they spend time together. That was one of the projects we worked on. And when did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing? This one is a work in progress. Building out a network, selling yourself — I describe it as there’s a me and a we element. I know how to sell me, for the most part. The we is a whole new journey stage, because I’m by no means an agency. Agency energy is a different type of body and being. The me was the start, but it got boring. I still like it, but it’s been nicer to play with other people. The first gig I ever did was an amazing thing — I got to travel the world for Target, meeting in secret rooms every three months and bringing back what we’d found. This was pre-Pinterest. Pre online trend tools. You still had to go out in the world. And the point of difference, the reason our team was special: when others would go to a city, they’d get a recce budget, stay in the great hotel, go to the top restaurants. A very company-wide experience of traveling to find cool-hunting, however you want to call it. But I would stay with my friend’s friend in Sydney — pre-Airbnb — take local transportation. And on a bus there was this graffiti-type pattern. They’d taken what people do on buses and made it a fabric. I took pictures of it and it became sheets. I always check things like that. Take the back alley. I will sometimes still stay at a hostel — you may question my life choices on that one. I mean, I still stay at Lux sometimes. But when it’s more uncomfortable, the insights are richer. There was somebody whose name was Seven, and he asked people to put things in Petri dishes — something that represented their place in the world. And this woman scraped off a subway handle and put it in. She goes, I live in LA, I only touch my things — and how weird it is to be in a place where everyone touches the same things. I live in an everyone-touches-the-same-things world. Those insights land differently in storytelling to a client because it’s not just saying, my Four Seasons was amazing. It’s: at the hostel, we talked about fill-in-the-blank. You have the weird conversations with the woman in her 80s traveling for the first time. Or I woke up one time to a room filled with 15 people for a bachelorette party. I need better life choices. It’s deeply uncomfortable work. But it’s fun. I’m curious about — and you said it yourself — that you’ve been at this for a very long time, so much that it feels, as you said, that we’ve come full circle. We’re back in this place of appreciating the analog and the tangible and the fringe. And I’m wondering: what are your reflections on how the practice of cultural intelligence — or whatever you call it — has changed? And how do you describe where we are now? I think we’re at an apex. A real tipping point. And I deeply worry about the skill set of people just coming into this work. I can give you an example — I was doing a breakfast club in Berlin that brings people together, and someone said: I just hired a junior recently and she brought back everything with AI. And he goes, I could do that myself. I hired her for her opinion. The her-ness was missing. That cultural exploration work is the her. It’s the you. And that muscle takes longer to build. Let me give you a peek at something I’m going to write. I’m going to write about in-real-life erotica. Because I’ve just had four magical days where erotica showed up in different ways. I went to the Chelsea Flower Show and there was this long line for this Garden of Eden. It turned out it was sponsored by a sex toy company — and it won the gold medal. The sex industry is something like six times smaller than the garden sector in the UK. So that flip was amazing. I had never seen anything like it in that space. Then I went to a sensory event on Friday by this amazing woman called Sarah Heinemann. She brought in a speaker who made us look at our hands and said: the cup of your hand is your bowl, the top of your hand is your plate, and your fingers are your forks. She designs dinner sensory experiences, sensual experiences using your hands. And she walked us through a five-course meal. Flipping amazing. And then Dr. Bridget spoke at Futurist Friends on Friday and talked about slime and bubbles. Slime was representative of sex, of not touching each other enough. All the elements, the semiotics of what slime means in culture. See how I don’t know where any of this is going to live yet. It’s the gathering. It’s the signal hunting. The joy of playing outside without a sense that it has to be a contained idea. And I worry about this industry needing to tie bows on everything — like, this is the latest trend. I’m not going to say this means we’re heading toward a more erotic cultural landscape when people are not actually having sex. The signal doesn’t necessarily match, but it will linger. Those lingered in my mind specifically, and I know they’ll end up somewhere in a report or a conversation with a team at some point. If you’re only looking at this from a virtual world, it’s a bit hollow. Because I can’t tell you — the gasps in that room when slime was introduced told me more about how achingly we crave connection than the slime itself. The people literally licking their fingers like they thought it was food, because they craved intimacy. You did that in person. That’s the analog part. And so what’s the ability you’re pointing at — this thing the story came out of? This concern about the state of the industry and young people coming in? How would you describe what you’re doing when you’re having all these experiences and holding them open? What are you doing? I call it getting lost on purpose. It’s not just wandering aimlessly, because you have to put yourself in the right rooms. There is strategy for where you place yourself — being selective about going out of the boxes and bubbles you’re already in. So I try to break my own algorithm, either through bringing speakers together or holding breakfast clubs. I love the term brain dance because it’s when the neurons light up. It’s a muscle. And I’m worried about that — a lot of people are starting to just look at the TikTok of vacation. I can see it. I can see it in media. There’s a laziness to just looking in one form and one space for insight. I’ll call it what it is. This is a theme, just listening to you talk. But you’ve talked about working against sameness, about breaking the algorithm. Can you say more about what you mean when you say breaking the algorithm? And how do you stay away from sameness? I identify with that a lot. I recognize in myself that sometimes if I find myself spending time with things that feel too common or popular or big, I have some sort of an aversion. There’s some piece of me that’s trying to navigate in the same way you’re describing. I don’t think I’m anywhere near as disciplined as you. So what does it mean to break the algorithm? And how do you avoid sameness? Well, with full gratitude for Cultural Connectors specifically — I can give you an example. I was in Bangkok for the wedding of Tregg from UAE. An Indian wedding in Bangkok. In itself, that was a view into luxury. Forget the traditional wedding — it was the most glorious thing I’d ever attended. Top 10 of my life. Did it change perception? There was a moment in the elevator where I was talking to one of the guests and I went, are you here for the wedding? And they looked me up and down and said, are you? And it was this minutia of judgment — like, who is she? And I was like, oh my god. That’s what it felt like to be othered as a white woman. How many times in my lifetime has that ever happened to me? Almost never. So to just have even the tiniest glance into what it feels like to be judged like that — I was like, this is amazing. So that’s an algorithm burst. A bubble burst. I felt that judgment that so many cultures feel — the ripple beneath of who are you, where do you belong? I had never experienced that before. And it came from just placing myself in a different algorithm — of wedding. But in that experience too, there was a huge lineup in Chinatown for gold. I’d never seen anything like it — on a Sunday, massive lines. So I asked Romanthea, our Thailand voice: is this unusual? It feels unusual. And she goes, this is very unusual. I looked in the news — it was the day that