Making Something of the Misses

Rebounding is important, but perhaps that has been lost among the highlight reels of recent years.

Out of the NBA’s Top 25 All-Time Rebound leaders, not one is still playing. I’m not a basketball fan, but on that list, nearly every name was familiar to me. They would likely almost all appear on a list of the best players (in general) of all time.

Few other lists of GOATs (in specific categories) are entirely absent current players.

This post isn’t about ballers by trade, it is about rebounding in a broader sense..

Rebounding is resilience by another name. It’s taking something that didn’t go well and emerging from it with hope.

2025 has begun with a tragedy free-for-all, but among the horror stories, there is also resilience.

To be clear, I am not suggesting all tragedies are equal, only that they share the potential for people to rebound and be resilient.

To be human is to forfeit control over many things. Weather will happen. Bad people will sometimes win. Fortunes may reverse. But what we do control is how we react to tragedy, or injustice, or loss.

Oddly, in my observations, the worse a situation is, the more outwardly resilient people can be. I know there are tears from loss in the LA fires, so many that if we could tap them, LA would never be short of water again. But the refrain I have heard from many is resilient, “we will rebuild.” Emerging from the ashes is hope. This is what we control, how we choose to view our situation, no matter how dire.

If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you know the job market is tough. Being resilient with so much disappointment as job seekers is challenging. There is fear. There is doubt. There is sacrifice. Among all of that though, is resilience. I see people posting new skills they’ve learned in their “involuntary downtime.” Many are aggressively making new contacts that can pay future dividends. Some are reevaluating and pursuing dreams that had faded over time.

Rebounding is not easy. But what is? It all takes effort, and many people are facing larger hills to climb than others. Your hill may come. My hope for you is that you’ll have a net below to secure your climb, safety ropes to keep you in place, and friendly hands to boost or pull you up.

When you sit atop the hill reach back and offer a hand, throw someone a rope. We need our networks and communities when things are at their worst. Donations. Aid. Time. While I still seek my next position, my network has provided incredible support. Unfamiliar hands have supported me simply because they could.

Out of all the emotional traits I hope I possess; resilience may be the one I rely on most. My aim is to help others be resilient too. If I can help you, let me know.

Rebounding may be a skill that has recently been overlooked, in the NBA and in life, but of those who did it best, most are still some of the biggest names of all time. Few current names are anywhere close.

When you have misses in your life, you can really make a name for yourself as a rebounder.

What's in a name?

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare asks through Juliet. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” she concludes.

Juliet, alas, did not pass her marketing class ere her tragic demise. Had she but some ambition academic and forsook love for lira, she would know that if the name stinks, no one is bothering to sniff the rose.

This is not an earth-shattering revelation, yet bad business names persist and continue to stink up business.

I believe most business names fall along a graph in a pattern, where the ability of the name to tell a story and the quality move up and to the right. And as we move northeast the total numbers shrink. This chart is made up and only takes into account names at inception, absent the brand it might become. Some businesses can succeed in spite of bad names, but I really believe this number is small.

When I note that the business name tells a story, I mean that it aligns with, and is additive to the brand’s overall narrative.

The most obvious in the far upper right quadrant is Nike. For a brand founded on athletic success and drive, a reference to the Greek Goddess of Victory (in athletics among other endeavors) both tells a story and is additive to the brand. Nike will forever feel like the gold standard but they are not alone.

Starbucks, while arguably a bit more esoteric, is another one. In an effort to call to mind the seafaring tradition of coffee traders, the founders looked to literature and the first mate in the story of Moby Dick, a coffee lover.

Google was telling us all up front of the volume of results they could provide in massive numbers.

For every one of those, however, there are legion that fall to the lower left of the quadrants.

While I make this sound like a binary science, I concede the practice of naming a business is far from it. It is subjective like so much of marketing.

As we move down and left in the quadrants, there is a sizeable share that are good (perhaps not great) that have stories (with varying degrees of relevance).

Caterpillar trucks and equipment were named because of how they appeared to move like… you guessed it… a caterpillar. Is that a good thing? Maybe. Caterpillars turn into other things so perhaps that they are used in constructing new things fits. And slow, plodding movements may be good when you want methodical over speed. I would suggest this fits in one of the two middle categories.

I would dare to put Apple in the middle but only because of the lore behind the name vs. anything more definitive. The stated reason was the Steve Jobs was a fruitarian and liked the fruit as it sounded approachable. But conflicting stories exist, including the one that no one could think of anything better by the deadline and so it became Apple. Meanings that have been assigned to it persist and that is due in part to a strong product and an adherence to brand standards. Let the consumer decide what it means. Being in this middle category clearly isn’t problematic for many, but subjectively, if you knew nothing else, would Apple make you think of tech?

If you name a business after yourself or someone in your life, you are telling a story. It is a story that may not mean anything to the consumer, at least on the surface, but there is one there. And there are millions of examples of this succeeding in part because the name itself is largely an empty vessel into which you can pour all of your marketing and branding resources in order to create the story.

