A powerful brand name is the first and most crucial component to getting your customers to fall in love with your business. But many entrepreneurs don’t know the best way to create engaging business names.
And after helping more than 35,000 brands find unique and catchy brand names at Squadhelp, we can confidently say that naming a company involves three key steps.
Know Your Business
The most critical component of your brand is its name. There is, therefore, no way to avoid considering your brand when building your company. Your brand name represents how you wish to be perceived by your audience.
Take Accenture as an example. What did you visualize when you saw or heard the name for the first time? Without a doubt, the name sounds classy, elegant, and refined. And as one of the top consulting businesses in the world, its name has been incredibly effective.
Therefore, having exceptional brand imagination is the first step to properly naming your company. And surprisingly, brand imagination is the most underutilized naming tool there is, and the best way to engage your imagination is by envisioning your brand’s personality.
So ask yourself:
- How does my brand look and feel?
- What are its values?
- What tone does it communicate?
- What feeling does it hope to arouse in its audience?
When you are aware of these components, you will be much more prepared to begin a thorough business name process.
Here’s another amusing example. The goal of SquattyPotty is to ‘promote bathroom health worldwide.’ And although the nature of their business is quite scientific and medically inclined, their name is a clear signal that they don’t want to be perceived in this way.
Additionally, it is clear from their website’s use of vibrant colors and clever puns that they wish to come off as a fun and playful brand.
Hence, it’s crucial to understand your brand inside and out. And this is how you start with that?
Start by considering the following three items:
- Consider who you are as a company?
- What do you represent to your clients?
- When compared to your rivals, who are you?
Answering these questions would help you craft your brand’s identity and how you want customers to connect with it.
The next step is to select a tone that aligns with your business. Feel free to select either a pragmatic, modern, emotionally powerful, fun and playful, or pre-eminent. For instance, the name ‘Louis Vuitton’ sounds luxurious and pre-eminent and perfectly fits what the company does and its target market. Whereas a brand name like ‘Slack’ is both modern and playful.
Think About Unique Name Ideas
Here’s where we get into the exciting part! Grab some markers and whiteboard, gather your naming crew (if you have one), and let your creative juices flow. The brainstorming procedure does not include analysis.
Right now, there’s no need to assess names. Simply turn up your creative flow and let things happen as they do. And if you run into a creative wall, don’t hesitate to get ideas from a business name creator.
Don’t be hesitant to document bland names. In fact, we strongly want you to write names that you are unsure of. You can never predict what you can get out of them. Here are some straightforward techniques that boost your name-generation process:
- Thesaurus
- Visual names
- Rhyming words
- Industry jargons
Feel free to use a few root words (which are basic words that can be joined to other words) to come up with a great name. The five most common words among our clients, according to our study at Squadhelp, are ‘omni,’ ‘gen,’ ‘case,’ ‘door,’ and ‘spot.’
Additionally, it’s beneficial to involve individuals of different ages in your brainstorming process because they have varied ideas regarding preeminent vs. inventive names.
In a poll we performed in 2021, we discovered that while older age groups—45–65 years old—were more willing to accept businesses with traditionally appealing names, younger age groups—25–34 years old—tended to choose brands with fresh and modern business names.
People between 35 and 45 loved both modern and traditional brand names. Therefore, having a variety of ages helps you to consider other viewpoints.
Even if you come up with 200 or so names by the time the brainstorming is over, that’s still wonderful since we will now concentrate on trimming this list.
Shortlist Your Best Names
It’s time to match the names we came up with to our brand tone and value proposition. A memo that contains your naming criteria and illustrates your ultimate tone and what you’re trying to achieve should be available to your naming crew.
You can evaluate names based on how well they reflect your brand’s identity, how they sound and appear on various platforms, such as social networks and paper, and how inspiring they make you and your colleagues feel.
Get opinions on the majority of the names that were generated, consider whether or not a name is memorable or catchy, and aim to have less than ten names left after this phase.
If you have determined that you would like to be perceived as a pragmatic brand, do your best to keep the emotionally potent names to a minimum. However, you can experiment within a category.
Even if you like a name that is pragmatic and solution-focused, you can still play around with different spellings like Lyft or short names like Zoom.
Verify Your Chosen Name
How we all hope your top pick from the list of contenders was the awesome company name you’ve been searching for!
But before you can rejoice, your ideal name must pass a few significant tests. Validation involves determining the viability of your intended company name(s):
Audience feedback:
This is a crucial phase in the validation of your company name. When you first started the process, you probably wanted a name that would resonate with clients, especially if you intended to run your business mostly online. So, ensure that the name you choose is appealing to your intended audience.
Domain:
Websites are essentially a critical need for any business. So, you must determine whether the domain name you have chosen is accessible. Typically you’d think you’d have easy access to nameofyourbusiness.com.
However, it doesn’t happen often. And getting an exact match domain name can cost you a significant amount of money.
Trademarks:
This step may not be your favorite, but it will help you save a lot of hassle down the road. The majority of words in use have some sort of trademark. You must determine whether your company name passes the trademark test.
At this point, you can also benefit from the assistance of a legal advisor. Avoiding this check might result in future cease and desist letters.
Powerful Brand Names are Game Changers
Brand names may change the game since they have the power to increase sales and have an influence on your financial performance. An amazing company name can generate excitement and, as a result, draw clients.
Without the appropriate name, even a fantastic company plan and product might fail on social media.
So, be sure to commit the necessary time and effort to choose the ideal name. To do this, you should thoroughly understand the personality of your brand and the perception you want to convey, think up good and bad brand names, shortlist names after you’ve carefully analyzed, and confirm your top brand names using customer feedback, domains, and trademarks.
You can be confident that using this simple but detailed approach will result in a name that accurately describes you and propels your brand to success.
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today.
We are also the world’s leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies.