gold had indexed higher than ever. The peak of gold sales. So then I put it in the WhatsApp group for Cultural Connectors, and eight people weighed in and talked about what gold means in their culture. It was escapism. Gifting. Ritual. Being in close proximity to so many different opinions made me go, oh my god — it’s not just about wealth creation. It’s not just about identity. It’s also about escape. Safety for some women in some cultures. The fact that you save away a little bit for when you’re buying groceries — and what does that mean? So there’s an activeness to joyfully and respectfully not just using it as consumable — because then you’re just running a buffet of one. Being in spaces where I go, well, who else wants some cake? It’s a shared experience. I only get a ticket to my own brain. You’ve got to share the Ferris wheel. I’m telling you, it’s so much fun in here. Wait, I feel like there was a mixed metaphor somewhere in there. It went from my brain and then there was a Ferris wheel... Oh — I meant that it’s so much fun to play. I get such stimulation that if I could give Ferris wheel tickets, I’m telling you, it’s a ride you want to go on. But because we can’t, it’s better to do this out in the open with other people and give them the experience too. Beautiful. How do you describe the people, the members of your network? How do you discover them? What are you looking for? How do you describe them to clients? What’s the role they play? Locally nuanced understanding is core. Can you speak to a truth that matches your postcode or your identity? That’s really important. The ability to be a community member first, commerce second — those are really important. Right now, 48 people are sending postcards to each other. We’ve done a pen pal exchange. Because if we’re going to talk about analog, let’s do it. Once a month, we come together, and for the April session, each person picked a color and then unpacked their culture or category through that color. These are internal groupings of sharing. There was this amazing garbage bag share from Taiwan — she chose hot pink. In Taiwan, you pay for utility services through buying the garbage bag. I wouldn’t have known that. And Finland for blue: we have Blue Thursday instead of Black Friday, and it’s about supporting waterways. I wouldn’t have known that either. So it gives them an opportunity not only to learn from each other, but to even learn from their own knowledge. The podcast itself is — I don’t spell this out loud because I don’t think it’s fair — but it’s my testing ground. If someone can speak beyond the category they’ve written about, they’ve got it. Deep curiosity. And the majority have collectively worked with every Fortune 50 in the world. But new talent like Mustafa, who just joined from Somalia — he’s new in the game, but he’s got real sharpness. And Ethiopia Blend is also an amazing music producer. At first she said, well, I’m not a trend person. Guess what? She has all the muscle. The Trend Galaxy framework just enabled her to contain her thinking. But how they unweave and unpack stories — I’m deeply dazzled. And then there are occasions where I go, I don’t know. That’s part of curating. And why it’s important for this to be a living black book — there are too many agencies that say, we have over 100 people in our network, and then when you really dig down, they’ve never worked with them. So it’s important to be able to say: have you had enough time on the Ferris wheel? Do we hand it over to somebody else? I’m going to instigate something for next year where it’s a two-year max sitting, and then there’s a whole refreshment of new voices. That’s how we shift the industry forward. It can’t be a closed society. That’s really important. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? Peter, I could cry, I love this work so much. I’ve never, ever gone to a grocery store and just bought anything. I look at behavior in the store. I look at the new end aisle. I look at new flavor profiles. I look at what somebody’s bought, I ask the cashier what people are buying, I look at shifting behavior, I look at what’s missing. To have places where this can go is so important. I don’t just ride on a bus — I listen to every conversation. I’m awful. Work enables a container for deep curiosity to live in. And working across 25 sectors means I’ve gotten to shape a brand new neighborhood that needed a completely new identity. I worked on a museum moving into a new space and had to be honest with them that their legacy wasn’t going to just shift — they had to become a new neighbor in that particular instance too. Or the cultural zeitgeist of AI: for a year I brought in porn and crime signals because those are the earliest adopters, and that’s so much more interesting when talking to AI technologists who only look at it from a technical angle. To be like, okay, well September we’re talking about sperm. To wake people up. Or a favorite: understanding the future of true crime for a streamer. What is the new lexicon and identity around murder and victimhood? How far can we go and how much responsibility do we have for bringing in our armchair sleuths? Sometimes it’s ice cream flavors. It’s always wildly different. Which means I have to look endlessly — but that’s a hobby. The problem is there’s no off switch, and that’s the challenge. I watch terrible, terrible television. Law and Order, 90s crime, on repeat, just to stop my brain. There has to be a place of rest — probably a meditation app is healthier than murder — but the off switch is never totally off. I’m curious, returning to something you were talking about earlier. In these conversations I always like to give people an opportunity to explain or justify qualitative research — the insight or understanding that comes from the kind of work you do. What is the thing you’re delivering to the client, and what does it do for them that they wouldn’t have otherwise? Do you feel like what you’re doing is qualitative and fits into that world of nuance and qualitative research? I’m always advocating for: we should be talking face to face, and qualitative is the science of description — which you’ve talked about. I’m always trying to build the argument that we need more of that. I see what you’re doing in that way. But I’m wondering — do you identify with that tradition of qualitative and ethnographic? I can give you two examples. Once I was working with a luxury speaker company. I was in Mayfair doing a site visit to one of their premium stores, and there was literally their dream target market walking by as I was walking in. And he goes, one day I’d love to go in there. He did not feel like he belonged. And they were shocked — like, he is who we want. But the layers of their communication were off the mark. And that kind of story could give them some teeth, some meat on the bone, as to why they weren’t landing. Another example: I worked with a sneaker head community — people with massive collections of sneaker culture — and I did all these interviews to reframe their brand strategy. The core center point that became the unlock: they became a sneaker head the minute they opened a sneaker box. Because for so many, especially men — and it over-indexes with men — the commonality among the biggest collectors, the pure aficionados, was that at a core point of identity, they couldn’t afford the shoe. There’s a reclamation and a real pride in being the 40-year-old who has the shoes the 13-year-old version of themselves never could have gotten. Their family couldn’t afford it. So the insight: they became part of your community 25 years ago. Yeah. That’s amazing. Or once I worked with a massive streamer. And the last, hardest person to get in the interview room is always the most senior person in any company — it’ll always be your last interview. For this company, it was the chairman of the board. If you’ve ever seen The Morning Show, he was that guy — that level. I had interviewed his entire HR teams. I was working on an employee value proposition, reframing how they would attract people — specifically within the era of massive tech hiring — to work for them. So at the very end, he interviewed me. I’ve never seen that. This is now my gold standard of what a leader looks like. Because he knew I had interviewed his entire