Just call your baby – Brand naming
The (brand) name when a new baby is to be born
Every once in a while a new product or service is defined, then created and developed: the new baby.
Somewhere during the course of this, the problem or the challenge of the naming emerges.
If the product is part or an extension of a family of products or solutions the naming can reflect this easily by a higher number or adding a superlative.
However if it is a complete new solution addressing a different problem then a new name needs to be selected and approved by management.
In order to give it a sense you can embed a characteristic or a feature of the product or the solution.
If not you can just create a well sounding brand name.
Should the name have an alphabetical advantage? Then let the first letter be an ‘A’ or even a ‘1′.
Lacking inspiration?
There are brand name generators available if you would be missing inspiration:
- Straight forward or more sophisticated
- Or even in Web 2.0 style.
- If you really don’t have any inspirations then find a variation on the brand name of the market leader.
Testing
After generating several alternatives then you should test for:
- Possible infringements with other well established brand names
- Is the name sticky ?
- Meaning of parts of the name
- Sounding: how does it sounds? Good or awkward or boring?
- Ease of pronunciation in your language
- Ease of pronunciation in foreign languages: you never know your reach
- Meaning in foreign languages: words do have different meanings in languages and in slang
- Possible associations with the name
- Lookup on Google
- Do a “Whois” lookup
Look-up warning
Still be carefull with searching on the Internet as there are pirates are out there who want to snap up your domain name before you have registered it.
We used to use a popular service that instantly shows if the domain name you type is free for a whole bunch of tld’s like .com, .net, .us. Ideal when brainstorming for domain names.
However, after a while we got the impression that names we liked started to get registered out of the blue.
Coincidence? Who knows.
Just to be safe, we did our checks using plain commandline whois on a Linux box from that day on.
The River of no return
All in all it is quite a challenge to come up with a good name and time is limited as development is moving ahead and launch in nearing. Moreover once settled for a brand name you and the company are likely stuck with it for a very long time as changing brand names is very expensive and can even cost the company customers.
Giving your baby a name is like in the River of no Return.
What was your worst and best naming experience?
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