Naming Your Business
New Entrepreneurs often ask us at Groucherz, “I’ve been thinking quite a bit about a topic lately, how to get the best name for my business, and in looking for some ideas, I’ve researched several websites, but don’t find anything in the way of a thorough solution.”
Here’s what we think:
Firstly, the main point we believe, is to create a brand name that people use to hang all the attributes of your business. The LESS it has to do with your category, the better.
Think a little more about this. If you call yourself International Postal Consultants, there’s a lot less room to hang other attributes. Look at some of the famous brands we acknowledge such as Starbucks, Nike and Apple who allow plenty of room.
Secondly, we often recommend you pick a real word, or a string of them. Axelon and Altus are tough to grasp, but Jet Blue, Ambient and Amazon are much easier.
Third, be sure it’s easy to spell and pronounce. Prius to us is a bad name. We can’t tell anyone to buy a Prius because we would probably embarrass ourselves and say it wrong.
Fourth, don’t obsess about getting a short web name. If you want to name your venture capital firm Nickel, then you could have www.NickelVenture.com and that would be fine. The only way this turns into a problem is if the current owner of the URL is a competitor (which won’t happen if you pick a non-obvious name, as we write in #1 above).
If you follow these pieces of advice, you’ll discover that there are literally millions of names available to you (lemonpie, for example, is perfect for a scuba tour company. So are orangepie, melonpie and kiwipie). You will have far fewer trademark hassles. You will have no trouble coming up with a cool name that means nothing and makes it easy for you to hang a good brand upon. And you’ll have fun.
BUT, don’t forget to come up with a great tagline. “lemonpie, the easy way to learn scuba,” for example.
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