team, every multi-layer from the onboarding person to the benefits person. He’d come in to transform the company. And I could tell him at the end: guess what — you’ve done it. You’re on the road. This is where I saw it. This is where I heard it. This is where it still needs work. And I saw pride in this man. It was so amazing to be able to first be asked the right questions to unpack what he needed — and that’s our role. It’s the knowledge. But to be able to hear that it was working, and working in the layers he didn’t necessarily know about. Because I’m an outsider, there’s an honesty that comes from that. There’s an anonymity — I get to hear all the good and the bad, and I have absolutely no problem saying both. I’ve once had to tell a museum that the neighborhood they were moving into, they had never welcomed into their own neighborhood. And they were like — oh! From a cultural perspective, they just hadn’t. And so that’s our job: to bring in the honesty and the voice of others. That’s what’s so beautiful about qualitative research and storytelling — the red threads of many have felt this way and have never told you, because you don’t have a safe space for this particular thing to be said. Or you all feel this way but you’re not saying it out loud, so I’m going to say it for you. Yeah. That’s beautiful. We’ve got a little bit of time left and I want to talk about our shared experience. We met in person in Athens three weeks ago at the House of Beautiful Business World Forum. It was my first experience in Athens. It was my first experience at the House of Beautiful Business. It was lovely to meet you. I liked the afternoon refreshment with Zoe Scaman, who was there. What are your reflections on that whole experience? Joyous. Again, we’re talking about the grocery store and the bus. This is like Disneyland of brain thinking. I just kept gathering things that people were saying that really struck me. One was they were talking about how as a room we operate at 120%. Which is true. But what if you went down to 80? What would you welcome in if you weren’t trying to control and lead and do so much? I’m trying to lean more into the 80. I love that somebody said she’s trying to add more life into her life. I’m starting to do that more. Those are the lessons. But also the experiences. Because I hosted a dinner the day before it kicked off and 35 wonderful people came. It was with Monica Jang, our Cultural Connectors expert on loneliness. And on the very last day, on the rooftop where I saw you, I saw five people standing together and I thought, oh my gosh — yeah, we met at the dinner. To me, that’s a marker. Talk about the clichés of KPIs — that was success. They had met each other, found each other through the rest of it, and there they were standing together at the end. That was really special. And Zoe knows this, so it’s not a secret — she stayed with me for five days. I’ve known her for 12 years, but I know the kitchen and I know the dining room, meaning her content and the things she puts out in the world. I had never seen the graft of what it looks like to be a supreme sous chef. The practicing, the listening — because her talk was one of the most mentioned and most beloved from the experience. I cannot tell you how that transformed how I want to do speaking in the future. To see the Olympian nature of it — okay, that’s where you put in the hard work. Really honor that. That was an unexpected, transformational career highlight. But then also this really unexpected thing. Athens is home, but I don’t speak enough Greek. And there’s always been a layer of deep guilt. So much guilt for not speaking more Greek. Family layers of guilt. My aunt and I try — and sometimes I get defensive. I’ll say, would you like me to build an airport for 2050? Once I retire I’m really going to lean into Greek. But at the very end, Tim and Till said, okay, all the Greeks come up and dance. And again I wanted to cry. Because I thought, I’m not Greek, quote unquote. I’m not Greek enough to go up. And then I got over myself. I thought about it for this millisecond — how fast your brain moves with this stuff — and I was like: I live in the house that was my grandfather’s. My aunt lives in the house that was my grandmother’s. I cook with the lemon trees. I welcome like a flipping Greek. I cook like a Greek. I live in Greece. My last name is as Greek as you can get. I have a Grego. I have all the elements of a Greek, but language. And identity is hard. I went up and danced, and it was a reclamation. I say this because I’m not the only one who struggles with multi-identity — when you have parts of a culture but not all of it. I grew up in the Greek kitchen, but that Greek kitchen only taught me how to swear in Greek. My dad didn’t teach me how to be a good Greek citizen. I can swear like a sailor because of him, but that’s not enough. That was a healing part of the experience. And I want to put the baton to you — what was a really special moment for you? Oh man. I remember the culmination of the event, the final keynote in that beautiful theater. They just called everybody up and I remember seeing you ascend the stage and join the dance. My experience overall — what came to mind listening to you talk was that going to the House of Beautiful Business was, for me, an effort to try to belong. I don’t really do conferences. I’ve always been a little allergic to that. But it was a real moment of saying, these are absolutely my people and I want to go spend time with them. So for that reason it was significant to make a big trip like that. And then — I think we talked about this on that Sunday — I had a visit to the Agora and the Pnyx. I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and civic engagement and civics, and I was surprised at how moved I was by being there. Connecting with the origins of that practice of self-governance. That was really powerful. There was a philosopher, Christoph Koch, who I’m going to interview as well, and what he did to bring it to life for me was really powerful. So I returned to that as the thing I was most touched by. And it was amazing to meet you in person, to meet Zoe in person. Some of those keynotes were just really powerful — messages and ideas done beautifully. I felt really grateful to just be in the presence of very smart people trying to bring some coherence into this very strange time we’re in. I love that. There’s one — I wonder if this one struck with you. Do you remember the student, the young woman who came on stage to speak and then left? Oh my god. Heartbreaking. Peter, we’ve got to talk about this one. There was a youth delegation sitting on stage — about a hundred of them — and she was speaking, and she wasn’t speaking loud enough. There was this moment where she got a little jolted and she left, ran off stage. And we all went — oh, you know that moment. But that’s where it could have ended. That’s where most of the time it ends. But half an hour later — and the back story came later — there were a lot of professionals in the back, people who had spoken many many times, and they ran and got her. They talked to her. They told her about all the experiences they’d had, the mess-ups. And when she came back: no shoes, hair down, had taken off the heels. Very much herself. I cannot tell you — and I heard this enough times from others — there was a deep healing for all the second chances that we didn’t always get. The recognition of how vital it was. That experience could have debilitated her entire speaking career. But it elevated her. She will be an amazing speaker because of that experience. I’m moved just recalling it. She really just had a full panic in the moment she was meant to be delivering. Stopped and ran backstage. And I felt like everybody had the same instinct — oh no, we’ve got to help. And they really did rally around her and made sure she had another chance. She came out and she delivered. And the fact that there were more than a couple of dozen young people on stage the whole time was also a real signal — how smart and how sensitive the design of that whole experience was. So touching. Deeply human. And the unlock — where it starts to unpack things. I once had a boss who told me I was a terrible writer. He was specifically talking about package design writing — like, these potatoes were kissed by grandma, whipped and golden — and I can’t do that. But he cloaked it in writing. And I didn’t write for five years. Writing has since transformed my whole life. So if I hadn’t gotten over it — but it took years to give myself that second chance. Though ultimately I gave it to myself. I think there was something in that student’s moment where the beauty of these experiences is they create shared space for contemplation. New neurons and brain pathways open up. And I know what you do, Peter. I don’t know what most people who went to that conference do. And I think that’s pretty great. It’s true. That’s awesome. Well, Amy — we’ve run to the end of the hour. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to spend time with you, and this has been so much fun getting to know you and your work better. Thank you so much. With pleasure, Peter. Always. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

