How to Choose a Brand Name

A brand gives your actual and potential clients a “hook” which they can use to remember that you exist. Every business has a business name and that is the start of their “brand”.   From there,  a business leader can develop a “personality”, or “brand identity”, for their business that is part of what attracts their customers.  This article introduces several useful external references that are worth reading to find your first, or next, “brand name”  Yellow Belt

There are many blogs and books on the topic of branding and brand names so we are not going to attempt to reproduce all that information here.  We leave it to leave it to the specialist writers.

We list in Resources below, some of the references we found particularly helpful.

Shorthand Tips

In this section, we dot point some of the useful tips gleaned from other writers that you might want to factor into your thinking.

• alliteration (starts with same letter) helps recall: e.g. Rolls Royce
• try to associate the name with the category: e.g. Flight Deck for travel
• use no more than 2 words.  Ideally ones that can be shortened to “friendly forms: e.g. Coca Cola becomes Coke 
• as few syllables as possible:  e.g. Pet Shop not National Pet Stores

Resources

There are a number of very good references to creating your brand name and we list some here.  We encourage you to read through them for a good introduction to the topic.  There is plenty of more advanced reference material that you can find in Amazon books and a Google search.

1. The Ultimate Guide: How to come up with a Business Name: a blog from SquadHelp  This is a comprehensive guide and we would start with this one
2. Choosing a Brand Name for your Business: a 5 step Guide; a blog from Rebrandly . It also reference 1. above
3. Business Name Generator from Shopify
4. Namemesh.com has a very helpful tool to show many possible domain names spun out from a “primer” word you give it.  This is a very useful tool for throwing up candidate brandnames and domains.  Try it with all the ‘action words’ that your brand might cover.  For (say) a hamburger shop, prime it with words like “hamburger”, “takeaway”, “family dining” etc
5. Neil Patel (a great reference for anything to do with digital marketing) has commented on the impact of brand name on SEO (Search engine optimization) which determines how many people find you in Google. Brand name and SEO link