Do you have the responsibility of creating brand names for your company’s product or service? What guidelines do you use? Considerable thought and research should go into selecting the name, as it will hopefully last decades, but often it seems that little thought goes into at all.
Branding experts have defined dozens of categories for the different types of brand names (blending, acronyms, personal names, etc). Those strategic categories notwithstanding, I have four quick and simple rules that I follow. A couple of them are admittedly no-brainers, but I see a lot small businesses disregard them as they plow forward.
The name should:
1. Have a pleasant meaning — Is there an interesting story behind it? Is there a synonym, a word origin, a play-on-words, or a hidden subtlety that supports the brand? Is it descriptive of the product’s offering? Good examples are Intel, Google, Amazon, HBO, MasterCard, and Acura. Not-so-good examples, in my opinion, are CVS, Quiznos, Listerine, Zillow, Kinkos, and eBay.
2. Be easy to read, spell, say, and remember — This is increasingly important in a global economy as more non-native English speakers have access to the brand. Good examples (in addition to those in #1 include Coke, Dell, Apple, Target, and Ford. Not-so-good examples, in my opinion, are Hyundai, Geico, Reuters, and Hammacher Schlemmer.
3. Be currently untrademarked — This should be a no-brainer, but a lot of companies create a name for a new product, service, program, or initiative without checking with the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) at www.uspto.gov to see if it is trademarked. They either don’t know how to research it or they think that no one will catch them or care if the name is owned by someone else. It doesn’t take but a minute.
4. Have an available domain — It isn’t necessarily a death knell if the URL for your new brand is owned by someone else. One can own a domain without having a trademark on the word. But if you can create a new brand name and also get the domain for it, you clearly have a great protection for its future.
Regarding my subjective not-so-good brands listed above, I realize that many of them are iconic brands that have dominated their categories for years. The idea is that, if you had to create a new name for your pre-launched product tomorrow, would you select a name that had their unfavorable characteristics?
