Unlike other naming companies that may take months to develop a brand name for a client, NameStormers will create your new brand name in a few short weeks, without exhausting your brand-building dollars. Our naming agency’s simple, straightforward process is geared to generate memorable brand names that cut through the clutter and grab immediate mind-share. Your business will achieve payback on a brand name development effort in days or weeks, not months or years.

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NameStormers interviews key team members, customers, managers and investors to develop a Name Development and Brand Strategy Overview.

We ask questions like:

• What do you want the company name to do?

• What are your brand archetypes? What is your positioning?

• What personality or persona do you want the name to reflect?

• Describe your prospective customer today? Tomorrow?

• When and where will the brand name be used?

• Who are your competitors? Where is the competitive opportunity?

• What name ideas have already been considered and dismissed and why?

• What are some brand names you like and don’t like and why?

The Gather step might span a couple of days, up to a week, and include a review of your positioning, competitive intelligence, and top line research results. NameStormers will also visit competitor web sites and often conduct field trips to view retail products on the shelf.

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After refining the Name Development and Brand Strategy Overview with you, your naming consultants will begin more extensive internal brainstorming and name ideation sessions. NameStormers first identifies the emotions associated with your brand’s archetypes and then focus on the key “dimensions” to pursue for name development. For example, naming consultants might identify “Textures” and “Shapes” as two dimensions to dive into when naming a new kind of doughnut. We may then come up with specific brand name candidates (like RingLeaders or Softballs) after pondering related word, concept and semantic associations. Some of our team members feel that naming a business, product, or service is more of a science than an art, and may start by following a linguistic architecture or sound symbolism approach. Others start with nothing more than a blank sheet of paper. And so on. The backgrounds and approaches of the NameStormers team vary as greatly as the brand names we generate.

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NameStormers prescreens all of our best name ideas for U.S. Federal and/or Canadian trademark issues and weed out those that fail before presentation to you.

We can also take your favorite brand names through a deeper preliminary trademark and linguistic screening which typically includes checking for:

• U.S. and international trademark issues using Thomson & Thomson’s databases

• Common law usage issues over the Internet

• Phone book listings

• Dot-com availability

• Profane or off-color meanings in multiple languages

If you’re still not satisfied with the business’ names that make it through the deeper screenings, NameStormers will repeat our creative and U.S. / Canadian trademark prescreening steps as many times as needed, until you’re satisfied with the final company name, at no additional charge.

NameStormers presents the company names that have passed our screenings to you. We provide you with the rationale behind each name as well as many tagline ideas to help frame the name in a context similar to the way your customers might see it.

Your naming consultants will then ask you to evaluate each of the name ideas in three ways:

• Your initial, intuitive reaction and rating

• A deeper pondering, where you consider the name’s potential to grow into a strong, distinctive brand with the right care and feeding, such as the right graphics, promotion, advertising and other marketing communications wrapped around the name

And most importantly, stickiness or memorability, the single most important characteristic of a great company name

NameStormers discusses the thinking behind the ratings, other comments, and new name suggestions for future rounds of brand name development with your company’s team.

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For each name, NameStormers takes each of your team member’s ratings and comments and enter them into a spreadsheet. The names are sorted on various metrics, such as average brand potential, weighted brand potential and highest score received. Naming consultants recap the feedback for each brand name by individual, sales office or country, including specific comments and new name suggestions. We then review all feedback with you, using it to guide the brand name development of more focused and on-target names.

This creative / name generator / ideation process is repeated as many times as necessary, at no additional charge to you, until you are satisfied with your short list of brand name ideas. Typically, this requires two or three rounds of names over a two to three week period, although this time frame can be compressed, if necessary.

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Optional Quantitative & Qualitative Name Evaluation Research 

NameStormers can conduct a hybrid name test that allows our naming consultants to combine our traditional quantitative, on-line study with one-on-one, live moderator “deeper dive” sessions. This approach often provides the statistically significant quantitative data needed to evaluate both existing and new customer name preferences across the U.S. or globally, not just in a few key markets. It will also give you deeper insights behind the company name preferences, insights that have historically required one-on-one phone or in-person interviews, or traditional focus groups.

Key deliverables from this brand development step include:>

• Recap of insights regarding each name’s compatibility with concept, memorability, extendibility, differentiation and other key issues

• Moderator summary report highlighting common trends and important comments from the one-on-one “deeper dive” sessions

• Transcripts, cross-tabulations and a complete PowerPoint presentation

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Once your NameStorming project is completed, your business will have several strong name candidates that have made it through two levels of preliminary legal screening and one or two levels of linguistic screening. You’ll be presented with the rationale behind each name, tag line ideas, and a solid understanding of how each name fits your positioning and differentiates your company from the competition. If NameStormers also conducted name testing research, you’ll have the supporting data, the comparisons to national norms and the customer insights needed to help you select your top name candidate.

Oftentimes, the initial launch of your new company or brand name pays for itself in just days or weeks, not months or years. Many of the brand names we’ve developed for clients have proven to generate an internal excitement and energy that is contagious, self-propagating, and almost viral in nature. It’s not uncommon for our clients to tell us things like, “We paid for the entire name development and roll-out effort with the first trade show!” This is what a great name is all about.