Starting a business requires choosing a name, and selecting a fantastic name requires more than just looking for a name that you love or that sounds really fun and fashionable; it also requires finding a name that conveys actual significance to your target audience.
Customers want a strong brand name that they can easily recognize, recall, talk about, and suggest. A strong brand name is also the first step to giving your company a distinctive identity, making marketing easier, and increasing your sales.
However, coming up with an ideal name for your company might be difficult but based on our expertise in assisting over 35,000 business owners in finding distinctive and alluring brand names, we can say that there are three simple procedures for choosing the ideal name. Let’s give them a look.
How to Choose the Best Business Name in Three Easy Steps
1. Get to Know Your Brand
The most important component of your business is its brand, and while your business focuses on the goods and services you offer, your brand focuses on the character of your business and how you want customers to perceive it.
Knowing your brand is crucial when picking a name for your business since it will make it simpler to choose a name that accurately captures your brand’s personality and values.
Check out the consulting firm Accenture and how it presents a tone that is sophisticated, elegant, and strong. This works very well for one of the greatest consulting businesses in the world. But since it wouldn’t be consistent with what they do and who they are, a common home item like the iPhone or Alexa wouldn’t have been given the same name.
So make sure you thoroughly research and comprehend your brand. That would make it easier to properly envision your brand and decide which kind of name would be most effective.
2. Start Generating Ideas
It’s time to put the knowledge you’ve learned about your brand to work and start looking for names that meet your company’s standards, so start your brainstorming by gathering your creative team, if you have one.
Keep in mind that the brainstorming phase is not the evaluation phase. As a result, you are not required to critically analyze the ideas you come up with. Instead, focus on letting your imagination go wild.
Do not be scared to come up with and include in your naming list some names you think are horrible. You never know what possibilities they could hold.
Here are some simple tools to help you simplify and add flair to your naming process:
- Thesaurus
- Industry jargon
- Rhyming words
- Product name generator
- Visual names relating to a color
Additionally, it’s important to have a mix of people from various age groups on your creative team since their perspectives on new vs. classic business names will provide you with a number of angles to take into consideration.
Try to gather at least 200 possible names before the brainstorming session is up. By doing this, you will have a large word pool to choose from when you begin to condense the list.
3. Verify
We all wish you strike ‘naming gold,’ and your top name among the names you gathered could be the best one for your business! However, a few checks must be cleared before we can start celebrating your newfound name.
The following validation techniques can be used to make sure the name(s) you’ve chosen are both appropriate and available.
- Customer Opinions: Customer reviews are crucial for validating your brand. Ensure you seek the opinions of some members of your intended market to confirm if they love your ideal name. There’s really no point in choosing a name that no one will love.
- Corresponding Domain Name: Every business needs a website. Therefore, be careful to check to see if the requested domain name is available.
- Trademark: Even though the process may seem tiresome today, it will save you a lot of trouble in the future because most words are already covered in some way by trademarks. Additionally, make sure you get legal counsel before trademarking your company.
Conclusion
A great brand name could boost your company’s productivity and revenue, giving you an advantage over rivals, so be sure to get the best you can for your business.
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.