They Took Us From Blood Diamond Disgust to Sentimental Spend

Let’s get right to it: We’re back this week talking about the startups that catch our eyes as product naming obsessors, the emotions that build them, and the variables through which they can measure success.

Measuring Startups by the Consumer Emotions They Evoke

There are obviously a ton of ways to measure or predict the success of a startup– from projected revenue to usage across an industry to the praise it gets from other startups versus from big corporations. Some will be celebrated for their revolutionary technology, some for the intuitive use and easy adoption. But as brand builders at a corporate naming agency, we naturally look at how brands make people feel. What emotions are tied to it? Does it buy off fear of FOMO? Curiosity? Does it inch its way into people’s minds, hearts, wallets, or all of the above?

Most people will look at the success metrics of an established brand and say, hey, their branding is great too. That must be what’s behind that great conversation rate optimization number. But what if, like we do in the background, a business put that first– based EVERYTHING off of how a customer will feel? What if the business model itself relies on the customer going through different emotions? What if the product or service is only possible when you’re intimately in touch with how your targeted consumers feel?

We’re pretty sure we just found an example of that right here in Austin with us, in a company called Eterneva. This is a “grief wellness” company (honestly, props, we literally make a living off of productization, category marketing, and business naming services, and we never thought this phrase could apply to something other than a counselor or workshop of some kind). They take the ashes (or hair) of your loved one (human or animal), and turn them into a diamond for you– calling it a grief-changing journey.

What kind of new age blood diamond fresh he||….

We were kind of thrown off too– what kind of unethically sourced, new age blood diamond fresh he|| is this, capitalizing on grief? Then we realized– the sourcing is coming from you– who gives permission to use the ashes of a loved one. And on their science page, we learned how they isolate the carbon out of the ashes or hair, and then their machines mimic how the earth naturally makes diamonds. That’s better than from a warzone with white people profiting off an insurgency, obviously. And sentimental (wealthy) crowds would actually probably love the idea. While it probably could be more environmentally friendly, like the people who want their ashes turned into tree pods, it doesn’t get much more locally-sourced than Eterneva, it seems.

What this means for their brand identity and growth hacking, we expect (as a top naming firm in Austin with over a decade of experience and case studies that speak for themselves), is that while they must employ incredibly careful, sensitive, and transparent outreach and retention strategies, their brand benefits from a pre-prescribed, innate sense of genuineness–the exact kind that people crave in the split second decision between clicking out of or further into a sales cycle.

And while younger generations aren’t too prime to spend on material items, let alone those that cost at least $3K, Eterneva will likely find a niche in older generations and the incredibly sentimental. And by the looks of their $4.8M seed funding, they have already.