Creating an original name for your company is one of the most important components of your company’s intellectual property and the centerpiece of all of your online and offline marketing. Creativity is very important - you want a Name Brand that reflects creative input!

A good Name Brand should not require any background introduction or explanation to make sense to your customers. A Names Brand also helps to position and differentiate your company from your competitors.

1) The name you select should work well on marketing collateral; meaning, should be short  if possible but convey strong branding, with some meaning and feeling implicit in the wording.

2) If you are looking for online traffic you may want to integrate carefully researched Keywords in the Name that will also be incorporated in your Domain Name.

This will help to accelerate your search engine optimization processes as you launch. But this can impact the “brand” in terms of creativity and originality.

3) Think about a tag line and how it would map to your Names Brand and how you will integrate a logo with both - a good Names Brand reflects the front end of the process but you want to view it holistically in terms of its impact on your overall marketing.

5) If you opt for not using Keywords in your Names Brand that could also be used in the Domain then go with a Names Brand that will resonate with your target demographic. Lots of non-traffic driven (in online marketing speak) names are nonsensical; i.e. Elle, Yahoo, Sephora, Google - this trend seems to be accelerating for many new companies.

6) Select ten finalists for names then bounce them off friends, family, potential customers and get the list down to three and then make the final selection. Naming is like songwriting - you have to be open to the Muse if you will - once you have your top ten you can “crowd source” the final pick using friends/family/clients.

7) For “do it yourself” Name Branding research  take a look at a Greek or Latin dictionary - there are lots of interesting words in both that will not drive traffic but may resonate with your targeted demographics.

8)  What products or services will be featured in your new business?  Some of these could give you root terms or words that you might want to play off of for your Brand Naming.

9) Take a hard look at your competition in your market and build some type of a competitive review in a spreadsheet to have an in-depth understanding of what type of  a Names Brand your competitor’s have done.

Name Branding Executive Summary

1. Creativity is very important - if you don’t have this skill set then outsource to an agency.
2. A great Names Brand should be strategic (speak to your audience) and have a good linguistic appeal.
3. Survey the competition in your market.
4. Position your Names Brand properly - review it from multiple angles; i.e. customers, business partners, domain name, marketing processes, international markets.
5. Take the time to Trademark your name and attach a Trademark symbol.
6. Build a mock up of your Names Brand with logo and tagline to see how it looks and review with all stakeholders.

To learn more about how we could help you create a high impact Name Branding process please click here contact us or [email protected]