Key Points:
- A great name is memorable, flexible, and legally available.
- Short, catchy names often have higher value than obvious ones.
- Pick a name that matches your budget and future goals.
- Test names carefully to avoid costly mistakes.
Why Your Name Matters More Than You Think
Ever wonder what your brand name is really worth? It’s a question most business owners never seriously consider until they’re stuck with something that’s holding them back. The truth is, your name can make or break your business before customers even know what you do.
A Tale of Two Names: When Shorter Beats Obvious
Here’s a perfect example. Take two names: “OMGO” and “Healthcrafter.” Your gut reaction? Healthcrafter sounds way better, right? You immediately get what it’s about. OMGO could be anything – a tech startup, a food app, who knows?
But here’s the kicker: domain evaluation tools say OMGO is worth 100 times more than Healthcrafter. Yeah, you read that right. One hundred times more.
Why? Four letters. Easy to say, impossible to misspell. Works in any language. People remember short, punchy names. Think Google, Nike, Apple. None of those names told you exactly what the company did when you first heard them, but look where they ended up.
The Power of a Good Story
OMGO might be a great name for that. So what’s the story you can wrap around? Well, the OM is in as in meditation, as in yoga, as in relaxation, as in mindfulness. The GO is in active living — right, on the go, getting out there and living an active, healthy lifestyle. It’s sort of like a Google-type name: unfamiliar at first, but rich in potential and story. Once you understand the background, the name becomes sticky.
Now, take a look at the graphic on screen — we show a sample OMGO logo with five leaves. These leaves reinforce a connection to nature and well-being, but they can also be seen as the five fingers of a hand — reaching out, waving hello, or asking for support. This hand imagery opens the door for personification — one of the most important emerging trends in branding, especially in an AI-driven world.
The AI Revolution Changes Everything
Think of OMGO not just as a name, but as a persona. With AI playing a growing role in our daily lives, especially for kids, brands will increasingly become companions — trusted, interactive guides that offer support and care. In fact, some experts predict that for children under five, their closest companion may be an AI chatbot — one that understands them better than their own family, because it sees and hears them constantly, tracks their mood, and talks with them regularly.
That’s where OMGO shines. It has the right tone to become that AI friend. The leaves-as-hand visual metaphor invites a personal connection. The short, upbeat, and emotionally expressive name (“OMG!”) already resonates with younger audiences. It’s more than a brand. It can become a character — a helpful, supportive figure in your wellness journey.
That level of brand personification — where a name transforms into a trusted digital presence — is where the real long-term value lies. A name like OMGO isn’t just a label. It’s the foundation for an emotional relationship, a conversational interface, a lifelong companion. That’s a runway Healthcrafter, while solid and more direct, likely doesn’t offer.
But What If You’re On a Tight Budget?
Look, not everyone has Google’s marketing budget. If you’re bootstrapping this thing and need customers yesterday, maybe Healthcrafter is your better bet. It hits the ground running – people immediately understand you’re about crafting personalized health solutions.
Sure, it’s not going to win any creativity awards, and “health” gets thrown around so much in this space it may be tough to build a differentiating brand image. But if you need to make money next month, not next year, obvious beats clever every time.
Thinking Beyond Today
Here’s where it gets interesting though. OMGO could be a brand for just about anything – fitness gear, supplements, therapy services, meditation apps, you name it. It’s got room to grow in directions you haven’t even thought of yet.
Healthcrafter? It’s pretty much stuck in the health world. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it boxes you in. Five years from now, when you want to expand into something completely different, you might be kicking yourself.
The Stuff That Really Matters
At the end of the day, a name is only as good as what you build around it. You need to remember the boring but important stuff – can you trademark it? Does it mean something embarrassing in Spanish? Will your target customers remember it?
Then there’s the fun stuff – your logo, your tagline, your whole brand story. Even a name that seems flat at first can come alive with the right packaging. “Healthcrafter: A Tailored Approach for Your Personal Wellness” suddenly sounds a lot more professional than just “Healthcrafter” sitting there naked.
The Bottom Line
Your name’s worth depends on two things: how much you’re willing to invest in building it up, and how well it fits what you’re actually trying to do.
Abstract names like OMGO are like buying real estate in an up-and-coming neighborhood – risky, but potentially a huge payoff in a few years. Descriptive names like Healthcrafter are like buying in an established area – safer, but probably not as likely to make you as rich in a few years.
Neither approach is wrong. It just depends on your situation, your budget, and your appetite for risk. The worst thing you can do is not think about it at all and end up stuck with something that makes your life harder than it needs to be.
Making the Right Choice
Before you fall in love with any name, do your homework. Test it with real people. Make sure you can actually use it legally. Think about where you want to be in five years, not just where you are today.
And remember – the best name in the world won’t save a terrible product, but a terrible name can definitely kill a great one. Choose wisely.
Let us run with your project
Ready to go?
Together, we will get you across the finish line.