29 Jun 2026 - 54 min

Nina Beckhardt on Systems & Words

Nina Beckhardt [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninabeckhardt/] is the founder of The Naming Group [https://thenaminggroup.com/], a brand naming consultancy she has run for 20 years. The agency works with large organizations on naming strategy, architecture, and systems. Clients include Chevrolet, Capital One, Reebok, Kohler, P&G, GM, Target, Puma, Gap, Sony, Nestlé, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. She co-founded The Business of Naming [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-business-of-naming-tickets-1986640382864] — the first professional conference for people who make a living making names — launched in 2025 and moving to Brooklyn in September 2026. Of course, as I think you know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who’s also a neighbor who helps people tell their story. And when I heard her, when I learned that question, it felt I couldn’t really start any conversation without asking it. But it’s a big question. So I always over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. It’s the biggest lead up ever. And the question is very simply, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. Well, I think how I want to answer that is from the more immediate frame of today, which is coming off of a very early morning and a really nice bike ride. Where do you ride? I ride in my neighborhood. I live in Mount Washington in Los Angeles. And it feels like Europe, it feels like a little bit like Italian countryside. So very hilly, really dense nature. And it’s the way that I want to start my brain off experiencing things in the morning. Yeah, how would you describe that ride? That’s a beautiful routine to have. I love getting on my bike. But what’s your morning bike ride? So I live on a really steep hill. So the first part is going down an incredibly steep hill, a hill that when people from the Northeast come to visit, they’re “What do you do in the winter?” And then they’re “Oh, wait, oh, wait, it’s LA.” And yeah, I just went my way around the neighborhood. And there’s this internal dialogue in my head of which way you’re gonna go, which way you’re gonna go. But then I always leave room for these last minute impulses, and following flowers or cars or certain directions that appeal. That’s beautiful. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up as a child? What did young Nina think she would be when she grew up? The first thing that comes to mind when I think of that question is, I recently found in my dad’s attic a report from, I had gone to Montessori school. And it was a report from the teachers on how I was doing and status updates. And it just had this sentence that says, Nina really enjoys being Nina. And I’ve tried to channel that henceforth. So I guess for a while, I just wanted to be Nina, which was great. And then yeah, the earliest thing I can remember really getting excited about was being a fashion designer, actually. For me, fashion is very much a creative practice and a means of self expression. I ended up studying art, minoring in psych. And yeah, so I never thought that I would be a namer or end up in the world of naming where I am now. I always envisioned it being a much more applied arts pathway. What do you mean? I think simply making things with my hands. It’s funny to think of myself as being behind a computer all day, every day, most days. Because my first loves, my first experience of flow state was with paint and pom poms and glue and mixing media and stuff. Yeah. I mean, first, it just has to be said that that note from your, did you say kindergarten? Yeah, Montessori school, kindergarten. I mean, that seems to be the note to end all notes from a teacher. I mean, I can’t imagine what a wonderful note to get. And then can you tell me a story about, I guess the art where the creativity, where that began? I think the biggest influence of that is probably my dad’s sister, my aunt, Karen is a, she’s retired now, but she was a professional artist. And I ended up spending a lot of time with her when she would come to visit. And we would often go on, I was an only child too. And the benefit of being an only child or one of them was being able to go on vacation a lot more than I think other kids that had a big family that they had to haul around. And my aunt and I would go on vacation with my parents. And when my parents would want to go off and do their own thing, Karen and I would sit and paint. And so that was just such an early thing that shaped me was from a really young age, just spending a lot of time being really still and observing a lot. And I think not just having that time and space to paint, but also having this mentor that was an expert. And I just remember her telling me things “okay, when you do the shading on that person’s neck, look really closely at the shadow because the shadows aren’t just black.” “There’s green in the shadows, there’s blue in the shadows.” And so I think she probably was one of the first people that really taught me to see things in such layers. Yeah. Yeah. Can you say, I mean, it sounds amazing. I really followed right into a moment where she was sort of teaching you how to look. Yes. And I think the way that art or creative practice has manifested in the last few years is through poetry, which as a namer, as somebody who has dealt with words and advising corporations on words for two decades, it feels funny that I’m just now in the last, I’d say four years really discovering how much I love poetry, but I think it’s a less messy, time-consuming creative practice that draws on the same way of seeing that Karen instilled. It’s seeing, you know, a vase or a coffee cup, but then seeing what it means, seeing all the layers, things like that, which is then reminding me and sort of bringing me to something that I can’t remember if I’ve said this to you before, but on your, on that business of meaning and a lot of your communiques, you have these images, they’re mostly of your hometown where you live, but it’ll be the light hitting a decrepit boat in somebody’s backyard. And I’m yes, it’s just, it’s so refreshing. And I just really relate to that part of your aesthetic and I really appreciate it. Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. Thank you so much. Yeah, that’s really, that’s really sweet. Yeah. And it feels that way too. It’s wonderful. So when you talk about the poetry, are you writing it or reading it or doing both? How would you describe your current relationship with it? It’s both more writing than reading, although I do read it. I think my favorite poet is Jane Kenyon, who is a master of making the mundane poignant. So yeah, just my friends and I have, I have two girlfriends and we have something called shitty writing club and it’s really to get us to keep writing, but to keep the stakes low. So we meet once a week and sometimes we write from a prompt. Other times we do sort of homework and bring it back there. But yeah, that’s where a lot of the poetry comes from. That’s great. It makes me, it made me think that every writing club is a shitty writing club, but the shitty is silent. I want to go back to the fashion designer. What did that mean? Do you have a recollection of what you were aspiring to or what it meant to be or what a fashion designer was or who? I’m going to think about that for a second. I think just that felt like one of the more exciting parts of life when I was younger. I remember in middle school, we had a magazine project where we had to basically build out a whole magazine over the course of, you know, a semester or something. And mine was a Vogue fashion magazine. It was called Faboo. And I just I remember this. Yes. My, maybe, maybe one of the first things I named. I’m glad things have improved since then. But yeah, I just, I think it goes back to that original thing I mentioned of fashion is a way to get to know people without speaking with them. And it’s just this immediate broadcast of choices that somebody has made. And so to me, it felt so interesting to build out pieces of a vocabulary that somebody could use and put on their body. I think I was always, my grandmother and my mom were both crafters. And so there was that sort of the piece I just mentioned about building the vocabulary, but then there was also just the gratification of the applied art of using a sewing machine and understanding how fabric works and color coming together. I think that’s another job as I got older that I was well, maybe I should be a color psychologist. So it was, it’s interesting. I don’t know if you feel this way, but just, I feel like I have landed in my work, but it didn’t, I didn’t seek it. It sort of found me and then I’ve nestled into it and found what I love about it. A hundred percent. I mean, I really, yeah, I really appreciate that observation. I think it’s totally true for me where it feels like I followed it into something that felt new and discovered also. Yeah, I was thinking as you were speaking that there, you mentioned that fashion was a way of understanding other people without having to talk about them. And it just, I feel like so much of this work is, or at least, you know, that we’re sensitive because we need to be for some reason, you know what I mean? This sensitivity or this awareness is a way of navigating the world, I guess. You know what I mean? And I remember my mentor who I really felt like was channeling all this stuff to me. I remember, you know, maybe we had a bad meeting with a client or something. And I remember looking at him in an airport line and saying, maybe we’re the ones who need the meeting. Nobody, they didn’t seem to give a s**t. You know what I mean? And I was why is this so, this is really important to me. You’re saying that you were the ones that needed, wait, say the piece of that once more. I thought we were, I was a young man in my first job and I thought we were, you know, bestowing expertise and wisdom on the client needed it. You know what I mean? And would acknowledge the value of it, but they just seemed to kind of be perfectly fine without it. And it occurred to me sort of in some moment where I was well, I really, I really get a lot out of this. Maybe this is really just about me. And this is for you and me, we love this. It really does. It doesn’t matter if it does anything for anybody else. Yeah. Yeah. Which feels like such a common sort of thread of a lot of creative practice. Rick Rubin talks about that in his book of yeah, sure. You can make art or do work for other people, but what often tends to resonate more deeply with a specific group of people is when you make art for yourself. And yeah, totally. Yeah. I’m grateful as I’ve gotten older that I can recognize more that it’s okay to just do more that I enjoy or or more for myself and not for the sake of something that I feel should be. So I relate to that. Yeah. And it really, I mean, I feel like I’m always sort of confess just the very, very slow awakening of a sort of a narcissistic young man. But let’s talk about you. How do you talk about your work? What do you, where are you now? What do you do? Yeah. So I am the principal and founder of a naming agency called the naming group. We specialize in naming systems. So what I mean when I say that is not just naming architecture and sort of supporting on brand architecture and what you might think of when you think of systems, but very much helping enterprise organizations set up naming systems within their orgs. So a lot of that ends up being working most closely with the person who has been tasked with running naming at a major brand and really knowledge sharing and helping them design systems that are specific to their company to make naming flow more efficiently. Of course we do pure name development as well. Sometimes the ask is just, Hey, we’re naming this credit card. Can you help us out? The other sort of third prong of what I mean when I say systems is we design decision-making systems around how to decide about names. Sometimes that’s on the more brand wide level, like flow charts and strategy charts and figuring out who should be involved when. But that is also something that we do even on individual naming projects where we just believe that the success of a naming project lives and dies by who is involved, how they’re involved when, and how we gather their feedback to make the final decision. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? Yeah. Very clear answer here. So I think a lot of people think that probably the most joyous part of naming is the creative piece, the let’s all get around a table, insert substance of choice, brainstorm names. I do enjoy that part. The part that I adore, the reason why I’m doing this almost 20 years later after I started is the human psychology piece. So it’s all that I just said about understanding people and how they make decisions, how teams collectively make decisions, understanding the individual personalities of people at different levels of the organization, just really honestly getting in people’s heads and being able to know when ego is showing up either on the client’s part or on my part, or my team’s part, being able to — in some ways I can’t directly compare myself to you, but listening for those little nuggets and establishing enough of a connection with the people we’re doing a project with, to not only do great work, but really build trust with them. That’s what I love. I love the people and bringing people together around a sense of — my colleague, John Elliott gave me this term and I love it. A sense of collective efficacy. There’s no better feeling than helping a team establish that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s beautiful. I mean, the only reason I talk about listening is that was my own. Maybe I didn’t even think that I would talk about this, but I feel like I’d labored for so long to figure out a way to talk about what I did that was different than moderating or quality. Listening seems to be one of those aspects completely invisible. You know what I mean? And it just needed to be named and to called out because it happens without anybody really recognizing that it’s something that you’re doing and it’s vital to everything that happens around it. So please compare away. So tell me a little bit about what do you mean, what do you listen for in a process for naming? What is the role that listening plays in your process and how you work? Yeah. So the way that we’ll start off any engagement, I like to call it the sponge stage where it’s just stakeholder interviews, kickoff conversations. And we’re just trying to really get steeped in, I’d say there’s two main arteries of information that we’re trying to tap into. There’s what the project is about. So really tapping into that institutional knowledge that these brand managers and people that have been laboring over this, whatever we are working on, they’ve been laboring over it for months. So really trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible. But then the other artery that we’re tapping into really is a sense of how the organization makes decisions. And as I mentioned, what are the personalities involved and listening for a lot of times, these little cues about how an organization thinks about naming. My work is interesting in that there’s a lot of assumptions around how naming should work around, how easy it should be. And over the time that I’ve been doing this, my ears are attuned for these keywords and phrases that tip me off to those types of assumptions that are being made. So the way that I describe it most simply is — this