We’re so intrigued by the idea that giving a concept a name gives it more power, and sometimes even brings it into our consciousness. That’s often why we borrow words from other languages — because there’s a white space where we don’t yet have a word to describe an idea.
Naming Is Power
Sometimes we have the idea but don’t have a succinct way to say it, but often the idea itself arrives in our minds only once there’s a word for it.
This video originally appeared in LinkedIn
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TRANSCRIPT:
– Hey, guys, it’s Rebeca with BrandTrue and I want to talk about how much power there is in naming. I’ve talked about it before but it’s worth revisiting because, well, because naming is so important.
When we talk about that there’s an issue that isn’t being addressed, what do we say? We say, “let’s NAME the elephant in the room.” We don’t say, “let’s discuss the elephant.” We give it a name, right? When there are ideas that are brought into being and we give them a name, they can become even a habit change like for example, there are lots of sales the day after Thanksgiving. We should go take advantage of the sales was what it was when I was a kid. Then someone named it Black Friday and it’s probably not coincidental but it became a behavior when it had a name to it.
And there’s a lot of things that are like that. The classic example of Listerine didn’t have any market until they took this obscure medical term for bad breath, halitosis, and attached it. It’s kind of ridiculous that they created a maybe self-consciousness that wasn’t there before but that’s how they were able to drive habit change and even when we borrow words from other languages, it’s often because it’s a concept that we don’t have.
Without the word, your brain can’t necessarily process it. In English, people used to say red for the word, for the color orange because we didn’t have a word for it. Sometimes they said yellow red then they ate this fruit called an orange and they started using the name of the fruit for the color because there was like a blank space in their brains.
So this video is me exhorting you that when you’re naming things, that is an awesome power. Don’t be lazy. Go for, dig deeper and go for naming things and creating a label conceptually for people to wrap their heads around an idea. If you can manage to do that, your name will be, it’ll be orange. It’ll be powerful. Thanks, that’s what I think. Let me know what you think. Bye!
