A successful company is challenging to launch. Particularly now, when demand is dwindling, prices are rising, and joblessness is rising.
Every business owner must now, more than ever, give their full attention to their company and gain skills that will increase their odds of success in the market.
The ability to create a business name that will captivate your audience and persuade them to buy from your brand is one of the skills you’ll need to master. And we’d be sharing the techniques that have enabled the naming agency,
Squadhelp provides top-notch brand naming assistance to more than 35,000 business owners in choosing the right name for their enterprise.
4 Ways To Come Up With Exciting Business Name for Your Venture
1. Completely Comprehend Your niche and business
Your startup or business name is an essential component of the business. And as such requires careful consideration before launching your business because it affects how your target market responds to your business.
Take Accenture as an example. Just seeing or hearing the name, what comes to mind? It sounds high-end, stylish, and modern. One of the world’s top consulting businesses, this works incredibly well. But you couldn’t name a commonplace electronic item like Alexa or iPad.
The name would not accurately describe who or what they are. Picking an excellent brand name makes it easier for customers to picture your company’s products or services mentally.
Brand imagination is a naming principle that is frequently disregarded, which is surprising considering how much it aids in the process of selecting a strong brand name.
In the words of Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
Consider Google’s parent company Alphabet and its diverse operations. The holding company is a giant in the internet sphere dominating almost every niche of the online sector, yet, they’ve done their best to maintain their fun, happy touch in their brand and product names.
And this has helped their business to remain connected to their customers no matter how big they grow and not terrifying like Facebook. Other brands like Nike, Microsoft, and Intel are some of the most successful companies and also the most imaginative.
The simplest method to start your creative juices flowing while looking for your brand name is to consider how you desire your target market to perceive and engage with your brand.
- The feeling you want to evoke in your audience
- What are the core values of your brand?
- The mood you want your online store to project
- The tone you want to evoke in your audience
After considering the core ideas powering your brand, you will be better prepared to complete the entire naming process.
Airbnb is another success story highlighting the power of brand imagination and understanding key branding elements and the results they can provide for your business. First, the company was a serial failure, failing four times, and its ideas were challenging to execute.
But, with a strong brand identity, Airbnb has grown to dominate the online tourist domain and disrupt the hotel industry. And this happened in 2014, after the Design Studio and Font Foundry.
Since then, Forbes estimated its net worth to have hit $38 billion in 2018, gaining revenue reaching $1 billion that same year, and even today, its valuation is still above $70 billion.
You must understand your brand and everything it stands for to establish a solid creative foundation for your brand image. You can achieve this by paying keen attention to the following three factors:
- What does your startup look like?
- What do your customers think of you?
- What do your competitors think of you?
You can develop your brand’s identity and decide how you want your audience to interact with it by taking the time to respond to these questions thoughtfully.
Choosing the right tone for your business and customers is the next step. You can decide to give your brand a modern, emotional, prestigious, pragmatic, or lighthearted and cheerful tone.
2. Seek Out Original Names
Another fantastic way to find a good business name is to seek an original name. Here’s the point where your naming process starts to become interesting! Take out a notebook or computer, gather your branding crew (if there is one), and begin formulating original brand names.
Never forget that the brainstorming stage shouldn’t involve any analysis. That’s because your current focus should be on developing and writing down unique name ideas rather than evaluating the names you’ve chosen.
So feel at ease and let your imagination run wild. If you are struggling to come up with names, don’t be scared to use a company name generator.
Create a list of brand names, including any that you consider terrible picks. We implore you to note any odd words you come across. You never know what they are capable of. Also, endeavour to use these naming options to speed up the procedure.
- Rhyming words
- Thesaurus
- Words with metaphorical undertones
To improve the quality of names you get at the end of your brainstorm sessions, be sure to pen down at least 200 potential names; later, we’ll concentrate on whittling these options down and selecting the top choices.
Also, when coming up with a unique name for your business, it’s important to remember that the demographics of your core audience should influence the type of name you eventually settle for. Not all customers are impressed by the same kind of names.
In a poll conducted in 2021, we discovered how names affect the age demographics of the audience attracted to a brand. Historied and traditional names like International Business Machines and General Motors were preferred by the audience between the ages of 45 and 65.
While a younger audience between the ages of 25-34 prefers modern names like Cisco and Tesla to the historied ones mentioned earlier. Only audiences between the ages of 35 to 45 do we have an audience base that doesn’t have any strong affiliation with any of the name types.
So, again ensure you consider various factors affecting the age demographics your brand name is meant to attract.
Related: How to Form an LLC In Any State
3. Validate the Potential Names You’ve Crafted
It’s time to check to determine if the values and tone of your brand align with the names you’ve selected. Your company’s naming should be known to your naming team, who should also be aware of the tone you want to communicate.
Validating your name choice doesn’t include backtesting them against your naming criteria and demands but ensuring they’re competent enough to pass communication barriers and are available and legal.
