Name It, Position It, Give It a Personality: A Startup Brand Playbook from Gmail and Square Veteran Arielle Jackson

Jackson's favorite project was launching the Square Stand, her first hardware product, when Square had about 140 people, no product managers and a tiny marketing team. She volunteered to run the launch as a product marketer, handling positioning, packaging, a deal with Best Buy and the Apple store, and seeding the product in coffee shops and donut shops across around 15 metro areas.

The positioning was aimed at quick-serve brick-and-mortar businesses, with the old cash register as the foil. The benefit was to turn an iPad into a point of sale, and the differentiator was a single experience that does everything a register does and that you would be proud to show on your counter.

She got to Square because she sold handmade jewelry at craft fairs while working at Google. After taking cards with a Square reader for the first time, she says she sold about 50% more than the previous year and emailed two Google friends who had joined Square. After leaving Square she worked with a seven-person startup called Cover, and when Twitter acquired it she began consulting. First Round soon asked her to help its portfolio, and she still works there half-time.

Having named just over 30 companies, Jackson likes names that do not describe the product literally but make sense once you hear what it does. Seesaw, an ed-tech app connecting students, parents and teachers, feels nostalgic and suits elementary school. Maven is a Yiddish word for someone who understands through experience, which fits a platform where operators teach cohort-based courses.

She describes a spectrum from descriptive names like Internet Explorer, through suggestive ones like Chrome and evocative ones like Seesaw, to fanciful empty vessels like Yahoo, Firefox or Eero. Empty vessels can be memorable, but the company must spend a lot of money and stay consistent for a long time to fill them with meaning. A name with a built-in meaning, she says, "does a little bit more of your marketing work for you".

Jackson insists positioning is the first step in almost any marketing task, and she recalls a student who said he would never write a line of code without it. Next comes a simple naming brief: what you are naming, what the name should communicate, what to avoid, competitor names, and extra considerations such as pronounceability for native Chinese speakers.

Seven criteria always apply: trademark, domain availability, distinctiveness, timelessness, fit with key messaging or emotion, sound and ease of pronunciation, and appearance, plus length. She avoids naming trends such as "-ly" endings or dropped vowels because they date a company. Domains matter less than founders think, since Square ran on SquareUp for a long time. She applies red, yellow and green ratings after the brainstorm to cull weak candidates.

The brainstorm is a one-hour session with five to seven people, including friendly outsiders such as a writer or a linguist. It has two parts: synonyms, antonyms and free association on words from the positioning statement, then a thematic round built on seven to ten Jeopardy-style themes. She then returns a shortlist of 10 to 25 concepts and narrows it to three to five finalists, because trademark conflicts can kill your favorite.

The process is the same for a company and a product, with one exception. If the company name carries a lot of equity, as with Square or Google, product names should be plain and descriptive, such as Square Register or Google Maps, so the master brand's equity shows through.

Jackson argues that a name is only part of the overall brand. Disney was just a man's last name and Volvo would not win a spreadsheet vote, yet both came to stand for magic and safety over time. Plain Arial text in a cell never shows what Apple, Nike or Lego became, and she says Nike's founder reportedly shrugged when first offered that name.

Her advice on a common mistake is to use a code name so silly that you would never launch under it. Founders often pick a placeholder to incorporate quickly, grow attached to it and then launch with a weak name. A throwaway code name leaves room for a proper process later. She adds that First Round companies get this naming help as part of the investment, whereas an outside naming firm she likes recently quoted $47,000.

Jackson says founders often confuse brand with logo, fonts and colors, which are only its visual expression. Brand is who people think you are, so brand strategy means deciding what you want people to think and what you will do to shape that. Her early-stage process has three parts: purpose (why you do what you do), product positioning (how people understand your product and its role in their lives) and personality (how you show up, and whether anyone would want to hang out with you if you were a person).

These three inputs should shape the visual design and the tone of voice, and belong in the style guide alongside logo rules. She uses her Volvo loyalty as the example: its logo has little to do with what the brand means, and a style guide of black, white and blue would not explain it. Volvo's early writing said cars are driven by humans and its job is to protect them, and in the 1950s it gave away the three-point safety harness rather than patenting it.