is very meta, but it’s unfortunate that naming is the word that is used. Because naming is also the word that you use when you’re naming your kid or your cat or when you’re putting a label on a file. Brand naming is more accurate, but it often just gets shorthanded to naming. And it’s just, because of that word being used and having such a broad meaning, people assume that naming a car and getting 12 executives to sign off on it and making sure that it passes trademark is akin to naming your cat. And it just — could it be more different? So that’s a really long winded answer, but. Oh my God. I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve told this story. It feels like it was a dream. I had a past client who was connected with people in the foundation world. This goes back a while ago. And it was I think I found myself, I don’t want to talk too much, but I was on a call with a bunch of people with open AI foundation. And it was, I think I was invited in to talk about a name because I had worked with this, I’ve been the brand guy in the not-for-profit space often. And so for that reason, I was on a call and I remember in the call, the head of the call who was on the open AI side said, okay, let’s do it as if we were going to do rename the entire organization. Right then they’re on the call. Wow. Amazing. I didn’t have enough client management instincts at all. I just said, you can’t, I just was, that’s crazy. What are you talking about? And then I never heard another word about it, but I want to, because this was part of where I wanted to get to just all the misconceptions around naming. And I wonder how do you, how do you confront them or approach them? You talked about listening for the clues. How do you approach them or what are the biggest misconceptions? If you could correct anybody’s wrong ideas or confused ideas about what names are or naming is, what would you want them to know? Yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. So I’ll start with what some of the more common misconceptions are, and then talk about the honed process of how to gently tackle those things. One, this is just top of mind. I was just posting about it the other day is that there is a lot of assumption that we can directly rely on our intuition when judging names that I’ll know it when I see it. It’s a gut feeling, it’s very feeling based, clients come in a lot of times with that language of well, I just need you to come up with some creative options and then I will be able to just feel it. And when you really break things down, if we relied only on feeling because we are mere mortals, evolution takes over. And what we are most attracted to naturally is what is most familiar to us. And so what is most familiar a lot of times is inversely related is opposite to what is most differentiated. And the essence of building a strong brand is carving out your own lane. And so a lot of times I bring up, I don’t know if you’ve read thinking fast and slow the book by Daniel Kahneman. I will admit that I have not read that book. It’s a clunker. It’s I have not finished it. I’m going to be honest with you also. But I’ve gotten enough to be able to talk about it on podcasts, which is there’s the system one thinking, which is your immediate reaction and system two is your slowed down more critical thought and naming requires system two, but the cultural narrative or understanding around naming is that it’s going to be a system one process. And so we’ve designed our entire process around basically really slowing down how you make the decision. And before we present any names to a client, we present what we call naming criteria. So it’s the three to five things that a name has to accomplish. So you’re really getting people to root their decision making in that agreed upon, objective first. And then all of the names are scored based on that by all the different people involved in the project. And so at every pass, we were just how do we short circuit the subjectivity, the emotion that comes into this? So yeah. Yeah. Can you tell a story? Can you illustrate how that works for with a story from your, from work you’ve done? I’m curious. I would love to hear people hear the kind of clients, the kind of names that you’ve worked on and projects you’ve worked on. And then also maybe just to give people an opportunity to hear what this looks like in practice. What kind of jobs does, what does a name do and what could a name do? What kinds of things do you make sure names do? Yeah, totally. I can definitely dive into that further. So just to give a general sense of clients and then I’ll dive into a story. Because naming is so delightfully narrow of an expertise, we get the joy of working with just such a breadth of clients. So that’s something that I really love about my work, which is that we have worked with outer space companies. So literal rocket science propulsion technology, but then we’ve also named chicken sandwiches and cars and just really gone across the spectrum there. But the through line, no matter what we’re naming is that naming criteria piece, which is that it’s basically so much of our philosophy is around naming is really a bit, you have to center it around business objectives. And so I want to answer your initial question and give you an example. We recently worked with a biotech startup and they were renaming, their original name was Vaxess, which was for vaccine access. There was a lot of trademark issues. They weren’t just focused on vaccines anymore. And so they needed to come up with a new name. And we basically in coming up with that naming criteria, we focused on a couple different areas. So there’s always the naming essence. So what is, because naming is a process of distillation through and through, how do we get the naming essence down to two or three words? I’m blanking actually on what it was for that, but I do remember for that in-space transportation company, that rocket propulsion company, it was the naming essence was powering the movement of humanity. So that becomes this central pivot point for a lot of different names. How do you get to the, there’s a whole process for getting to the essence as well. Oh yeah. It’s looking at the value proposition. It’s looking at questions that we’ve asked the client about, what truly makes you different. It’s basically the synthesis of that entire sponge stage that I mentioned. So actually maybe I’ll pivot to explaining what you asked about a specific story, but through that client, cause we took powering the movement of humanity. And one of the other naming criteria on that project was it cannot sound like a space brand, space at that time, which was maybe, I don’t know, nine years ago now had such an aesthetic, both visually and verbally, it was incredibly stars trek, add Astra, just extremely expected. And the tone of the name, which was one of the other criteria was that it had to feel optimistic, human and bold. So really putting into words, how unspacey we wanted this to feel. And the name that we ended up developing was momentous. So M O M E N T U S, which you could break apart as moment and us, our moment to move out into space, but it was also, momentum forward motion. So going back to naming essence, powering the movement of humanity, you’re getting basically all three of those, they’re powering movement humanity for us and things like that. It’s not every day that a name nails all parts of the naming essence. Sometimes it just really powerfully does one. And then we advise the client and the brand team to shape the messaging and the visual design around the other pieces of the essence to support it. But yeah, momentous was a cool example of hitting all those. Yeah. That’s amazing. To first go back into biography… When did you first discover that you could do this for work, make a living doing this, if it was a job? So my very first job out of college was I was an intern at Martha Stewart living magazine in the crafts department. So much more what I thought I would be doing. Shout out to Caitlin Barrett, who also worked at Martha Stewart living. Yeah. And so yeah, learned some incredible lessons about brand control, through working there. Anyways, so didn’t end up getting hired on full time. Base goal was to stay in New York city. That’s all I really