...for naming and branding...

...or for anything at all, really.

Marketers (at least the good ones) are big advocates for measuring the results - or the potential - of marketing and branding efforts.  Most of us in the industry have some system whereby we take an aspect of a campaign and measure it on a 1-to-10 scale - or perhaps a 1-to-5 or 1-to-3 system.

We tend to agree that evaluation is good.  Not only should use use systems that evaluate qualities before you release a brand - you should continue to measure after launch.  But generally speaking, it is the way we evaluate that seems to be tripping us up.

Consider the infamous 1-to-10 scale.  Harmless, right?  Everyone knows it, understands it, and can live with it.

But we've gotta ask if all of that really offsets the negatives we've encountered ourselves.  Does familiarity trump false optimism, inaccuracy, and inconsistency?  If it doesn't then folks need to find a better way...

Here's what we know to be true about positive evaluation scales:

• Using only positive numbers leads to falsely optimistic evaluations.  
• Given that our culture has the concept of negative numbers already established, when we don't use 'em there's a good chance that we're still factoring in their existence.  Consider an example where your brand ends up with a score of "3 out of 10" for some hypothetical quality.  There's a strong inclination to think "Well, at least we got three points, right?" since three is indeed a positive number and it is above the lowest potential score.  
  
• Now - shift the scale five points down (and add a zero to balance things out) and see what happens... A score of 3 turns into a score of -2.  Still think that score is harmless?  Scooting down the scale lets you accurately reflect the impact of the measurement without needing to spend large amounts of time explaining the scale.  "Negative is negative" is much easier to communicate than "4 is negative"
  
• Using only positive numbers cannot adequately capture the effects that campaigns (or branding work) can have on a brand.
• Sadly, marketing campaigns and branding activities can actually damage brands.  An all positive scale makes interpreting this potential for harm very difficult.  If a 1 to 10 scale were to be truly representative of brand potential then a score of 4 wouldn't be slightly below average - it would actually have a slight potential to damage your brand.   
• Using only positive numbers leads to inconsistently interpreted scores.  When someone says "I give that a seven out of ten" what does that mean?   Does a score of seven give you a grade of C (barely passing) or does it mean that you're rated "good" as is often the case on product evaluations? 
  
• Each of us has a different way of interpreting the scores based on our background.  A baseball player (from an environment where hitting 3 out of 10 is very good) is going to see things a bit differently than a nuclear engineer that would be unable to accept any score of less than 10 without putting lives at risk. 
  

Why does this matter? 

Because in looking around the branding world - when it comes to evaluating names - everyone who does it only uses numbers to the right of (or perhaps including) zero.  (At least as far as we can tell.)

Here's a sampling:
Talking Names
Igor's Evaluation Chart
Black Champagne Band Names
The Branding Blog

(We did find a couple sites that use negative numbers - but they had nothing to do with evaluating names across various qualities.)

I'm not meaning to bash anyone here.  There are dozens of examples out there but we namers are pretty damn hard to find.  This means that the better-known folks may take a disproportionate amount of the heat.

Ultimately my intent not to bash is best proven by the following admission...

You might be wondering why we know this much about a form of scoring that we don't use.  Well, Stokefire was in the same 1-to-10 crowd up until about June.  It was around that time we finally got it into our heads that our clients were all seeing the same thing and reading it differently.  (You'd be amazed at how many clients are perfectly happy with a score of "5" - even we explicitly state that "5" is "neither positive nor negative."  A "5" meant the negatives and positives were balanced - and that the name basically offered no help to the brand at all.)  We had to make it clearer.  "0" does the job very well.

So, fellow namers and even current and past clients... does this diatribe make sense?  Do you see the value in moving the scale down so that "bad" actually registers as a negative?  And should a neutral name be given a neutral score?

Does it clarify things at all?

(And for what it's worth - I rate this post a 4.  But I'm not going to tell you what the scale is.)