What AI Couldn’t Do: Finding the Perfect Name for My Book with Brand Strategist Rebeca Arbona: Podcast Ep. 477

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Carol Cox:
How important is a name for your book? Your talk, your framework, your thought leadership message, even your business? Well, my return guest, Rebeca Abana, is a genius. She has an incredible talent with naming. And I’m going to tell you in this conversation how she named my book that I literally have spent five years struggling with the name, have tried all different variations of it. I’ve even asked ChatGPT to help me with the name Big Fail. So we’re going to talk about what Rebeca ended up coming up with for the name of my book, which I was so excited about, but I really want to dive in with Rebecca, how she does this thing. Is it just magic that she’s able to do, or what can she teach us about the importance of the names that we do? Rebecca is a brand strategist and the founder of Brand True, where she helps organizations uncover and communicate the truths at their core. And she was last on the Speaking Your Brand podcast in 2020. So yes, it’s been six years and episode 179, that is an incredible episode. We talk about the deep truths that you and your brand need to stay. So I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can check that episode out as well. Rebeca, welcome back to the podcast.

Rebeca Arbona:
It’s great to be back. I can’t believe it’s been six years since we last did this.

Carol Cox:
I know, I feel like it hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen you.

Rebeca Arbona:
Agreed, agreed. But thank you for having me back. I really appreciate it.

Carol Cox:
Well, I am so excited we reconnected because you are working on a book and my book coach, Tiffany Hawk and I were planning a retreat, which stay tuned, that will come back in 2027. And so we had a Zoom call and we hadn’t connected in a while. And so I was really excited to learn about what you were doing. And then I mentioned to you that I was struggling to name my book and you’re like, just send me the send me what you have, send me the blurb and I’ll do it. And I was just stunned. But before we get into there, I guess, Rebeca, tell me a little bit, how did you get into naming? When did you figure out that this was something that you were really good at and why it’s so important?

Rebeca Arbona:
I love the opportunity to answer this question. I mean, I probably didn’t really start chasing a role as a namer until I was about 50. So somewhat later in my career, um, as an undergrad in college, I was a linguistics major because I grew up bilingual. Spanish is my first language. I grew up bilingual, and I was fascinated by languages. And in college, I really never knew what I wanted to do. But those were I took a linguistics class and it just lit me up. Those sorts of classes were the things that I found most interesting. So in the spirit of, you know, a liberal arts education, I studied that. I didn’t want to be an academic. Um, and so I didn’t know what else you could do with it. And I ended up floating around a little and I ended up in brand management, working in a toy company, Hasbro, and then working in brand strategy for many, many years. And sometimes naming would come up and I’d be like, oh, you know, I love it, but I didn’t really know how to do it until when I worked at Interbrand, which is a global brand consultancy. I got trained in naming and started to understand the discipline and the rules and realized that, you know, I didn’t know what I was doing when I dabbled in it before, when I ten years ago went out on my own. Um, with Brand true. I loved the idea of having it be a naming firm, but I didn’t dare, I didn’t have that much, um, under my belt of naming.

Rebeca Arbona:
I didn’t have contacts and case studies and those things. So I was really just doing general brand strategy work. But when the naming projects searched up, you know, for me, naming, if I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about work at any other point in my career, it was a bad thing. When I’m working on a naming project, I wake up in the middle of the night and go, oh, and I roll over and I grab my phone and I tap out 20 names, and then I put the phone down and I go back to sleep with a smile on my face, like it’s a completely different energy for me. So that’s how I got into it. And I do think, you know, I draw on the languages that I speak and on how I enjoy languages. You know, I never studied Latin, but, you know, Latin roots. You pick them up when you do this kind of work. I draw on those things, but just as much. I draw on the fact that I’m a brand strategist. I think that as we talk about names, you’ll hear me say the word strategy a lot. For me, it’s it’s a very creative exercise, but incredibly bounded by the strategic guardrails. You know, let’s keep talking and that’ll make sense.

