If coming up with an incredible business name were as easy as spouting off ideas and picking your favorite, every company in the world would have a winning name. The process is a little more complicated than that, but luckily the experts at NameStormers have mastered a methodology that works. Ready to get started? This handy guide to naming a business will help.
Establish Your Naming Objective
The first step is to figure out what you want your name to do. The obvious answer is “attract customers,” but dig into the specifics. What brand personality do you want the name to convey: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, or ruggedness — or perhaps a combination of two? Who are your customers? What is their target age range and income level? What main qualities of your company do you want them to know, such as integrity, approachability, or innovativeness?
Understanding your mission and your target is the key to creating a name that you can build a brand on. Never skip this step in the process, or you will regret it down the road!
Cultivate a Productive Brainstorming Environment
For some people, brainstorming is the most enjoyable part of naming, but for others it’s intimidating. Some personality types like gathering in a conference room full of people and letting their creativity loose. Others would rather blend in with the scenery and will only participate when forced. It’s important to make sure that everyone you’ve asked to participate in the naming process is comfortable and feels free to speak their mind.
Be wary of gathering too big or too small of a group; you want enough voices to ensure diversity of opinions, but not so many that you’re pulled in several different directions and struggle to establish a consensus. As odd as it may sound, the process of naming a business tends to bring out passionate opinions, and the whole situation can quickly devolve into chaos. Choose just a handful of people whose opinions you value.
Vet Your Favorite Names
So, you’ve brainstormed some winners. Many people think the process ends there, but that’s only the beginning — for us, at least. Once you have a list of name candidates that you like, you need to make sure they are both available and appropriate. At NameStormers, we perform a preliminary trademark check as well as a dotcom check to weed out the ones that aren’t up to snuff. Linguistic screening is an additional service that we offer, specifically to help our clients who plan to launch on a global scale understand how their business name will be received in other languages and cultures.
A thorough vetting process is absolutely crucial. Sometimes this step leads to tweaks. Other times, you unfortunately have to cross a good one off the list. It’s hard to let a good name go, but it’s worth it for results that our clients can feel confident about.
Test the Names with Your Audience
During the internal back-and-forth of the naming process, it can be easy to lose sight of what your target is looking for. That’s why you never want to go straight from picking a name to launching it — that would mean skipping a decisive and integral step in the process. In order to see your name with clear eyes, you need to test it with your audience.
NameStormers can conduct quantitative name evaluation research to reveal in-depth insights about your top name candidates. We can design the tests in order to understand the participants’ snap judgments, as most people make quick decisions when it comes to engaging with brands. We can also test the memorability of the names, and then we compile the data and present it to you in an easily digestible summary. We don’t make any decisions for you, but instead equip you with the information you need to choose which name you want to represent your brand, products, and services.
Create a Comprehensive Branding Strategy Before Launch
Selecting the right name for your business is a major victory, but it’s only winning the battle and not the war. In order for your business to succeed, you need a long-term branding strategy. Your name is the foundation of that, but there are other things to consider. Designing a naming architecture is an excellent way to create thematic cohesion throughout all your current and future names. NameStormers can help you with naming architecture, as well as logo creation and product and service naming.
How NameStormers Can Help with Naming a Business
NameStormers is a comprehensive corporate naming agency focused on building long-term relationships with our clients. Our portfolio reflects partnerships with businesses of all sizes and types, from startups and nonprofits to Fortune 500 companies. We’ve been in business for nearly 30 years, and we have refined our process to produce successful results for our clients. Contact us today to get started on naming a business!