Four Professionally Tested Tips for Naming Your New Business

Photo of author
Written By Grant Polachek
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. We are also the world's leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Potential customers always look for a convincing reason to pick one product or service over another. And that’s because most customers don’t have the luxury of trying out every product on the shelf to know which one would be best for them.

Before purchasing, customers often consider a product’s quality, price, availability, and brand name. This is where branding comes in.

Branding provides an excellent avenue for businesses to convince their target customer that their products are the best solutions to satisfy their needs. The quickest way your business can captivate your target audience is to give your products a captivating brand name.

And yes, it can be challenging to choose a perfect name for your company or product. Fortunately, we’re here to show you clear instructions on selecting a name that perfectly reflects your company.

Four Tips to Choosing an Exciting Business Name

1. Learn About Your Business Brand’s Features

As we said earlier, your business brand is the way to quickly convince your target audience to choose your business when they’re feeling perplexed. This power of a brand makes it an indispensable asset to your company.

Therefore, before you start finding a name for your business, ensure you take into account your brand’s values, tone, and the feelings it should arouse in your target audience.

One look at Apple, and it’s all too clear that the brand’s name flawlessly captures the company’s push for novelty, class, and luxury. The brand name only works because Apple embodies the identity and personality of the company. 

So be sure to consider your business brand when choosing a business name.

2. Start Coming up With Possible Brand Names

If you have a group already set up, call them together, give them an overview of your business’s brand, and get them a whiteboard and marker, some pens, a notebook, and some treats. Then, ask them to start brainstorming names that best describe your company. 

Focus on coming up with as many brief and creative company names accurately reflecting your brand as possible.

But also, remember that assessing the phrases you come up with during your brainstorming session might disrupt the process.

Consider utilizing one of these naming tools to reduce the workload: 

  • Thesauruses and dictionaries 
  • Color names with visual representations
  • Getting a premium domain for sale
  • Industry jargon
  • Rhymes

Before ending your brainstorming session, try to come up with at least 200 brief, easy-to-understand, and compelling words. It doesn’t matter whether those words are weird or abstract; unless you assess them, you won’t know their actual worth. 

You’ll have a large enough selection of workable choices to consider when we go on to the next phase if you collect lots of names while brainstorming.

3. Verify Your Names

You should now have 200 or more names that were just written down without being analyzed yet. What you have to do next is analyze and select the top possibilities, which could be less than 50.

To analyze the names, closely compare them with your brand identity. Do they fit? Or do they not? Next, check how nice they sound when spoken out loud or written down. Is it easily confused for something else when spoken or written? Is it easily misspelled? Finally, check to see how motivated it makes you and your team feel.

4. Pick out the Best

With personal bias taken out, the names entering this stage have an equal probability of representing your company. But there are still too many because we need just one that fits perfectly with your brand identity. So the goal of this last stage will be to choose the one that best represents your company. 

The quickest way to determine whether your possible business name is acceptable for your organization is to validate it. 

You need to make sure your top choice complies with fundamental validation criteria in order to select the perfect name for your company.

And you can confirm this by:

  • Doing a Linguistic Test: You’ve probably heard the saying that the world is now a global village. Well, that’s precisely true. Information is now so easily accessible that physical location has minimal impact on your brand’s reach. And to enhance your business’s reach, you have to perform a linguistic test to certify your business name does not mean something offensive or disgusting in another country’s language. And even if you plan on running a small business, word travels fast, thanks to the internet, and no one would want to patronize your business because it has a ridiculous name. 
  • Getting Target Audience Feedback: This is the most important test since it’ll show whether or not the name will attract your target customer’s attention. Ask your viewers to vote on their favorite name from a list of your top suggestions. The one with the most votes wins. You can also ask close friends, family members, or even total strangers for their honest input. 
  • Confirm it has an available domain ending in “.com”: Even businesses with unique names will struggle to succeed in today’s market unless they have a matching domain name and an excellent website. So, verify that any name you are considering has a “.com” domain and available handles that can easily be accessed on social media. 
  • Trademarking: By registering your company name as a trademark, the USPTO can assist you in preventing several problems in the future. This is because many popular terms already have some form of trademark protection, and reusing them may result in legal penalties. The trademark registration procedure can be complicated and time-consuming for new business people. So don’t fail to seek assistance from a skilled trademark lawyer.

Conclusion

Your company’s name is a crucial asset it needs to surpass its rivals and survive in the market since it will increase brand sales, productivity, and recognition. Therefore, in order to draw in new clients, you must select a brand name that appropriately conveys the core of your brand message.

Leave a Comment