Carol Cox:
Well, yes. So why are names so important. So we think of the names that we know so well you know Amazon, Google, Facebook, then meta, like a lot of the, you know, a lot of the tech companies like short one word names. I think these all these AI startups are kind of following along that versus some of the older names, like International Business Machines, which was IBM. Like we had a lot of those, I guess in the 60s and 70s. So it feels like business names and brand names have evolved over the past decades. Is there like a trend to them that we should be aware of that is that we should follow or not follow or, you know, how do we think about even go about thinking about what a name could be?

Rebeca Arbona:
There are trends that I can talk about, but they’re small. You know, like I see that nonprofit names are a lot of nonprofits are renaming to be less descriptive and more of a call to action. But that’s, that’s sort of a smaller thing. I think that there were a lot of questions in your question, which I loved. I think that I’ll go with like, sort of why are names so important? Before I talk about how names have changed? It’s like anything, it’s it’s first impression management. There are lots of great companies with crappy names and lots of companies with great names that don’t succeed. It is not necessary for success, but just like you’re going to catch more, what do they say? Catch more flies with honey you’re trying to date. You smile, you comb your hair. It’s like you might as well put the best face onto your brand. And so and so I think that’s why they matter so much. Why? Why don’t you have a name that helps you more by helping you to express your strategy? So there’s a lot of different kinds of names and they’re all good depending on what you’re trying to do. So for example, International Business Machines was a brilliant name at the dawn of there being business machines.

Rebeca Arbona:
Business machine was probably a novel idea when IBM was calling themselves that, you know, many years later, these are the really the, you know, the obvious examples. But many years later, when computers were somewhat established and Apple came along, they named themselves Apple to be friendly, approachable, not intimidating, because people at that point knew what international business machines and other kinds of computers were. And they were such business machines. They were so a part of a certain world that they didn’t feel like they were for regular people. So, so this incredibly metaphoric name and this incredibly descriptive name are both very good names because they had different strategies of who they were speaking to and what they needed to communicate. So. What kind of name to use is never the starting point. It’s what are we selling? Who are we selling it to? Who else is out there? Do we need to educate people that this exists? Or are there lots of competitors? And we’re going to have to lean into emotion or whimsy or metaphor to be different. Things like that come to play?

Carol Cox:
Well, that is such a great example between IBM and Apple, because clearly they just have very different cultures. And like you mentioned, different audiences, different goals, different brands that they want to convey to their to the consumers, the people who would be buying from them. And so then, Rebeca, it sounds like just taking a piece of paper and kind of just jotting down a bunch of words that maybe that you like as the business owner or as the author or the speaker or whatever you’re working on is not the way to go. Like we have to back up and do some other work and in front of that. So I guess, tell me a little bit about your process from the high level. So you know, you’re working with someone. What is it that you start to do first before you even get to the brainstorming of potential names?

Rebeca Arbona:
Yeah, I mean, I think I rattled it off just now to a certain extent. The first thing I would want to do is really understand what is the offering a service like you offer a product, a widget, whatever it is, let me understand what it is. Let me understand what makes it different. Um, is it different because you’re the only one? Great. Do people understand what it is that’s going to give you a different naming task than if they don’t. Right. Um, are there a lot of them? And it’s hard for you to stand apart. Okay. We need a name that’s more distinctive. So so understanding what it is, understanding who you’re speaking to. I’m not even doing these in any good order, because I’m not sure that there is an order. It’s all these things at once, you know. So what are we trying to sell? Who are we selling it to? Can we not just identify them, but maybe understand them a little, get some insights about them and what are they looking for and how do they want to feel when they’re getting this product or service. So we need to understand those things. And then we say, okay, what is it that we are going to choose to talk about in that case? So I know that one of the things that we wanted to talk about was mistakes that people make in naming. So I’ll jump to that. One of the mistakes that people often make, and I suspect this is why you were so stuck on the name of your book for so long, is because you know, all the things that you want to say, and it’s very hard to pick one.