Tiffany & Co. wasn’t always the lifestyle brand it is now, that took years and dedication to refinement of their brand. Tiffany started as a stationery and fine goods retailer. No one would have aspired to breakfast at Tiffany’s without years going into making the name the brand.

As I look into starting my own businesses, and continue to explore opportunities in the corporate world, I keep finding really bad business names.

There are very few businesses (if any, I haven’t combed the entire list) in the Fortune 500 with puns in the name. This is no assault on the pun, I love a good one, but not when it comes to a business. For some reason I’ve never understood, hair salons have long had punny names (and these are actual): Heads You Win, Head Shed, A Cut Above, Anita Haircut, A Breath of FresHair, Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow and Hairport.

It is unlikely to see a salon in the Fortune 500 though, and maybe that’s why they proliferate at the local level, but I think the principle remains the same regardless of your size and footprint.

I have come across recruiters with cutesy names, and I wonder if they thought about how candidates would feel being represented by cute over serious. Are candidates confident that cutesy gets jobs?

Would you consider doing business with Cool Guy Lending? Even if the head of the company was named Guy Winter? In this case, the story is a play on names but the category for the business absolutely must be taken into account. When faced with multiple options, I couldn’t do business with this Guy (see, I love puns). For the record, I don’t believe this company exists, but there are others in the category with similar issues.

When consumers begin their journey to decide where to spend money, they often have only a name. While products may be be better for one, humans often cut their consideration sets based on perception over reality.

If you name your rose business “Manure-factored Roses” there is a good chance one would assume they will not smell as sweet. I think even Juliet would agree.

Marketing has completely changed...

Except it hasn't.

The bigger picture is being missed because we are so concerned with the camera.

As a student and observer of marketing and related content, it is evident we are the “pick-me kids” on the playground (credit to twelve-year-old twins in my extended family for the term.) We, as marketers, are doing everything we can to get noticed and picked. We want to be in the in-crowd. (Yes, I mixed a 1960’s reference with one from the TikTok generation.)

We make sweeping statements like my first line above, or that some new tactic will revolutionize everything, or we talk big about metrics and performance.

The thing is marketing itself hasn’t fundamentally changed at all. We have a product (P1), for which we are presumably charging a market-established price (P2), within our corner of the market… our “place” (P3), and we find ways to promote it (P4). The classic 4 P’s model still holds up because it’s a broad blueprint.

I would be pretty dumb (and I don’t think I am) to suggest that nothing has changed in marketing, because much has. But most of the advances are in the tools at our disposal. Getting ever better at targeting customers? Tool. Using AI to enhance our efforts and doing things that manually weren’t worth it? Tool. Finding our way into new and emerging media? Tool.

We have allowed the latest tool buzz in our biz to become synecdoche. Pardon my word-nerdery but if you aren’t one yourself, it means when a part comes to represent the whole. We keep letting the latest tools define our worth as a whole. If a company isn’t touting its AI marketing capabilities, is it even a company? Yet, AI is a tool to deliver on the broad goals of marketing which have not ultimately changed. But the more obsessed with the tool we become, the more we get distracted from the goal.

Let me shift to an example which has reached me third hand so I can’t cite details. Basically, leadership of Product Z was tired of the lack of concrete attribution of spend to branding efforts. The leadership went to a seminar and heard about Performance Marketing. This seemed like an answer to all their issues, and on return, shifted most of their paid media budget into performance marketing. And Product Z results spiked. Leadership pointed to the results and proclaimed, “we are performance media company!” But in a very short time, results dipped below where they originally started. All the product seekers at that point had found the product and made their purchases. More investment was put into performance media and sales remained relatively flat.

What happened was an unspoken synecdoche, where performance marketing came to stand for all of marketing.

Spending only in performance is setting you up to constantly chase immediate results. In many cases, this can be a cheaper option at least from a media buying standpoint. But the there are other costs that are harder to calculate. For Product Z, they were reaching an audience with ads directing them to buy but were no longer telling them why to buy from you. Presumably Product Z’s competitors did some of that. If all I know about Product Z is to buy it now for $1, yet Product Y is eco-conscious and sells for $1 also, I’m more likely to buy Product Y.

Synecdoche is allowing the tools to take the credit for the knowledge that good marketers have studied, practiced, and evolved for years.

So, when it comes to staffing, who are you hiring? Are you going out and finding people good at using tools but can’t read a blueprint? Someone once told me you can’t teach people to have an eye for artistry, but you can teach people how to use a camera. This is what makes a photographer, the two things together.

Tools are always changing, just like cameras, so hiring for a camera operator is temporary, while hiring a photographer is going to deliver more than just a part of the whole.

Ultimately, marketing completely changes all the time, but only within itself. What may be the answer today, may shift tomorrow, and back again the next. The trick is to understand the broader needs and balance. That is the bigger picture, which is why you need a photographer in the first place.