wanted. And so back then, I think it was 2007. It was still very kosher to just hop on Craigslist and look for legit jobs, which I did. And I had only been looking at media art and design, which was one of the lanes in the job section. And this one day I pivoted over to business or something, I forget exactly what it was called. And it said that a naming agency was seeking an administrative genius. And I was like, oh, what’s a naming agency. And that agency was called name base. And they had named cars for Kia. They had named Fruitopia that Coca-Cola answered a Kool Aid. And anyways, I interviewed, got hired and that was it. So I always joke around that. My memoir is going to be, I found my couch and my career on Craigslist. Do you have any, I don’t know why these come together, but I think about, do you have any mentors or touchstones either people that really, really I mean, I had a mentor and absolutely I can trace so much of my thinking, just back to conversations with him. And then touchstones ideas that you return to, or you feel are bedrock or touchstones for your work. That’s a nice word. I hadn’t heard that before, but I really liked that. The mentor, I think one of the most powerful mentors for me was the founder of that first agency that I worked at. His name was Jim Singer and Holy s**t. He just really believed in me way more than I believed in myself. And I think there was a lot of who am I and what am I doing? I was fresh out of college, trying to make it in the big city and had all of this understanding of myself and forward motion towards art. And somebody was like, Oh no, you can do this. It doesn’t have to do with art, but come on board. And then, so not only just that initial sense of belief, but also there was a real, there was a defining moment that, I think we had Procter and Gamble as a client. We were naming a dishwashing detergent and I had written an email to the client. I was doing some project management at that time. And I walked over to his desk and I was like, what do you think? Can you give this a read? And he was like, no, just send it. And I will never forget that moment of just you have the answer or you don’t and you’ll figure it out. Which was very much not the way I was raised. I was raised more towards check your work, make sure it’s perfect. And so yeah, I still think back to that moment, even now when I feel like I turn around and look for this proverbial permission behind my shoulder. So yeah, Jim was huge, touchstones. I think the idea that gives me a lot of courage that I come back to a lot is that we all teach what we seek to learn. So at any moment when I feel like I’m pushing into a new space and my work that feels uncertain or imposter syndrome creeps in of who am I to be espousing this? Or it’s that idea gives me a lot of, it steels me for moving into new territory. Yeah. Can you say more about that? That’s, I feel like that’s, I’m having that experience of half understanding and being really interested in what you’re saying. It feels like it’s bending back upon itself and I want to know more. Okay. Yeah, I think I’ll answer it practically, which is yeah, the way that I think a lot of the naming industry is headed, is towards training different organizations, whether it’s brands or design agencies, on how to name and how to name well and how to set up efficient naming systems. And I think maybe you can relate to this, but it’s something I talk about with colleagues a lot that phenomenon that unless you are lucky enough to be in the Dunning Kruger camp, that the more knowledge you have, sometimes the less certain of yourself you can be because you’re just, you’re so deeply knowledgeable that you’re like, well, there has to be more that I could learn and there has to be more and there has to be more. It’s a moment when I actually feel envious of my younger self sometimes when I was 25 and just walking into meetings and just acting like I owned the place. So yeah, I think the humility and curiosity that’s built into that phrase of we all teach what we seek to learn is so, it buoys me in those moments where I’m like, well, who am I to be doing this work? But then I look around and there’s only a couple other people that are really starting to think like this about naming, Caitlin Barrett being one of them. The list is short. And so it’s, it’s exciting at the same time too. So powering ahead. It’s beautiful. Tell me what is the shift that’s happening? I guess. I mean, it is one of those things. How would you describe the way naming has changed, in your career and then maybe be, what do you see right now that makes you think the way that you’re thinking about what you want to teach them? Yeah. So I think the way that I describe it is, when I started this, back in 2007, if you told me that Ford motor company had a head of nomenclature or that CVS has a director of Brandon naming architecture, I would be like, well, that’s a nice idea. That’s not real. And now fast forward to today, those are real people. There are major brands that are creating positions and departments with the word naming in them. And that is happening because the pace of business is accelerating so massively. I can’t believe we have gotten this far in the interview and haven’t said AI, but that’s in no small part, thanks to AI. And just the expectation that business should move so much faster clients that we have that used to have two limited time offerings per year now have 11. And so, and all of those things need a name. Sometimes they need multiple names and then there’s the exponential mycelial impact of those names need to relate to the other names in the portfolio. And they need to be structurally sound and, not to mention on the individual naming project, every single time you need to get alignment across all levels of the organization, oftentimes all the way up to the CMO or the CEO. You need to make sure that those names are available for trademark. You need to make sure that they’re linguistically appropriate. And so I think that naming is, it’s getting to be a full-time job for people, especially at major organizations. And because it is still a relatively specialized skill set, the real opportunity that I see, and this is very much backed up by the types of asks and RFPs that we get is oh my gosh, please help us build out a naming practice. We need, we need help setting up a larger system and training people on this, very special set of skills. What do you make of that? I think I just feel so darn fortunate because it really dovetails so perfectly with that. It’s not like, honestly, going back to AI, AI is still not great at naming, but it’s really good at helping you explore different pathways and options and metaphors. And it’s a great sparring partner for naming, but the fact that so much of what is needed and where the real white space and business opportunity lies is in solving people problems and building people centered systems is just, I’m so stoked. That’s exactly where I would personally be going with my work. So I’m really pleased that that’s where the need is. Yeah. So I feel two things are coming together and maybe one is the right way to get into the other one, which is to pick up the poetry, right. And the words and the attention from the beginning of the conversation and maybe just put it next to AI. I mean, how are you interacting with it? What’s your experience been? I don’t want to ask, I don’t want to have a leading verb, working with AI or thinking with AI in your practice. What is it? What, how, what’s your practice now that we have this strange, strange companion? Yes. I love that strange companion. That’s perfect. There’s two thoughts that come to mind when answering that the first one is the more expected answer of how am I using AI in my work? And I’ll go there first, which is, it’s an incredible research tool. So so much of the work that we do, especially when we’re developing that criteria for clients and really looking at naming trends across the industry is, doing incredibly in depth competitive analysis, but through the lens of the name. And so we were naming an eye cream for this founder that was Turkish. And so they had told us stories about their childhood in Turkey. And basically I could go to AI then and enter some keywords from that story