I often say that a logo is like an amuse-bouche to a business or a brand. It helps to give you a little taste of what it might be like to deal with that company or business.
So if a logo is an amuse-bouche, a brand name is then the manner in which a person greets you by the entry, the atmosphere of the restaurant, and the architecture and interior design.
On a subconscious level, creating a brand name is essentially setting certain expectations about the rest of the experience for the customer, which will either be met or they won’t. And the name will forever become a mental shortcut for the customer’s brain to remember those experiences, as well as the main course.
So in many ways, if the customer service you provide, or your products are flawed, creating an amazing brand name won’t save your business. But on the flip side, if your name sends the wrong message, you might not have any customers (or the right kind of customers) show up in the first place.
15 years ago, I got to create my first brand name for a Modular Building company, called Kubik Modular, or just Kubik. It was one of those projects like ‘you’re building our website, oh by the way, and can you create our brand name as well?’. It was the kind lack of pressure combined with the lack of knowledge of the importance that a brand name can make, that caused me to perhaps spend much, much less time on trying to find a perfect name than I do today.
And ever since then, the more I got into brand naming, the more I realised how hard it can be to create something that can stand the test of time. And something that means something. And secure the domain name. And not always in that order.
Naming is a creative process. But its success depends on using proven strategies for creating a brand name that works.
Why a brand name is important
As I mentioned, naming helps humans to instantly attach meaning to something through associations we’d had with those things.
We can simply tell our friend let’s discuss fast food or artificial intelligence, or McDonald’s, or Google, and straight away we both have an opinion, an idea, and some level of knowledge on the topic.
Without names, we wouldn’t be able to collaborate effectively. We’d waste hours describing an entire concept to our friends before they even know what we are talking about.
This is especially important for naming businesses or products.
When naming is done well—it opens up a story and a conversation, and hopefully creates a good first impression for potential customers and partners.
But when naming goes wrong, as it did for plenty of companies, it can become a funny meme on the internet, making a laughing stock of that company and an invitation for Twitter shaming.
When naming goes wrong
A few years ago, an American company, Tribune Publishing rebranded itself to tronc Inc. It has sparked ongoing ridicule of the name on the internet with some hilarious reactions.
Online magazine The Verge wrote Tronc ‘is the sound of a millennial falling down the stairs’. And it didn’t stop there, eventually forcing the brand to revert to the original name.
So despite these types of stories, I still find that much too often naming can be an afterthought.
An informal exercise where business owners or startup founders who spend months developing brilliant products or companies go with a name that is ‘fine’.
Often without even bothering to examine cultural contexts, competitive landscapes, or ease of spelling.
If you’re not a customer-facing company, translating your key service into Latin and calling that a day, might be fine for a brand name. But, if you’re like most companies, needing to market yourself to attract new customers, then you need a brand name you’re not ashamed of, and one that doesn’t give potential customers the wrong impression.
So when and how to create a brand name?
My initial advice is: don’t rush into naming.
If you’re still exploring and finding ground for your business or product perhaps naming this early on might not be the right time. It might be sufficient to give your project a code name until you solidify your business plan and concept.
Otherwise, you risk the common startup issue of the concept evolving and the name no longer having relevance.
When you are ready to create a brand name, use these tips to help:
Generate your word bank
Before you can dive into creating a brand name you need some foundational words that can inform the name. To extend the cooking analogy at the top of the article, think about these as ingredients for a dish you’re about to prepare. You can’t cook something without ingredients, right?
Your word bank can include things like brand values, keywords from your positioning, mission, vision statements, as well as words related to the customer’s transformation and benefits, your USP, and anything else that might be relevant to your brand and how you conduct your business.
Keep this in a list, categorising the names under each of those aforementioned buckets, we will use them to get cooking.
Brainstorm more word associations
Based on the words you have listed, you can now start using some blue-sky thinking and generate associations. A few good tools you can use for this are either the Mind Map tool or the Morphological Matrix. If you have a larger group responsible for making the final decision on the brand name, you can brainstorm these association words, together.
The idea here is that based on your ‘standard’ words (most of which will not make for a unique and distinct brand name), you want to generate some words that are somewhat outside regular thinking.
That means words like Talented or Inventive might make you think of Mozart or Da Vinci, or perhaps Nikola Tesla. You can sort of see how Tesla got the inspiration for their brand name.
Think in terms of analogies
General Motors or Electronic Arts do what it says on the box. However while that approach may provide a certain immediate relevance to the client in terms of keywords, it’s not particularly emotive or memorable.
And the more businesses populate that particular niche with similar keywords, the more your business will get lost in the noise.
One of my favourite approaches to naming is to call on analogies.
