Business and Product Naming
What should I name my business or product and how should I do it?
There are several different methods for creating a name for your product or business. At Namexpress.com, we use a number of different approaches depending upon what it is we are naming. The first things we consider when starting a naming project are:
1. Who is the target audience for the product or business?
2. What is going to be the feel of the brand?
Who is the target audience?
We start with a description of the business or product and the target audience. The target audience or demographic is important, a name that will appeal to fashion conscious teens is going to be much different than a name that needs to appeal to an older crowd looking to invest their money. Jot down who your target audience is, it may be a narrow audience such as “teenage boys into gaming” or as broad as “everybody”.
What is the feel of the brand?
The second factor involves the feel of the brand. By this we mean, what impression should the name get across? When we talk about “feel of the brand”, in essence we’re referring to things like:
- This is going to be a hip clothing store.
- This is a business that people who are looking to invest can trust.
- This is a line of tough accessories for hard core off-roaders.
- This is a line of organic produce that must appeal to the health conscious.
Keep this real simple, look at the bullet points above, the words hip, trust, tough, organic are the ideas that we would start with in these instances. Make a note of the brand feel ideas you come up with.
Now that you have the target audience identified and the impression you want your business or product name to get across, we can get down to the process of creating or generating name ideas. What we do is create a list of potential names then we refer back to the notes we’ve written down, and determine if the names we’ve created appeal to the audience and work with the feel of the brand.
It can be tough creating name ideas, and there is no shortage on opinions on the best approach. We usually go down a few different roads when it comes to creating names. Below are brief descriptions of different styles of names for products and businesses, create a few names in each category below and start a list.
Descriptive Names
First, we usually look at descriptive names, examples include Mrs. Field’s Cookies, Milk Bones, Microsoft Word and Sony Memory Stick. These names describe the product or define what the business does. Business names such as General Electric, General Motors and Tom’s Tire are all in the descriptive category. Make a list of any descriptive names that you come up with.
Geographic or Location-based Names
In some cases, geographic names may be appropriate such as Beale Street Market, Pacific Coast Coffee, or Great Lakes Marketing. The obvious thing to keep in mind in the case of geographic related names is expansion; if you start out as the Summit Street Diner, then open other locations at a future time the location based name may be an issue. In any case, if you come up with some location based name ideas, put them on your list.
Related Abstractions or Evocative Names
These are names that may be related in some way to the product, business or brand feel but are not obviously descriptive. The name Google, for example, is a deliberate misspelling of the word “Googol” which is a large number 10100, representing a very large number of search sources. Nike is the Greek goddess of victory, Nero, the CD burning software is from Nero burning Rome. If you want to represent “speed” a name such as “Velocity” may be appropriate, etc. Think of some abstract names and put them on your list. In some cases, we use our own NameBuilder Name Creation software to help with these types of names, basically, NameBuilder includes a database of related words, so if you type in “speed” you’ll get name ideas such as “Accel” (accelerate), or “Catapult” etc. Using a thesaurus may be helpful for this, but the thesaurus will only give you synonyms, and not necessarily related words or related emotional words that are appropriate as names. .
Coined Names
Coined names generally refer to new words, such as Pleomax, or Optiplex. There are three different styles commonly used. One style is to take existing words or portions of words and fuse them together such as Microsoft or OfficeJet. You can do this by making lists of words and trying to combine them in combinations. Again, we use NameBuilder to speed up this process both by using its built in concatenating database or creating new word section lists to tie together. Another style of coined name is our Pleomax example (which is actually a name for a mouse by Samsung), this is again a concatenated name using a less common word section (pleo). The third type of coined name is a new word not made of any existing words such as Xerox or Kodak, in this case you simply create a new word. NameBuilder Name Creation software has a built in “Letter Fuser” function that combines every combination of vowels and consonants in the alphabet to help create a letter “fused” name. Try to come up with a few coined name ideas for your product or business and put them on your list.
At this point you should have a few descriptive names, a few evocative names, a few geographic names and a few coined names on your list. Look over the “brand feel” and target audience notes you made and look at the names you created, line off any names that you feel don’t represent the brand personality or the target audience.
With the names that are left, you have to ask yourself a few questions. Do I need a .com domain for my business and are any of the names on my list available to be registered? Check for domain availability first, you can go to any name registrar site and check for domain availability such as www.godaddy.com, www.dotster.com etc. There are literally millions of “.com” names registered, so creating a name that has an available .com domain may be difficult, but it is possible. You might consider other domain extensions such as “.biz”, etc., but we are firm believers that .com extensions are the way you want to go.
You also may want to check to see if the name you want to use for your business or product is available as a trademark. In the U.S., simply to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site at www.uspto.gov, navigate to the trademark section, and you will find a “Search” section where you can search the trademark database. There is an art to searching the trademark database properly, so don’t assume that just because the exact name you are searching for is not registered that it is okay to be used. During your search you need to look at names that are “close” to the one you’re searching are registered (i.e., one letter different, same sound, etc.) A qualified trademark attorney is always recommended if you’re in doubt.
Another good practice for determining if the names you’ve created are already being used is to simply search Google or Yahoo using the name you are considering as the search term.
Searching for name availability is similar to panning for gold, it’s time consuming, and 98% of the name ideas you start with will likely be taken already. If you get stuck, frustrated, or are in a hurry, let us know. At www.namexpress.com we’ve been creating names for businesses and products for over a decade. In addition to our NameBuilder Name Creation software, we offer reasonably priced naming services and have a variety of techniques for creating effective names that enhance the value of your brand.