and explain to them, Hey, I’m looking for Turkish words that are meaningful in this space, or even more than that. On that particular project, it was can you come up with a list of all brands in the beauty and healthcare space that use Turkish words and what are they? So it’s those are ideas that I would have had five years ago and been, well, wouldn’t that be nice if I had the time or if I could sick a junior strategist on that. But it’s the fact that I can ask incredibly detailed questions and get an answer in a minute is incredible. So, to you as a namer, it makes you more what? It strengthens the thinking that goes into doing naming well. So as a namer, it bolsters me, it equips me better because again, the creative part isn’t the hard part. It’s building the naming criteria, I think in many ways is a legal case. It’s building the evidence against, not against, but for where a name should go. And so the fact that I have this B plus junior strategist at my ready to do those, to really look into those things and see those patterns is, it’s great. And then the other way to answer that question that you would initially ask about how AI is showing up is, we are really starting to think more about and put a white paper out about, how can we now be developing names that play well with AI? So the fact that most people now, the way that they are searching for brands, services, offerings, is through these, is through Claude, through chat, GPT. And so how can we engineer language so that it is more likely to show up there? How can we make sure that naming is consistent? That, you know, the messaging that supports the naming is consistent so that it’s parsed correctly. So, yeah, we’re not only thinking about how naming impacts the work that we do, but also our clients as well. Also occurs to me, tell me if you think that this is true, because this feels one of the things that, that smart people say to feel smart is that, you know, in this, this moment of massive transformation, you know what I mean? It seems hard to overstate the disruption that we’re in the middle of with AI should have arriving and showing up and making itself known in every domain. We are in, we are in a place where we have no language, you know what I mean? We need new language because there’s new, I mean, I remembering, I always think about maybe, oh, this is what comes to my mind. I always, when I talk about names, I always talk about, I talk about brands as verbs, right? And I’ll say Google, it’s a perfect example. Google becomes a verb and please correct me if I’m wrong. Google becomes a verb because it becomes associated with a, with a goal-oriented behavior that people have around this thing. And it was because the introduced a whole new behavior into our world. And so there’s this connection between behavior and the name. And so AI has arrived and we have a whole world of behaviors that are fundamentally new and we don’t know how to talk about them. And I wonder, is that something that you’ve also, I’m just thinking about the convergence of the challenges and the opportunities when you talk about companies recognizing that they need a system and an architecture for this to take it seriously, but also that we’re really at the beginning of a whole era of just a crazy, a crazy, is it Renaissance? That’s what’s coming to my mind, but this moment where we need names. Yeah. Yeah. And is it a Renaissance? Is it a bubble? I’m sorry. No, I mean, there are threads you’re laying down that I think are interesting. I think what it makes me think about is AI washing, that there are so many names, even of companies themselves, not just at the product level, but that have AI in them. And it’s such an interesting place to be because it’s everybody really, really, really feels they need to signal that. And that’s gonna make the deal, but it’s pretty short sighted. So we’re preparing for this deluge of inquiries in the next five or so years of how do we, how do we disentangle ourselves from these names that are all wedded to this term? So I think that’s a lot of what we’re doing now, which is I know that that feels such an important keyword and it is, but the name needs to be so much more evergreen than that. Yes. Yes. I mean, I get, certainly it didn’t occur to me that of course there’s an AI rush, right. Or a new tech rush that happens. I’m sure there was horrible conventions from, or the E, right. It was e-commerce, right. Everything had an E in front of it. I’m just remembering these horrible habits. Or the Apple, Apple washing. Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the, you’ve mentioned Caitlin a couple of times. Do you want to talk a little bit about the business of naming the community you’re building? Is it year two? It’s year two. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. So this is one of those things, origin story for that is it was an idea that I’ve had for over a decade to have a naming conference. And I said it out loud to so many people, always testing the waters. And when I said it out loud to Caitlin, they were, hell yes, let’s go. Let’s do this. So I think just so grateful for that partnership. So yeah. But for people that don’t know what I’ve just been talking about for a minute straight, it’s a, the first ever global naming conference. So our inaugural year last year was in Berkeley, California. This year it will be in Brooklyn, New York. And yeah, it’s just, I’m so amazed every time we do this, just the amount that people want this. People are hungry for knowledge and community around naming. So the business of naming is really built for that to amplify the voices in naming, but also the topics and questions. We’re going to be talking about naming research this year and how it’s done properly. There’s a whole panel devoted to in-house naming. So people that run naming at major orgs. Yeah, it’s going to be great. I’m stoked. Early bird tickets on sale until May 29th. Nice. I saw that it was in Brooklyn that I’m going to try to make it down there for it, at least to say hello, if not to attend. I would love that. We’re near the end of time. And the thought that just came to me, the question that came to me was this idea that, well, how to ask it. I feel like all of us, we have our little corners, our little expertise, our little specializations. As a namer, what do you think you see or are sensitive to that others aren’t? You know what I mean? What do you carry with you when you look at something or when you take something and what are you paying attention to that maybe somebody else in the group or the team or the organization isn’t really tuned into? I am actually going to quote you for my answer to this from your podcast with the deep dive podcast that you did, which is, you said, every word is a doorway, every word is a threshold. And I think that is this sensitivity that I’ve always had, but that has become just sharper and sharper and more attuned the longer I do this, which is every word somebody says or writes down could be a springboard to a brand name, which then becomes the flag to wave for an entire business, for a company of people. So, yeah, I’d say being incredibly attuned to the worlds that live within a single word. Has it always been that way? Were words always a place that you felt that way? I think so. Both of my parents were avid readers and I have early memories of us playing with language and talking about words. And we played this game called Mrs. Burns Dictionary, where it was a dictionary of incredibly obscure words that nobody’s ever heard of. And you write down the real definition, but then everybody else writes their own definition. It’s like Scattergories, if you’re familiar with that, and you vote on what you think the correct definition is. So from an incredibly young age, we were always playing with meaning and language in that way. So I think it probably got me really comfortable with the idea of using language to shape reality. Yeah. Beautiful. This has been so much fun. We’re at the end of time. Nina, thank you so much. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. This was fantastic. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

8 Jun 2026 - 58 min

THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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