5 Tips to Building Better Brand Names

A crucial element of any business is the creation of a brand name by which people could identify the service or product it provides. It’s also one of the very first things you have to think about, as it’s something that will be stuck with your business for long.

This is why it’s necessary to be particular about coming up with the perfect brand name and the story behind this name for your business. It may not seem like a daunting task, but it requires careful consideration on various aspects of what kind of services or products you will be providing.

After all, the brand name, along with the logo and the type, sums up everything your business represents into a symbolic name.

Here are a few essential things you might want to consider before you decide on your brand name:

1. Ensure it’s Web-Friendly

In this age and time, if you want your business to flourish, it’s probably a must to bring it to the Internet. Therefore, you have to ensure if the brand name you’ll be coming up with is “web-friendly“.

The brand name should be “web-friendly” in the sense that the name can be put on the web with Internet users having few issues finding and accessing it to gain information about the business.

First, if you’re going to utilize the net for your business, you’ll need an official website to serve as a one-stop station for anyone interested to find out more about it.

This means getting a domain name that is distinctly associated with your business. Therefore, you should choose a brand name that people could easily remember rather than something complex and meaningless.

Take for example, www.tchm.com versus www.tchmedical.com. The second one seems easier to remember because of the word “medical“. People would recall “tch” and “medical” better than simply “tchm“, which does not consist of any real word and does not give any clue about the business.

Second, given that social networking sites like Facebook are the in-thing now, you might be considering marketing your business through them in future. One thing you should thus check is that there are no pages created with the same name as your brand.

This will prevent the dilution of your branding and easily allow people to find the exclusive page of your business and gather more information about it.

Other things you may also wish to consider include your future business email address (which will most likely bear close resemblance to your brand name), the ease of using your brand name to search for your business on search engines, etc.

2. Simplicity

The easier it is for the brand name to be pronounced, the better it can be spread through word-of-mouth. Similarly, the fewer the number of words for the brand, the easier it is to be remembered.

Sometimes words are not spelt out the way it sounds, and people may have difficulties searching for the company on the net. For example, although “Xerox” has become an effective brand name that became synonymous with “photocopy“, it probably had some pronunciation issues when it first existed.

People might have mistaken the pronunciation with the incorrect spelling of “Zerox”. The company may have lost a significant portion of their potential customers just because these people couldn’t get the spelling right.

So when it comes to ensuring that your brand can be remembered accurately, simplicity could be the best policy.

3. Contains the Essence of Business

Just as your business should have a unique selling preposition to distinguish yourself from your competitors, your brand name should also manifest that which is distinct from the others.

It can also be used to reflect the strength of your business or give a hint on what kind of services/products it actually provides.

For example, the search engine “Google” might have given us the impression of “googly” eyes, which we can associate with searching for things. Such a company name lets people effortlessly identify with what the company provides and serve as a good anchor in their memory.

Other brand names may seemingly bear no relation to the business, but they emphasize on the “feeling” aspect of the name. No one probably have any idea what “Starbucks” is when they first heard it, but once people realize it’s a coffeehouse chain, it sticks in a strange way.

The name evokes energy and spontaneity, just as a cup of coffee would do to you every morning.

4. Stand Out from the Crowd

Simplicity aside, brand names need to be memorable as well in order to create a buzz and generate an interest in what is it that your business provides. Making your brand name too descriptive and straightforward may kill the curiosity that is needed to sustain the interest.

Before coming up with a few potential brand names, it would be a good idea to do some research on the ones that your competitors have come out with. Identify what are the similarities across the different brand names.

Subsequently, when you generate some potential brand names for your company, resolve not to come up with something similar to them.

In other words, your brand name should stand out from the crowd, by which I’m referring to your closest competitors. After all, a large part of your business concerns will revolve around these few.

As a potential customer considering the various options between you and your competitors, which one would most likely catch his or her attention initially? The one with a brand name that doesn’t sound like the others.

5. Have the Logo in Mind

Brand name and logo go hand-in-hand for the most part. If you want to have a strong branding for your business, make sure that people can identify the logo with the brand name.

The brand “Apple“, for instance, has a pretty straightforward logo in the shape of an apple. This makes it simple for people to recall your business. Why? Instead of relying on solely the linguistic memory for the brand name, they are now also able to store the visual memory of the brand by associating it with the logo.

Now that you know how significant the connection between the name and the logo is to your branding, it’s necessary to think of a name that affords you more freedom in the creative process of your logo.

Personally, I believe an “image” logo is stronger than a “word” logo, so it might be a good idea to consider a brand name that can be symbolized as an object or something.

Try comparing Apple‘s “image” logo to Microsoft‘s “word” logo, I think most of us would agree that the former takes lesser cognitive resources to remember than the latter.