Rebeca Arbona:
So, so one of the things I say often is that a brand is like a big suitcase. A brand has all these different, you know, products and experiences people might have had with it and things that it knows and things that it does. And they’re all in there. When you interact with the brand, there’s a lot of things going on. But when you’re not in there, when you’re on the outside, you can only see a few things on the outside. And the name is like the handle. Like if I say Nike, you know, we’re talking Apple. They’re just such obvious ones. But it’s good because everyone will know them, right? So we talked Apple. Let’s talk Nike. Everyone knows for the most part the same inside that suitcase. They’re going to have a different set of experiences. Did they play sports and use Nike in high school? Is it their kids? Are they upset about something Nike did? Do they think Nike is great? Everyone has a different unique set of things in the suitcase, but they’re mostly the same, right? The the contours are pretty much the same, and all you have to do is hear that name or see that swoosh. We’re not going to talk about logos today, but.

Rebeca Arbona:
And boom, like everything is in there. So that’s why I said the name is like the handle that you can grab the whole thing by. And then it’s helpful to think about what’s on the outside and what’s on the inside. So setting the strategy is figuring out what do we need to talk about. But here’s a tricky part. I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole on this, but there’s probably several things that you want to talk about for your brand. And so we can probably pick several things that the name could be about, like if this is a bad example, but there’s a pen next to me. So if I’m trying to establish some kind of, um, I’m trying to sell this pen, I could talk about that. It’s got, if you don’t know these pens, they’re wonderful. And they’ve got really, really juicy ink. They call them signature pens or signing pens. Sometimes they’re really fun for signing your name. So you could talk about how it’s juicy. You could talk about how it’s, um, because it’s juicy creative ideas flow. You could talk about how it writes boldly. You could talk about how with a fat barrel, it’s ergonomic. All those things are true. And maybe you might end up talking about all of them, but you’re not necessarily going to put them all in a name. So a strategy is saying what are they? What are the most important ones? And then naming has a little bit of like luck and creative strokes of lightning and maybe even what’s legally available.

Rebeca Arbona:
So probably we would brainstorm all of them knowing that like the ergonomic thing, comfort in your hand, that’s the one that we think is the best. We’ll put a lot of effort into that, but let’s, let’s play with juicy names too. Let’s play with flow of ideas, names. And so she’ll end up, you have your strategy, figure out what you want to talk about. You figure out what you don’t want to talk about. You generate as many names as you can. When I do, naming project 600 names is kind of skinny. Skinny? Yeah. In in, um, any kind of creative endeavor, there’s lots of research, whether it’s, say, designing logos back to logos or coming up with new product ideas or coming up with names, any kind of creative exercise. The single biggest predictor of quality of ideas is quantity of ideas. So, so we’ll take that idea, that strategy and say, this is what we’re trying to communicate, and we’ll come up with some names. And even if you’ve got a big bunch of people, 100 or 200 names, you’ll probably be done. Then you say, okay, now let’s talk about juicy names and we’ll go a little further. Now let’s talk about creativity names. Let’s go a little bit further. Somebody has an idea.

Rebeca Arbona:
Let’s let’s all do names on that. And so the more names you get, the more likely you are to have a stroke of brilliance. So then what comes next is with your strategy, with some priorities, some selection criteria. You narrow it down, you generate that many just to make sure that you’ve left no stone unturned. But then you have to narrow it down. And so you narrow it down strategically, but you also narrow it down legally, because there’s a lot of names out there that are already taken. And sometimes you’re lucky and it’s not taken, and sometimes you’re lucky and it’s not taken in your category. That’s how you can have dove chocolates and dove body products. They’re not the same company because they’re not likely to be confused. So so the practicality of is it available has to come into play. But first we just got creative. Then we narrow it down and then we help clients figure out what are their best bets, but we try not to let them fall in love with any one name, because when you send it to trademark, it might not be free. Or when you do a little bit of due diligence, when you ask people, it’s not good to ask people, do you like this name or not? Because we don’t really know how to evaluate names. And so we’ll say, do I like it? I don’t know, don’t I like it? Um, generally speaking, in our culture, when you pick on things and criticize them, seem smarter than loving them.