Below are some of the validation tests that can help you ensure you get the best out of your names:
- Audience Feedback: Audience feedback is a necessity in getting an idea of how your customer thinks and how they will respond to your brand name. And trust us, you’ll need this understanding if you’re to develop a successful brand.
The easiest way to get feedback is from friends, family, and acquaintances, maybe in a bar, gym, or other public centres and online communities.
However, you may need to keep full details of why you need their responses until they’ve finished giving you the response so as not to compromise their answers.
We also recommend the crowded bar test, which includes saying your brand’s name in a crowded place to see what it sounds like. Different audiences may hear other things, but understanding this is essential to avoid negative associations.
For example, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon was once called ‘Cadabra,’ and customers usually mispronounced the name as ‘cadaver.’
- Language and Translation Test: Before taking your names to the world, it’s crucial to ensure your brand name isn’t offending or having negative meanings and associations in foreign languages.
International customers can be unforgiving to foreign brands that fail to brand their companies in the right language. So, ensure you do your due-diligent research or get a professional to help you with that.
For example, Lumia may sound cool in English and even mean ‘snow’ in the Finnish tongue, but to a Spanish audience, it’s a slang name for ‘prostitutes.’
- Domain Name Availability: confirming that the domain estate of your brand is still available is critical to ensuring you’ve secured your brand’s online presence and future.
And even though you could say that Elon Musk wasted a lot of time, over ten years to be specific, and ultimately had to pay millions of dollars to secure the Tesla.com domain name, you could say he was the lucky one since powerful organizations like Google’s parent company,
Alphabet, doesn’t even have access to its domain name and social media handles. In the end, Alphabet settled for abc.xyz because BMW owned abc.com.
But, very few of us can control online traffic like Google to help direct customers to our site, and considering domain availability is necessary for finding the best brand name for your business.
- Trademark: By conducting a survey, you can ensure your target market will enjoy the name you choose for your business. After that, make sure a trademark is used to protect it.
Your company’s reputation, as well as your commercial success, are largely controlled by your brand name. People are interested in and drawn to organizations and websites with compelling brand names.
When choosing a name for your business, consider how well it fits with your brand, how it sounds, and how it will appear on your branded products and other platforms like social media. Additionally, it is crucial to confirm if the name’s.com extension is available.
When evaluating them, consider whether the name is memorable and appealing. Finally, ensure to provide over five names that can be associated with your company.
4. Build Your Company’s Brand Around Your Chosen Name
Assuming you’ve completed the previous steps, your next and final step is the most important yet, and something you’ll continue to do in the market for as long as your business continues to exist.
This is because no business exists that doesn’t have a brand. Successful businesses have strong brands, and mediocre brands are usually found in weaker businesses.
The simplest way to understand a brand is to figure out what your customers say, feel, and think about your business. Brands don’t only exist for businesses; they can also exist for people and countries because it’s how they’re seen by others interacting with them.
Coca-cola, a significant corporation, started as a drug company, but today, it’s become the most successful beverage in the world.
But their success isn’t just tied to a strong product, but how they’ve been able to position the Coca-cola brand in the minds of their audience as a symbol of happiness and sharing love between communities.
Apple and Nike have had similar branding success. Nike collaborates with world-class athletes like Michael Jordan, Lebron James, and Cristiano Ronaldo to build up their brand as the shoe of choice for successful athletes.
While Apple has poured its creative energy into building the ultimate phone that its customers will always cherish above others and, at the same time setting the standards that other phones in the tech industry aspire to meet.
However, building a solid brand that supports your brand name isn’t an isolated concept but one that relies on branding elements to create a rich brand idea and name. And these brand elements include:
- Visual concepts: Brand colours, typeface, images, and infographics.
- Brand messaging: taglines, value propositions, and vision statements.
- Brand Communications: Ad campaigns,
- Tone: Tone of voice (casual, friendly, or direct),
- brand archetypes, positioning, and benefits.
- Endorsements: celebrities and programs that you align your brands with.
- Business culture: a set of ideals everyone in your organization can identify or rally themselves around.
And in case you didn’t know, your brand elements are the foundations of your business and give meaning to your brand’s name whenever it’s been said.
Several entrepreneurs don’t get this and assume branding is just about ads, campaigns, and endorsements. However, Ad-campaigns are strategic moves targeted at improving specific business goals, while branding affects the entirety of your business.
You must understand that great entrepreneurs begin building their brand from its name. So, devote the time to ensuring you get it right because it goes a long way to affect the outcome of your business.
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency.
Squadhelp has reviewed over 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. We are the world’s leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients such as Nestle, Dell, Nuskin, and AutoNation.
I hope the article helps you understand how you can develop a good business name for your company, startup and organization.
Oyundoyin Anthony
Oyundoyin Anthony is a blogger and an affiliate marketer that offers helpful contents to people who are looking for different products for their needs. He enjoys helping people to achieve success in their business.