How to get a brand naming right and survive

Your brand naming: does it exist already? Yeah, probably

This will probably be hard to accept, so let’s tackle it upfront: your name – even the one you will choose – is probably taken. Fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have known it, as most businesses were not online.

Today, though, brand naming is a different thing. Every small pancake shop of Kuala Lumpur, every thrift store in Melbourne, every student association in Nairobi is online. Humans are naming things everyday.

So if you Google that up it will probably come up, one way or the other. The first reaction is usually of shock and disappointment: understandably, we want our brand name to be completely unique. This is not impossible, but it shouldn’t be mandatory: you want to make sure

• the same name does not belong to a prominent brand
• the name does not belong to a brand in the same industry
• the name does not belong to a brand in the same territory

No URL? No worries

This is another common anxiety in brand naming, and it’s usually put forward in the brief phase: “we want the .com to be free!”. As you might know, this is becoming increasingly hard.

The most sought after domain extensions, like .com, are a finite resource that is being consumed by the day: not necessarily by a brand with that name. It could be a personal blog or even someone who just bought it to speculate. Or it may be available for purchase – starting from 5.000$. Too many good names have been sacrificed on the altar of the .com domain.

Consider that users are skilled today, they don’t need the domain to be identical to your brand name. You can:

• use a creative URL: your brand is called “Spoon”? Go for tryspoon.com or haveaspoon.com! There all sorts of creative ways to circumvent this problem.
• use a different domain extension: today you can have .tech or .company or .hotel and so many others. Alternative domain extensions are becoming commonplace and you can use them to build a sentence to make the most of it.

A good brand naming? Don’t crowdsource it

There comes a time, in almost every brand naming process, when hopes are down and the client (or the agency) resorts to crowdsourcing. Hey, let’s hear what everyone has in mind.

This can be useful at the beginning, and only if people are asked to suggest values or references. If you ask people to input names, be prepared for a disaster.

No matter how good, people will come up with all sorts of names, most of them unusable. Realizing how hard it is to find a good and free name will frustrate people, rather than engage them. Or worse, you will try diplomacy with a mash-up. Don’t go down that road.

Judge brand naming with your heart, but mostly with your ears

A naming, while apparently simple, is a very technical thing. But then, judging it is up to you. How to do it? First of all, listen to the rationale. It matters, but not 100%. Then, use your heart. How does the name feel? This is usually pretty straightforward. Don’t trust your heart too much, though: being very attached to your brand, your judgement might be biased.

Or you might associate it to a memory or another brand you dislike (but that’s just you). Give more credit to your ears: the way a name sounds is usually the most important thing. If it sounds awkward, hard to pronounce, embarrassing, just skip it.

A brand naming takes on meaning with time

Lastly, don’t ask too much of your brand naming. It has to be good, it doesn’t have to be perfect. If it sounds good and is quite memorable, it will be fine. You will build associations with branding and communication. Just think of how many brands with obscure or weird names have built strong associations through the years and are now more powerful than many “trendy” brands with carefully crafted names.

Your brand naming is out there. Go and take it.