Transcription
Mike Carr (00:05):
Welcome back this week to naming in an AI Age, and we’re going to talk about what is your name worth? Have you ever thought about that question? Whether it’s your personal brand or your company product brand, maybe in your organization’s name. So when you think about how do you evaluate that and why that’s even important, I’m going to throw a couple names out for you just to think about OMGO and Healthcrafter, which one’s the best name? Now, you may say OMGO could be anything. Don’t know what that is. Or Healthcrafter. Well, that sort of sounds interesting. I have some idea what that is. Healthcrafter obviously the better name. What if I told you we own the.com for both of those? And by just the fact that we own the.com of OMGO, a lot of the evaluation services feel that’s worth 100 times more than 100 times more than Healthcrafter.
(00:56):
Why? Because it’s shorter. It’s just four letters. OMGO. It’s easy to say and spell. It works in multiple languages around the world. No one’s going to mistype it. It’s perhaps more memorable. Healthcraft is longer granted it, more obvious what it means, but it doesn’t necessarily have the same flexibility and versatility. But I don’t think that’s the most important criteria. Do you? The most important criteria might be, well, what are you going to use it for? And then what do you wrap around it? Have you done some of the other screening when it comes to, is it test wall in the marketplace? Is it legally available? How about the linguistics? Let’s talk about OMGO. Let’s pretend it was for a mental health app, a wellness app, and you think about why is that a big deal? Well, it’s a bigger deal now than perhaps it ever has been for a lot of reasons that we see in the media every day that people are wrapped up in social media and the mental health is suffering, especially for our kids.
(01:55):
OMGO might be a great name for that. So what’s the story you can wrap around? Well, the OM is in as in meditation, as in yoga, as in relaxation, as in mindfulness. The go is in active living right on the go. Getting out there and living an active healthy lifestyle. It’s sort of like a Google name, right? You don’t know exactly what an OM go is just like you didn’t know exactly what a Google was. But when you think about it, when you hear a little bit of the explanation of story, the name is sticky. It certainly is short, easy to say, easy to spell. And when you put a OMGO, and I have up on the screen right now, just a quick OMGO that we came up with for OMGO with the five Leaves, it sort of takes it to nature. You can get out into Mother Nature and you sort of get a sense this is about mental health and relaxation and mindfulness and wellness and all that sort of thing.
(02:48):
Or those five leads could be the five fingers of your hand reaching out for more resources, saying hi to somebody. Hey, welcome. I want to come talk to you. You could also personify OMGO. This is going to be a big deal. We think with AI in particular, there’s a lot of research now, a lot of thinking now that if your child’s under five years old, their most important friend is going to be an AI chatbot. That chatbot’s going to know more about them than you do as their parent, or you do as their brother and sister. Just think about that because they’re interacting with it. They’re talking to it. It sees them. It can assess. It’s the visual presentation, what’s stressing ’em out, how they’re doing, whether they’re smiling or not. And it’s going to ask ’em questions. They’re going to talk to it about anything they want to.
(03:35):
It’s going to be a really big deal, and it’s going to have all kinds of knowledge of your child or your customer that perhaps you don’t do. And so this is something that we think when it comes to personification is a real high potential, real new use for names and names that fit that. Also OMGO. If you’re targeting a younger audience, has OMG embedded in it as in, oh my gosh, is this cool or what? Look at what this Zap can do for me. Oh my gosh, right? So you can go down that sort of crazy zany route a little bit more, but you’re going to say, I don’t have any budget to build it, right? For me isn’t going to work. I have no money at all in which I can invest in. The name is not going to work. Oh my gosh, maybe Healthcraft is a better name for you, right?
(04:28):
Because Healthcrafter does hit the ground running. This idea that you can craft a persona, you can curate all the data and knowledge that’s out there and provide exactly the kind of therapy, exactly the kind of tools that you need for improved wellness and active living and a better life and better health in general. So now Healthcrafter, a name that might hit the ground running a little bit quicker than Om Go might look a little bit better for you. Will it be a strong brand down the road? Probably not. Health is used an awful lot in healthcare. Space. Craft isn’t. But certainly personalization is. So this is the typical trade trade-off. When you think about, well, how much is the name worth? Part of it is how much are you willing to invest in the name? An OMGO certainly has much more brand building potential, arguably in a much wider runway that you could build new products and services around if you want to get into other kinds of things.
(05:28):
OMGO can take you just about anywhere, right? It could be a brand on apparel for physical fitness workouts, whatever it might be. It could be supplements, it could be new therapies, new services. Who knows, right? So it has a much broader runway. Healthcrafter could still work well in the health space, but it’s probably limited to the health space. But health is not as distinctive. Healthcrafter will sound more similar to probably a lot of other health, this that’s names than an OMGO, which is pretty distinct and pretty different. So when you think about what’s that name worth to me, think about that OMGO that you wrap around it, that tagline that you wrap around it. Healthcrafter, a tailored approach for your wellness, a approach for personal wellness. The right tagline can really make the name come alive. The OMGO can even add more value to it. The fact that it’s legally available, the fact that linguistically seems to work in different languages, it doesn’t have any off-color meanings. You start to wrap all this stuff around a name and a name OMGO that maybe falls flat all of a sudden comes alive. And even a name like Healthcrafter starts to really, oh my gosh, that’s got tremendous potential and doesn’t require as much of an investment. Hope this helps. We’ll be talking to you again next week. See you.