Rebeca Arbona:
Oh, so you convince yourself you don’t like it just to sound smart sometimes. So instead, there’s two things I like to ask. Ask some people. What does this name make you think of? So the associations. And that’s a really good reason why you shouldn’t fall in love with names, because people will say, well, it sounds just like booger snot. It does. That didn’t occur to me. You know, something horrible like that can happen. From experience, you also look around you make sure it doesn’t mean boogers, not in Serbo-Croatian. And you make sure that. I’m just going to say it’s worthwhile to check the Urban Dictionary because once or twice I’ve looked in the Urban Dictionary and I’ve found unspeakable things in there that have killed a name. So. So you got to look around. So I got all excited thinking about, okay, so, so, so the first thing is you say, hey, and you figure out what people’s associations are. And that’s a little bit of a disaster check. But that’s also like, wow, the associations for this name take people in a place that I like more than that name. So that’s extra information. That’s one thing that’s nice to do. The other thing is maybe take a description of what your company does or your positioning or like with your book, what I did. Can I talk about your book?

Carol Cox:
Yes. Let’s go. Yeah, let’s get into that.

Rebeca Arbona:
I’ve been talking so long. Sorry.

Carol Cox:
No, no, this is great.

Rebeca Arbona:
With your book. You sent me a blurb and I started pulling out a blurb and then a little bit of context underneath it, and I started pulling out ideas and pulling out ideas. And then I looked at the blurb and I said, mhm. And I rewrote the blurb just for myself. I sent it back to you after I was done, but I rewrote it just for myself. And I said, okay, so if this is what I’m working with, then that just helped me get clear. So to understand which name goes best with that. Which brings me to the other way of getting feedback. Vetting name options is to give people some sort of little summary of what the brand is and then say, give them like maybe your three best names and say, which of these fits that best. And those are better ways of checking on names than actually saying, do you like it? Do you not like it because we’re just not equipped? Um, so I’ve been all over the place. Does that answer your question?

Carol Cox:
Yes yes yes yes. Well, thank you for going through the process. And I feel like this is the same thing when we work with our clients on their talks. You know, I have the board with all the post-it notes. And halfway through the three hour VIP day, that looks like Post-it notes exploded all over, you know, the room, but that’s what it’s supposed to look like because we’re capturing so much and we’re playing with different ideas and bringing in different stories. And then towards the end is when everything kind of gets organized and structured and we find the clear through line and, you know, we put everything in its place. And so I and I think for a lot of people, they, we’re going to get to the AI conversation here in just a moment, because I really do want to talk about that. I feel like for a lot of people, they, they may come to this process trying to do it very linearly and very logically, like, I have to do this and this and this. And this is kind of what AI also trains us now to do versus the more, you know, like, let’s get a whole bunch of stuff out and kind of like you said, like piece, like find the different pieces and see where they go. Okay, so let me tell you about, let me tell the listeners about what happened. So I mentioned that. Yeah. Go ahead.

Rebeca Arbona:
Yeah, I just as you were talking, I was thinking you and I both and anyone who does work like we do, we are we should all have stock in Post-it notes. We are all a wall full of Post-it notes. You know, a day with a wall full of without a wall full of post-it notes is a wasted day. Like that’s just how we do our work. I just I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump.

Carol Cox:
Yes. No, that is so true.

Rebeca Arbona:
It’s it’s so it’s how our brains work. Now, you know.

Carol Cox:
I should buy stock in 3 a.m.. This is not advice.

Rebeca Arbona:
But I started to say that. And then I thought, am I allowed to say that?

