How to create a great Brand Name
There are nearly 300 Million businesses around the world.
Some are bigger as Google and Apple. Others are as small as one person’s business. Choosing a great brand name for your new business is harder and tricky. So how can you choose a brand name which withstands in the market among your competitors?
A good brand name can help your brand to become visible in the market and help your audience to understand your brand message and what you represent. It can help you carry your values effectively.
Creating a great brand takes lots of effort and research to create your own brand and stand out in the market, here you can win the name game by using these three steps to create a great brand that suits well with your brand strategy.
1. Select the type of name you want
There are 7 categories of naming your business. All the business name in the world can come under there categories
Eponymous means named after a person or a group, when a business name representing the vision and beliefs of their founders like Adidas or Tesla. Adidas’s name derived from Adolf Dassler, the founder of the company. Tesla wasn’t created by Nikola Tesla (yeah it was Elon), but the name is an homage to Tesla’s electrical engineering achievements.
Descriptive means creating brand name telling exactly what is your business or service it like British Airways, or Sri Lankan Airlines. But these types of names sometimes can be harder to pronounce or protect.
Acronymic means a short version of your business, like the first letters of your business name like KFC or HSBC, sometimes it can be used to protect the business interest, for example, Kentucky Fried Chicken switched to KFC because the fried chicken didn’t sound too healthy.
Suggestive means suggest the idea of the business or service. Real words like Uber and Slack are directly scrapped from the dictionary. BER literally means an outstanding or supreme example, so works well for a company with big, broad and bold ambitions beyond ride-hailing. This might seem easy but with 300 million other businesses it can be hard to find the right name from the dictionary.
So companies like Facebook and Rayban are created by connecting two words together. These type of names are easy to memorize.
Since it is hard to find meaning full words from the dictionary companies like Kleenex and Pinterest created a name by adding or removing words, you need to careful sometimes it can sound weird or hard to memorize.
Associative names work by reflecting imagery and meaning back to the brand. In the logo of Amazon A and Z are connected to represent it has all the products in the world Red Bull associates to drink with bull-like qualities such as power and confidence.
Some brands are originated from non-English languages, like Samsung which means three stars in Korean. A Hulu is a bowl used to store precious things.
Finally, the seventh type is abstract names. Names like Rolex or Kodak. These names have no essential meaning but instead, rely on the power of phonetics to create really powerful brand names.
2. Decide what you want your name to say
The most important thing about the brand name is what your brand stands for in the market. The name itself must be representing a big idea like Nike. Nike is about winning, Apple is about simplicity and productivity, and Google comes from the maths term – a 1 with 100 zeros after it. So that really big number helps support the companies really big original vision to organize the world’s information.
3. Check the names is available
The last thing is about checking the availability, you need to check whether the name is taken or not. You also need to check the meaning of your name in other languages, because when you expand your market the last thing you want to an embarrassing.
You may already have an idea about Google’s parent company Alphabet. It is the most valuable company in the world. (Pssttt stock market) But the domain name Alphabet.com owned by car company BMW. So they came with www.abc.xyz
So as you consider your new brand, think carefully and ask yourself, what’s your big idea?
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