It is possible that all of us sound more the term Branding because this name is attributed to the process in which the brand of a company is built. In other words, the corporate identity is developed to “launch” our company to the market and ensure that it is positioned in the market, becoming a benchmark for the entire target audience.
For this, it is essential to have a good marketing and communication plan.
All this is very good but it is not enough. It is necessary to work on the choice of our brand name. All the techniques used for this purpose are called Naming.
What is Naming
The word Naming comes from English, being its translation denomination or appointment. It is the first step that must be taken to give meaning to our brand. It may seem simple and purely symbolic, but the importance of doing this job well is very high.
The name of our brand will be the first impression that all people have of our business, so it is essential to transmit well all the values that we have proposed in the beginning.
First of all, we must be clear that the name we choose must be clear and concise, with ease for pronunciation and writing and that is attractive to the person who listens to it.
Naming process:
If you are thinking of carrying out this laborious process yourself, these are the main steps that you should follow according to our criteria.
✅ Arm yourself with patience, because this task will take you a long time. It is not something simple or fast.
✅ Take paper and pen and spend the time you need to perfectly describe your business. You should know what you do and who your competition is, mainly. To complete this part, why not use the well-known 5W rule? How ?, When ?, Who ?, Where ?, Why or for what? Always directing these questions to the two main pillars, your business, and your competition.
✅ As we said at the beginning, our brand name must transmit all the values that we thought at first. Well, now is the time to decide what we want our name to say about us.
✅ A little brainstorming can be the key to success. Based on all the information you have collected so far, spend another important part of the time writing all the names that you can think of.
For this part of the process to be more complete, it would be interesting to contrast your results with other people on the team and to contribute ideas to the future name of your brand.
No one is better than you will know the meaning of your business. That is why all ideas and suggestions have to be well received. At this time, the more ideas you have better, then we must select the ones you have not liked the most.
✅ Once we have a small selection, we will check that the chosen names are not registered.
✅ In addition, we are not only interested in knowing if the possible names are registered or not. It is very important to find out if the domains for the selected name are available.
Tools for Naming
Dictionaries are some of the most useful tools for this process. By consulting the keywords of our business in them, we can obtain information about the meaning, the etymological origin, synonyms, etc. from the same.
On the internet, there are countless dictionaries. From the most classic ones like that of the Royal Spanish Academy to more extravagant dictionaries like Rimador, which returns rhymes for our keywords.
If we want to search for names in another language, we can use Wordsafety, which will pronounce the word introduced in the selected language. In this same line, another interesting dictionary is the Urbandictionary that will indicate if the chosen word has negative connotations in another language.
In addition to the dictionaries, we can consult other pages that will give us information about the availability of domains. These results will also be useful for the work at hand.
Tips to choose the name of your brand
As a marketing agency with some experience in Branding, we have developed this small list with some tips that when choosing your brand name could be very useful. Your name should meet one of these aspects, if not all:
✅ It must be a new name, unique and different from all existing. The struggle for differentiation must start from the beginning. Your name has to evoke differentiation and novelty.
✅ The name must be suggestive. With it, anyone who hears it should think about what we want our name to suggest.
✅ It would be interesting, that it had flexibility. That is, it can be extended to other sectors or categories because although we start our business focused on a sector, we will never know what the future will bring. If our name is too explicit and not very flexible, we can not use it for other categories.
✅ Easy to pronounce, read, and write. Regardless of the country in which we are going to operate, our name should be easy to be pronounced and written. If this is not the case, we will make it difficult for people who listen to it to retain it and relate it to our activity.
✅ As we have already mentioned, we will have to ensure that both your registration and the possible domains are available to us. If we choose a name that we can not use in our domain, the positioning tasks will be negatively affected.
✅ In relation to the previous point, following the line of positioning, it is advisable that the name be short. In this way, people will remember it more easily and, in addition, the domain will also be brief. This favors the positioning, especially in social networks like Twitter where the characters available for writing are limited.
✅ We will also have to avoid connotations and / or negative associations. The name should not suggest anything negative.
✅ Many companies have a certain background with user stories for the creation of the name. If yours is one of them, do not hesitate and take advantage of that opportunity. You will not find anything more suitable for your business than the story itself.
Conclusion
The ultimate goal of this laborious and important work of naming is that anyone outside our business quickly identifies our product/service by simply listening to our brand name.
Also, if we have done this task well, we could be able to make our public appreciate our most differentiating characteristics in the face of our competition.
In the end, we must not forget that we buy brands because they make us feel special, not products without value or personality.