Carol Cox:
That’s the caveat. All right. So I as I mentioned before, so Rebecca and I were on the Zoom call and I mentioned that I, you know, I think she, I don’t know if you asked me about my book or I mentioned I was working on my book again, I’ve been, you know, working on it for a number of years. That’s a whole nother side story. And then I said, But I’m really struggling with the title of it, the name of the book. And Rebecca, you were so kind to say, well, send me kind of a blurb or what you have. And I’m happy to take a look at it. And I was like, oh my gosh, you don’t have to do that for me. Like, I know your services are so valuable and your time is so valuable, but you insisted. So I said, okay, I’m going to take you up on that, I really am. And then it was about a week later, I finally had a chance to kind of sit down, find the blurb I took out. I think I even took out the working title that I had had because I didn’t want to taint you with it, but I just sent you. I then just sent you the blurb and a little bit more context. And then about an hour or so after that, I get a phone call. But your cell phone number wasn’t in my contacts, so I didn’t pick up because it goes to voicemail automatically. And then but I saw it said Cincinnati, and I know you live in Cincinnati.

Carol Cox:
So I looked at the the call and I was like, oh, after, you know, you left the message. And I was like, oh, I think that might be Rebeca calling. Right. So I listened to the message and you were so excited. Like, I have the, I think I have the name and I want to share it with you. And so then I called you as I was driving to an event and we had a great conversation, and you told me the name that you had become, that you had come up with. And here’s the reaction that I had in my mind, and that I verbalized to you something like, oh my God, that is so obvious, yet it’s so good. I never would have come up with that on my own. Clearly I hadn’t over the past five years. I never would have come up with it. Chatgpt certainly hadn’t come anywhere close to anything like that. And so I said, okay, I need to have you come on the podcast. I want you to talk about this. How did this happen? Was this like a bolt of lightning from the sky? You know, like, this is where I feel like so much of it is art and science. Like, obviously there’s a science to the brainstorming and the creativity and getting a lot of stuff out. But I do feel like a lot of it, like is art and maybe like you said, a little bit of luck.

Rebeca Arbona:
Yeah. So, so, you know, I’m talking about, oh, 600 names at least that’s for, you know, like trying to name a salsa brand or, you know, like some of the things that I’ve named a cheese or a tequila, right. Yours is the second book I’ve named besides my own. How it happened, by the way, is I told you the name of my book because we were talking about the naming retreat with Tiffany Hawk, and you both said, that’s such a great name. And I said, well, thank you. You know, I named things and you were like, oh, you do. I have a book? So great. So with the other book and with you, in both cases, it was just kind of a a bolt. And so it took me about 15 minutes. It wasn’t a huge process. I don’t know if all books would be like that, but it was also, you know, years of experience and a mini version of that process. And so I actually, you know, like I said, I had the, the background, the blurb, and then I started thinking about the things you were saying that weren’t in the blurb. So you want me to talk about like the. Yes.

Carol Cox:
Yeah, yeah. You. Yeah. We can share. This is not a secret, so it’s fine.

Rebeca Arbona:
So, okay, so I started pulling out the themes and thinking through what you were trying to see. And that’s when I realized that the blurb wasn’t I didn’t have a strategy. And so I said, I rewrote the blurb. Another way you could say it is I wrote a strategy that was sort of based on the blurb, but it was. And then just for myself, you were talking not in the blurb, but to me about the expert trap that you in your practice talk to people about avoiding the expert trap. And so I was thinking a lot about expert trap saying, okay, and you said that was negative. You didn’t want that in the name. I’m like, okay, why? Well, I do think that we think we’re supposed to be experts, but we also feel nervous about putting ourselves up as experts. There’s just this like tension. And you were talking about thought leadership. I said, well, what does that mean to have thought leadership? And so then I started thinking about brainstorming off of ideas and thoughts. And then with all that, again, thinking strategically, I thought, well, her brand is speaking your brand. And then that’s when it came to me. Do you want to say it?

Carol Cox:
Yeah. No, I want you to say it.

