Master Strategies for Generating Brand Name Ideas
When brainstorming a name for your company, there are several foundational elements to keep in mind before making your final decision. You need to carefully weigh the products you sell or services you offer, your target audience, your company’s long-term vision, its core personality, and your innovative business goals. To help you take your naming process to the next level, I have broken down the absolute best strategies used by iconic global brands.
Leveraging Personal Authority
One classic approach is to simply use your own name. While it sounds incredibly simple, using your first or last name establishes immediate personal authority and carries a high recall value. This is exactly how legendary brands like Calvin Klein and Michael Kors built their empires. You can choose to use your full name, or adopt the last name technique practiced by brands like Ferrari, Ford, and Dell.
You can even make minor modifications to your name to make it sound more brandable, just as Tadao Kashio did when he founded Casio. If you are launching a venture with business partners, grouping your names together can result in an iconic identity, much like William Procter and James Gamble did with Procter & Gamble.
Before choosing this path, ensure your name is easy for a global audience to spell and free of odd punctuation or special characters. It is also important to consider your exit strategy. As the founder, do you plan on being the public face of the company forever, or do you prefer personal anonymity? Keep in mind that a business named after a person is often much more difficult to sell down the line. If you know you want to sell the business one day, it is wiser to choose a non-personal name.
Solving the Customer’s Pain Point
Another highly effective strategy is to name your brand after the specific problem your business solves or the fulfillment it brings to your clients’ lives. In the entrepreneurial world, this is known as solving for the pain point. For example, the brand Weight Watchers is named exactly after the problem they solve, which is helping their customers manage and monitor their health goals.
If you want a name that speaks for itself, look for words that describe your product or service in the simplest, most creative way possible. Consider the company Virgin, where the founders figured out a highly unique, provocative way of telling the world they were completely new to the business ecosystem.
Advanced Wordplay and Naming Frameworks
Advanced Frameworks from Alliteration to Acronyms
If you want to inject a massive amount of psychological impact into your business identity, you can use specialized linguistic frameworks to make the name roll off the tongue.
The Power of Alliteration
Alliteration involves using two words that begin with the exact same letter or phonetic sound. This linguistic trick adds immediate impact and makes a name incredibly catchy. To do this, find a word that best describes your industry and pair it with a complementary word that shares the same starting sound. This exact psychological trigger is what makes names like Coca-Cola stick so firmly in the human memory. Using words that start with the same phonetic sound creates a rhythmic cadence that makes a brand stand out from the crowd, commands market authority, and ultimately drives more revenue.
Owning a Standard Dictionary Word
Using a single, normal word from the dictionary is a bold move that can establish an incredibly powerful brand presence. Think of massive entities like Target, Alphabet, Gap, Apple, Pandora, and Yelp. When you hear the word Amazon today, you instantly think of the online marketplace rather than the world’s largest river. Jeff Bezos deliberately chose that word to relate the scale of the river to his vision of building the world’s largest store.
The downside to this strategy is that single words are notoriously difficult to trademark and require massive marketing efforts to fully own in the mind of your target consumer.
Putting a Creative Twist on Spelling
If you find a perfect word but the domain is taken or the trademark is unavailable, try changing the spelling slightly. This strategy combines your business vision with modern creativity. Brands like Fiverr, spelled with two Rs, Toggl, with the E removed, and Digg, with two Gs, executed this perfectly. While this tactic makes it much easier to secure a clean domain name, keep in mind that people might occasionally misspell your name or struggle to find you online via direct search.
Mashing Two Words Together
Blending two distinct words together is an incredibly popular way to create a completely unique brand name. Simply list out a few keywords that represent your business and see if they can be merged. Netflix is a perfect example of this framework, combining Net, short for internet, and Flick, slang for movie, while adding a modern twist to the spelling of flicks. Groupon followed the exact same logic by blending Group and Coupon.
The Acronym Approach
Many traditional businesses choose to shorten a lengthy corporate name into just the beginning letters of each word. For instance, IKEA created a completely new word using an acronym derived from the founder’s initials and his hometown. However, acronyms are generally very difficult for audiences to remember and pose significant challenges for modern SEO. If you choose an acronym, keep it short and sweet like KFC, or ensure it reads smoothly as its own individual word.
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