For a skeptical product manager, she says the work can be done from scratch in about three weeks, with naming taking closer to a month because of trademark and domain checks. The time is recouped later, because decisions get easier and the website copy "almost writes itself".

Jackson frames purpose as "we exist to..." and ignores mission and vision, because people can only remember one thing. A good purpose describes the change you want in the world irrespective of financial gain, lasts around ten years (positioning might hold for 18 months) and gets employees and the public to root for you. She notes that everyone at Google knew its purpose from the offer letter onward, and cites Stripe's goal of increasing the GDP of the internet and Nike's innovation and inspiration for every athlete.

It should work as an introduction at a conference and as the header of the About page with the "we exist" removed. Examples from companies she has worked with include LogicLoop, which wants to make operations data work harder than operations people, and Woolf, which aims to increase access to world-class, globally recognized higher education. Alt aims to increase the transparency and liquidity of alternative assets such as sports cards.

To draft one, she borrows an exercise: list the cultural tensions relevant to your business, list the ways you would describe your brand at its best, pick one from each list, and then complete "the world would be a better place if..." before writing "we exist to...".

Jackson defines positioning as the space you occupy in your target customer's mind. The sign of a problem is that ten employees or customers describe the company in ten different ways. Another is being unable to explain it in a sentence. She makes new clients fill out a worksheet first, where the "what do you do" box starts at paragraph length and is cut down to one sentence in conversation.

She starts with audience, using concentric circles from the total market down to a target audience you will actively acquire in the next 18 months, with a named model persona at the center. For Eero, the target was tech-savvy dads, and the persona was a specific sales VP in suburban St. Louis with gaming teenagers. Early on, trying to be everything to everyone is the worst move because you lack the runway, so pick an audience large enough to build a giant business.

The exercise then moves through the audience's problem, how they address it today and what you make, ending in the classic four-part positioning statement: for a target audience with a need, the product is a category with a benefit, unlike the old way. A great benefit is what you want customers to repeat, such as "turns your iPad into a point of sale", and it can become your homepage headline.

Jackson's bar test checks whether positioning is in human language. Founders' first drafts are often full of words like "leverages" and "empowers", which nobody says aloud. You imagine telling someone in your target audience, over drinks, about the product, category, benefit and differentiator, and see if the response is natural curiosity. She says this exercise is taught in her course and is not available online.

Lenny's example of an ADP email trying to make home security "fun" illustrates why personality matters. Jackson says that when a serious brand puts on a fun hat, it seems forced, and compares the extremes of Mountain Dew (rugged, edgy, fast) and Rolex (sophisticated, aspirational). Personality is the quickest of the three parts and can often be done in an hour.

Her framework uses the five brand personality dimensions from academic research by Jennifer Aaker: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. Strong brands spike in two of them; Amazon and Google are sincere and competent, while Mountain Dew is rugged and exciting. She then defines five attributes as "we are X, but not Y", such as "playful but not silly", because brands need tension. The result goes into a creative brief for agencies and writers, onboarding and partner materials.

On PR, Jackson says a story that cannot be told in a sentence will not be told by a reporter either, so revisit positioning, make sure the site is ready and avoid driving traffic to a name you may scrap. Launch timing is no longer in the founder's control. Embargoed briefings to several outlets have given way to a single exclusive for early-stage startups, and the number of reporters has shrunk while funding news has become less interesting.

She advises targeting outlets that actually cover seed-stage companies, not the New York Times, and using funding only as a hook for a bigger story such as a product launch, reference customers or partnerships. Her example is Vitable Health, whose hourly-worker benefit was tied to the Great Resignation and made local Philadelphia businesses the heroes, earning a Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer story. She also says local press is hungry for such stories and was a big win at Square.

On hiring, Jackson says to bring in a full-time marketer when problems pile up or freelancers and agencies become hard to manage. For a sales-driven company, wait until there is a repeatable sales motion. For a marketing-driven one, it tends to come around ten people. One-off projects like a name or a website can stay outsourced, and she favors a T-shaped marketer who is deep in one function and knows enough about the others.