I love analogies. I’ve often said that my wife makes fun of me because I’m always trying to squeeze out an analogy for practically every notable situation in our lives. I read about using analogies as a Creative Thinking tool in Edward de Bono’s book over a decade ago, and have been using them in my creative process ever since.
Let’s say you’re creating a brand name for a banking service, investment app, or something for a financial planner. You might compare the process of saving and accumulating money to a snowball, that gets bigger as it rolls down the hill. You’ll be able to pull out words such as snowball, rolling, compounding, and perhaps, momentum. All great words for you to play with for coming up with an interesting name.
Analogy’s cousins, metaphors, and similes can work just as well.
Their strength lies in being able to convey existing characteristics through a mental image we already have. A good example would be the British car brand Jaguar, which chose the animal to evoke the shared characteristics of fast and powerful.
Or Amazon – piggy-backing on the metaphorical volume of one of the largest rivers. Which sure as hell beats Cadabra or Relentless, two of the previous name ideas for Jeff Bezos’ business.
Mashup your words together
Now that you have your word bank filled, start mashing words together for interesting combinations. Things like adding suffixes and prefixes can work, and so can combining words together.
Some common prefixes are re- as in rebuild, or un- as in unkind. And some of the common suffixes are things like adding -ly or -ing on the end.
Facebook, PayPal, and YouTube are basic combination names. And then we also have less recognisable mashups that make for interesting combinations, like Spotify (combining spot and identify), or Vodafone (voice, data, telephone).
For more ways to generate name ideas, try the SCRIPT method I’ve devised for problem-solving and idea generation: Simplify, Compare, Restrict, Imagine, Provoke, and Transform.
Look at these tools as outside help that can enable you to see beyond your immediate circle of knowledge and idea pool. A selection of exotic, previously unknown ingredients to add to your main dish, if you will.
Once you have at least 50–100 different brand name options you can start to pick those that sound best and shortlist them down to your best 20-30 options.
How do you pick the final name?
After all the creative thinking you need to ground yourself back down again and validate the name options. A checklist is a good place to start.
There are lots of qualities a good name can have, and not necessarily all at once, but here are some questions to ask.
- Is the name distinct from what’s already out there?
- Can the name work not just for your current offering but future aspirations?
- Will it mean anything to your customers or employees?
- Does the name allude to the customer benefits?
- Or the promise you are making to the market?
- Does it open the conversation about what you do differently?
- How about your brand personality, or your brand story?
- Does the name sound nice on the tongue and easy to pronounce?
- Are there any international issues that the name could cause?
You want to rate all the ‘top runners’, scoring the names in each category out of 10, by the end of which you should hopefully have 3-5 top shortlisted names.
Also, think about it in terms of the possible future for a name – could it work as a verb, like Google, Photoshop, or Skype? Or could it easily lend itself to an extended brand vocabulary (Twitter, tweet, retweet, fleets)?
Don’t be stuck with a .com name
Nowadays, just about anything that is recognisable is already registered. Or at the very least, parked. I’m talking about the coveted dot com domain name, of course.
There’s a huge debate about these things, many claiming that an exact dot com is a must. And I get that the allure of securing that exact .com domain name is high.
However, insisting on an exact dot com domain will likely cause you to come up with a name that’s too hard to spell, or remember, just because you’re trying to ‘please the algorithm’ of availability.
In the early days, companies like Tesla and Dropbox, had to find creative ways to register a domain name: teslamotors.com and getdropbox.com
They knew that customers either Google the name or the brand’s keywords, rather than trying to guess the domain name – meaning that the right customers will reach you regardless.
So if you feel that all other factors in terms of the name being relevant, distinct and memorable are on-point, my suggestion to you is to not reject a name idea based on an unavailable dot com. Consider another creative domain name that can work instead.
Final words of creating a brand name
Anyone can generate a great brand name with a little research, brainstorming, and lateral thinking. But it certainly is hard work— it’s not unusual to generate over a hundred, if not thousands of options in the search for a name!
According to sources, an advertising agency proposed over 6,000 possibilities to Henry Ford when he was looking to name the eventually coined Ford Edsel.
But at the end of the day, a name is not the entire full-course meal of your business. It’s only a small introduction to it – so if you can’t find the perfect brand name right away please don’t let it make you lose your enthusiasm for launching (or re-launching) a business. Lots of well-known businesses we know today had started with less than desirable brand names.
It might also be worth running some surveys with a select customer group to see which of the shortlisted names resonate with them the most. And don’t forget to reach out to a trademarking lawyer to check the theoretical availability of name registration in your country for your top 3-4 names.
My promise to you is that you will be that much closer to your perfect name if you use the tactics and tools I’ve listed above. And if you need a little outside help, there are many naming services and consultants who can help.
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