Baby-naming trick that solved a global branding problem
If you’ve ever filled out a birth certificate in a hospital room, you know how I felt on October 14th, 2022.
One minute you’re timing contractions; the next you’re staring at a government form that will follow your child for the rest of their life.
My situation had a wrinkle I’m not sure many parents have faced.
We had picked a name for our daughter. But since my wife grew up speaking Bosnian – a language that doesn’t have a letter that could be used to spell the name – we faced a dilemma.
Do we spell it the Bosnian way – Zejna – and burden her with a lifetime of mispronunciations?
Or use a Y – Zayna – making her life easier but nudging the name away from its roots?
That tension — where a name comes from versus where it needs to function — came roaring back last week while I was editing a survey for a global logistics company.
I know that sounds like a stretch…
They were naming a new service and wanted to know if any of their candidate names would be hard to pronounce in different languages.
The key question was straightforward: “How easy is each name to pronounce in your language?”
The respondents answered with a generic 1-5 scale.
1 - Very easy
2 - Somewhat easy
3 - Neutral
4 - Hard
5 - Very hard
It wasn’t the question that got me thinking about the birth certificate.
It was the scale.
When people judge names, they don’t think in numbered increments. They just react. And every time my wife and I looked at each spelling of our daughter’s name, our reactions fell into two buckets:
It comes out naturally
I hesitate
Pronunciation is instinctive like that.
Survey respondents don’t think in degrees of difficulty either. So I replaced the 1–5 scale with options that mirrored our experience — and added a third inspired by the names we'd rejected long before we arrived at the hospital:
Q: How easy is each name to pronounce in your language?
Easy — comes out naturally
Kind of easy — slight hesitation
Hard — I stumble when I say it
If someone chose “Kind of easy,” I asked, “What made you hesitate?”
If they chose “Hard,” I asked, “What made you stumble?”
That way, I wasn’t just measuring pronunciation difficulty--I was capturing the reasons a name fails to travel.
We ran the survey, got clean, useful data, and the client was happy. They picked a name you might see someday.
There are two morals to this story.
First: naming is hard. A good name has to mean something and work in the world. That tension is why we agonized over the spelling, and why companies argue over whether a name “travels.”
Second: surveys should reflect how people experience that tension. When a question is about pronunciation, the response options should match the experience of pronouncing, not the abstraction of a scale.
This is exactly the kind of thing most surveys miss—and why I started Survey Roast.
Your Likert scales might look rigorous, but if they flatten actual experience, they hide the signal you’re trying to measure. You get data that’s captured "correctly," but not truthfully.
If you want to know whether your survey captures real reactions instead of abstract ratings, consider booking a Survey Roast.
Send me your draft, and for $145 I’ll record a 15‑minute Loom with copy‑and‑paste edits and suggestions that improve your survey’s flow and data quality.
Cheers,
Sam
PS: We picked Y!