How to name your business or product

2008-07-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick guide to help anyone who is starting to think of name ideas for a new business or product they may have. There are books and books about this subject and I could write forever about it, but I will try to keep this short and focused on the most important points towards any business or product name creation. Please bare in mind that even though you are trying to just come up with 1 word (business or product name) it can be a daunting task and there is so much more to the subject than what is written in this blog.

Coming up with a business name can sometimes take forever, because you think that it will be easy, but after you run your name idea by a few friends you realize that your name idea is lame, 2 weeks later you're still trying to figure out a good name. 1st of all, a good business name is extremely important if you are serious about your business or product, don't just settle on a kind of ok name. So the question is, how to figure out that perfect name for your business or product?
The ideal business or product name you should use is one that somehow is intriguing, and can captivate people's attention and curiousity. You need a name that people see and they are curious about what business or product is behind the name. Also the name should be engaging enough that people think about it long enough to get it impressed into their memory, making the name memorable.
There are 3 most important points about the name:
1: Visual
2: Verbal
3: Perceptual Meaning

These 3 points are the most important aspects of the name towards memorableness and the what I call "the cool factor".
1: visual; People will first most, see your name, on the Internet, in the phone book, and advertisements. Does the name look cool? and is it easy to pronounce by sight alone?

2: verbal; 2nd most, people will bring up the name during conversation, either over the phone or over dinner or at a meeting etc.. How does the name sound? and can the name be spelled easily just by being heard?

3: perceptual meaning; by the look or sound or look and sound, what is the meaning of the name that someone would think of right away by what the name word is? an example of this could be yahoo!. My first thought that comes to my mind is that yahoo means someone is having a lot of fun and yelling YAHOO!.

Use these 3 points as a guideline when you're brainstorming name ideas.

The goal to strive for while developing a name, could be a couple different end results, for instance, you may be striving for a professional sounding name with a serious business sound, or you may be striving for a more creative fun sound, for examples; IBM, this is a more on the serious nature of a business name, there is no joking around. example 2; yahoo, or google, these are more on the lighter side of names and they convey creativeness. Do you see the difference? so what is your name idea goal? Serious, or more laid back?

Keeping these short guidelines listed above in mind, it's time to start brainstorming name ideas.
There are a few different ways to come up with names, there are different types of names as well.
coined names: Microsoft, Gatorade, Intel, RiteAid, FedEx
geographic names: Seattle's Best, Bank of America, America Online
person's name names: Ford, Disney, Hilton, McDonald's
real word names: Saturn, Oracle, Apple
invented word names: Acura, Kodak, Pixar, Mozilla
short phrases names: Burger King, Circuit City, Bed, Bath, and Beyond
initials: IBM, ABC, CBS, AOL
number names: 7-11, Big 5, 3M

There are more other types as well, but these should give you an idea about how different businesses have different types of names.

So how do we go about finding the right name for your business or product? Some companies and people hire professional branding and naming agencies, but this can be costly, however they usually do come up with great names for your business or product and all you have to do is pick which name you like. This is probably the easiest way to get a great name, but if your looking to save your money and figure out a great name yourself, the first step would be to start brainstorming.

Brainstorming is a very easy thing to do and I won't go into too much detail about it here, but the basic idea is to write down business and product name ideas on paper or using notepad on your computer. Write down as many name ideas as you can for about 10 minutes, however for the sake of keeping this blog entry short, I suggest that brainstorming means not just to brainstorm for 10 minutes, but to generally brainstorm for the entire duration of your name venture. What I mean by this is to continually try to think up name ideas for as long as it takes until you finally come up with a few real potential name ideas. This could be days or even a few weeks. I'm not saying that you should focus every minute of your day on trying to come up with a name, but do try to think of name ideas which you are probably already doing. Also try coming up with coined name ideas, take 2 words that are somehow associated with your business or product and try to put them together somehow to make 1 word. Use a thesaurus to find synonyms and put those words together to see if you can make a unique new 1 word that could be a good name. Keep brainstorming and writing name ideas down.

After a while, you should have some name ideas that are really standing out to you, the hardest part really about coming up with a really good name is simply choosing the best of the bunch. This is a difficult choice because the name you finally choose is the name you are going to be risking your business or product on. Coming up with name ideas is actually very easy, it's the decision of which one to use that is very difficult, but in order to move ahead with your business or product, you have to eventually choose a name.

To narrow down the decision process, start by determining to see if your name ideas are available for use. Type your name idea into google and other search engines to see what comes up. If there is already a business or product with that particular name, it will probably show up right away in the search engine's results and you will know right away that maybe you shouldn't use that name since someone else already has it. If the name idea doesn't show up in the search engine's results, then take it to the next search step, which is to use the USPTO's TESS system. The USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) has a free online Patent and Trademark search system called TESS. Type your name idea into TESS and see if anyone has a trademark using that name. If there are no results, try a few close alternatives in TESS to see if there are any trademarks that are very similar to your name idea. If the results don't have a very similar match, then your name idea is looking pretty good. The next step is to search using a site like http://www.switchboard.com/ or yellowpages.com. These websites are great because they are like the yellow pages for the whole country. If anyone is running a legitimate business using your name idea, it will most likely show up in the search results on these sites, because if the business hasn't trademarked it's name, it almost certainly has filed a DBA (Doing Business As (Fictitious Business Name)) with it's local government.

After you have done all the searches etc.. you will most likely end up with about 5 to 10 serious name ideas that you will be seriously considering to choose from for your final decision on which name to use for your business or product. This is where you will need to get some feedback on the name ideas from people outside of yourself and anyone else who has participated in your name venture. Run the name ideas past some of your friends. Run the name ideas past random people. After about a week, ask your friends what some of the name ideas were that you ran past them, if they remember one of them, that is a pretty good indicator that the name idea is memorable. If they really remember one and are even positively responding to it, then you know it's memorable and has personality. The best way to make a final decision on a name is when multiple people all agree that the name is a good one and that you should use it for your name, and when you know that many people are positively responding to that name, you will gain confidence in the name and will probably ultimately choose it to run your business under or sell your product under.

That is the basics of how to come up with a great name for your business, service, product, or even a domain name. Like I said before, there are entire books written about how to come up with 1 name for your business or product. Naming businesses and products has become an art and a science and it all comes down to how the general public will respond to that 1 word or short phrase that will be your business or product name. The next step is the Logo. The visual branding of your business or product is another extremely important aspect of your business or product's image. Stay tuned for my next Blog entry about how to come up with and make a final decision on a logo for your business or product.
-enspaceman
http://www.enginame.com/

Naming your business or product

How to name your business or product