Rebeca Arbona:
Okay. So then I thought, oh, the book is called Speaking of Ideas. And then I think it’s really important. Make me come back to this to describe a name. So it was speaking of ideas, colon and I’m sure you’re going to tweak this, but how I envisioned it. Colon transcending the expert trap to become an inspirational thought leader. And it hangs together. And so I want to talk about names versus descriptors. This is a really important part of something I talk about a lot in my naming and do a lot with my clients. So every name, like legally you have a name and then you have what we call a generic descriptor. So what is this a MacBook I’m on? It’s a MacBook is a laptop. Tide is a laundry detergent. So that descriptor, you don’t have to trademark it. You don’t own it. Other people can use it. So people don’t pay that much attention to it. But it can be a very important source of power. And so for some names like say, you think you need to be very descriptive because people you’re doing something new and people don’t know what it is. Well, maybe you’ll write a little something that’s a little more emotional, or maybe there’s a lot of people and you want to stand out. So your name is pretty emotional or like poetic. Well, let’s have a really clear dumbest to rocks description right under that name. So people will get what it is. So for you, I was like, speaking of ideas from speaking your brand, I get that, but we have to make sure we ground it with a nice explanation of what that is. So it’s not the same as a brand with a book, but that semicolon, it’s, it’s doing kind of the same job. Where do we go here? How do we wrap it up with something to make a whole story? So that’s what we did. And I’m so happy that you were excited too.

Carol Cox:
Oh, I was so excited. And and here’s why. So the title, speaking of ideas, the reason that I got so excited about it because I had been struggling with the balance between the book being about public speaking, clearly that’s, you know, so much of the work that we do, but I wanted it to be bigger than that because really what we’re about is your thought leadership, bringing more ideas into the conversation, wanting to have women be part of the important conversations that are happening in your business AI, tech, politics, government, healthcare, whatever it happens to be. So it’s really about ideas. And it just so happens that public speaking is the channel that we focus on for those ideas. But I couldn’t figure out how, besides in the blurb, how to bring this, how to bring ideas into it. And here’s what ChatGPT and its different permutations, basically what the working title had been was something like The Expert Trap How women Can Break Free and Lead with impact. And I’m like, oh, I’m just saying that like, just I don’t I don’t like it. It’s like all the, the like buzzwords that just is like the opposite of what I feel like my brand speaking your brand and our mission is, and I didn’t want the expert trap to be the main title. I don’t, I like it in the subtitle. I don’t want to be the main title because again, I didn’t want to lead with something negative. I wanted it to be a positive vision that women could have for the book. So that’s where I was coming from. So that’s why, speaking of ideas, was so exciting for me and something that I literally had never thought of and would never have come up with on my own.

Rebeca Arbona:
So you asked me why? Why do good names sometimes seem like both that they came from nowhere and that they’re so obvious. And I had a boss years ago. His name is Darryl Travis. Really amazing gentleman. And he talked a lot about insights. Are the unthought known that a great insight. You go, oh, I hadn’t thought of that, but I knew it, but I didn’t know I knew it. And I think that a great name can be like that. Where like this one, you were like, oh, of course. But also you hadn’t seen it because it just, it tapped into everything, but it just hadn’t connected it that way yet. And I think AI can’t do that very often. Maybe sometimes, but not very often.

Carol Cox:
Yeah. You know, I, I use AI all the time. I have since ChatGPT came out, I have a background in technology and software development. So I’m, you know, definitely not anti AI, but I have found for my own use, especially say this year that using it for what I call downstream assets is a better use of it. So you already have your signature talk or your message or your name or whatever it is you’re working on. Then you say, okay, here you go. You know, AI, you know, go create some other downstream asset from it that I can then work from on that. So I think that’s a better use. Plus some other other, um, projects that I’m working on versus I feel like a lot of people are wanting AI to do the thinking for them to come up with their thought leadership message or to come up with their signature talk. And it’s like, AI can’t do that because it’s the average of the internet, and it is just taking all of the different things that it knows and trying, trying to give you something that is going to make you happy also, like, right.

Rebeca Arbona:
I think that’s exactly right. I think that it’s if you are going to use AI, it’s for execution. I use it for research. When I use it almost always, hey, can you find me blank? Right. But ideas, like you said, it’s the average. How I think of it is that it’s a pattern recognition machine. It’s only looking at what already exists and it’s saying, what are the things that come up a lot? Well, that’s helpful for some tasks, but not coming up with a unique idea. You can’t look backwards for that. So it’s just, I mean, something like this. Speaking of ideas is quite obvious, quite right in front of us. But just like we couldn’t see it, it couldn’t see it, you know?

Carol Cox:
Yeah, exactly.

Rebeca Arbona:
Strategy.

Carol Cox:
Yes. Yeah. And because it will just and it would ChatGPT would just keep giving me the same kind of titles over and over again. But instead of using the word lead, it would say something like, you know, transform. Like it would just switch out words. But it really wasn’t giving me anything new and different and unique. It was just giving me variations of the same that already existed.

Rebeca Arbona:
Yeah. And I think what I did, um, again, it was, you know, obviously a very, uh, abbreviated process, but I thought about, well, how do we people who are wanting this work from you? How do we want to feel? And I thought, uh, oh, inspirational thought leader. Yeah. That’s aspirational. That’s what I want to be. So, you know, all these were the threads that I was pulling on.

Carol Cox:
Well, Rebeca, I am so grateful. I’m so grateful that we reconnected and that you, you gave you, you know, you very kindly said to me your what you’re working on and that it just it worked out. I just feel like that was the day, the day that I sent it was the day that your brain was ready, you know, to receive it and to come up with this. And I mentioned to you when we were having the conversation, when you shared the book title with me, that I have been a lot of the reason I’ve been struggling with writing the book is because I was torn with the direction to go in. Is it about public speaking? Is it about thought leadership? Is it about ideas? Is it about the expert trap? You know? And and for a lot of authors, I know they don’t need the title to write their book. They’re like, don’t worry about the title. It will come later. But for me, the title sets the direction, the through line of the book. And without that, I was floundering because I needed that strong through line. And now that I have that, it really has re-energized me to work on the book, because I can see now the architecture of it in a way that I wasn’t able to before.

Rebeca Arbona:
I’m so honored that you feel that way. I feel that way about my book, too. I need to understand the target that I’m trying to hit. I’m about the process, but I could just churn forever in process if I didn’t have. I guess because I’m a strategist, what is my objective? What what am I trying to write? I’m trying to write a book called this. Okay, now I know what I’m doing, so I get that. I think I’m the same way. Maybe not for a novel, but for a non-fiction book. I think you need to understand it.

Carol Cox:
That is true. A novel might be different.

Rebeca Arbona:
I think you might have to let it unfold. Somebody told me today that George R.R. Martin, that he writes and writes and writes and the book just happens. Okay? He’s a novelist and he’s a genius, okay? But for me, I need to know where I’m headed.

Carol Cox:
Yes. We need the Post-it notes. Right in order.

Rebeca Arbona:
There you go. There you.

Carol Cox:
Go. Well, Rebeca, I have so enjoyed this conversation. I know my listeners have gotten a lot out of it. And for those of you listening, if you would like Rebeca’s genius in brand strategy and naming, definitely check her out. There’s a link in the show notes to her website, brand true.com. Also connect with her on LinkedIn because I know, Rebeca, you’re pretty active on LinkedIn as well. Anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Rebeca Arbona:
I don’t think so. I mean, it was just so enjoyable to be on here again. I really appreciate the opportunity and I. I was so afraid you wouldn’t send me. I just knew that I wanted to give it a try with your book. And I’m so honored that you liked. When I came up with. It was a blast. Some people do crossword puzzles for me. This was fun.

Carol Cox:
Well, you will definitely be in my acknowledgments. Delightful.

Rebeca Arbona:
Delightful. Thank you again, Carol.

Carol Cox:
Oh, and for those of you listening, if you haven’t yet taken our speaker archetype quiz, definitely do so because that’s going to give you an insight into which of the four speaker archetypes you are. That I’ve identified is so fun. Multiple choice quiz. It just takes a few minutes to get your results. You can take this quiz at speaking yourbrand.com/quiz. Until next time. Thanks for listening.

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