Sometimes the hardest part of starting your venture is naming it, that’s why today we bring you naming strategies for your venture, because you can’t leave something so important to the last minute.
Naming is an important part of your branding strategy, because it helps to make a good first impression and to position yourself. Besides, when you name something, it becomes real! That’s how important your brand name is. Even if you already have one in your head, you can check this little guide to evaluate if it is the best name you can give to your brand.
What is naming, and why is it so important?
The translation of naming is simply “naming”, but the truth is that it is much more than that. When we talk about naming, we are talking about one of the most important stages of branding. So it is more than just giving a name to a company, brand or product, since the objective is to differentiate and identify a product or brand from the competition through the name.
Naming involves a series of strategies and techniques to achieve the ideal name for a brand, company, product or service, which, in addition to identifying it from the rest, describes in one word the best features of it.
In this way, creating a good name allows us to identify and intensify the attributes that make us original and make us stand out from the competition.
Characteristics of a good name
To give a good name to your brand or products, you need more than just creativity, successful names have some characteristics in common that make them stand out from the rest and be memorable. Here are some of these characteristics that will help you evaluate if the name you have in mind is the best one.
Ability to make an impact and be unique
The name you choose must make an excellent first impression and, above all, it must attract attention and be different from others. This will help you avoid the worst mistake you can make when naming something: using a name that already exists.
Using a name used by another brand or even a similar one will only cause confusion among your customers and new audiences and will make it harder for you to position yourself in the market.
Short and concise
A good name is short, but this doesn’t mean that you use a single word or syllable and say nothing or that it is meaningless. Take for example Nike, it’s a short name, and it’s the name of the Greek goddess of victory, so the public quickly relates it to sports and winning.
Ease of pronunciation
Another big mistake when choosing a name is to use a little known word or a compound word, because the problem comes when your audience cannot pronounce it or pronounce it totally different from how you have planned it.
The ideal is that once you choose the name, evaluate if at least your target audience can pronounce it or pronounce it as you imagined, otherwise it will be difficult to make a positioning or brand loyalty if the public pronounces or writes it in different ways.
Make it sound nice
An important part of naming is to make it easy to remember, and for this there is no better way than looking for something that sounds pleasant and harmonious. A name that sounds good is much easier to remember and identify than one that is difficult to pronounce or has many complex syllables.
Experts recommend using the letters L, D, T and R, as they are considered to provide a good auditory effect. On the other hand, the Spanish G and K are somewhat unpleasant. While X and J evoke strength and are not recommended if you want to cause tenderness or sweetness.
Be timeless
Using a name or a term that is now in fashion can be very tempting, because it can help you to position yourself quickly, especially if your target audience is in the Z generation.
But you must keep in mind that this can mean a problem in the future, because what is now very popular and important in the future may lose its meaning or change its meaning to something pejorative, this can make your brand or product to be forgotten over time, if it has not been positioned.
Naming strategies for your venture
With these recommendations, you can imagine that to create a good name you only need a lot of creativity, but fortunately this is not always the case. It is true that creativity helps, and a lot, but it is not everything, that is why we are going to present you some branding strategies so that you can create the best name for your business.
1. Describe all the characteristics of your venture
As we have said, a good name refers to the best qualities of the product, so this is a good start. Write down in a list all the most important and outstanding features of your product, service or company. Maybe you won’t use all of them, but surely some of them will awaken your imagination and inspire you to create an excellent name.
2. Know your audience
Knowing your target audience is always the first step in any branding strategy and if you want to create a name that connects with them easily it is best to start by seeing what they like the most.
You can create a list of things that your audience identifies with the most, for example TV series, movies, singers, books, activities, artists, food or even cities.
Once you have this list you can create another one with the terms that remind you or are directly related to them. Choosing a name from this list can help you position yourself faster, especially if you are a new or little known brand.
3. Back up the name with a story
On other occasions we have already said how important it is to tell a story for marketing, and the truth is that this also applies when we associate the name with a good story.
Creating a brand is also creating a story, so when we talk about associating a story with the name, it doesn’t mean that you have to invent a story, you just have to tell your story, or the part of it that connects with the public.
4. Get inspiration from other languages
If you already have some good ideas for names, but they are the same or similar to other products or brands; or you are not completely convinced, a good idea is to use these same words but in another language.
The easiest is to look for the terms in English because it is almost a universal language, so you can connect quickly, and it is easy to guess the meaning, but if you dare, you can use other languages such as French, Italian or Portuguese.
Nowadays, it is very easy to research a word in other languages, even in some translators you can check the pronunciation, so you can use these tools to evaluate if a name is easy to pronounce or if you are pronouncing it well.
If you plan to expand your brand in other countries it may be necessary to hire a linguistic expert to check if your brand name does not have a pejorative or double meaning in the countries where you have a presence, this will help you avoid many problems in the future.
5. Use creative techniques
Some branding experts suggest using creative strategies to deform and make a name more striking, or even to inspire you to find the ideal name. So if you already have a list of ideal candidates, you can use some of these techniques to make them more attractive.
The first one is to use onomatopoeias, so look for sounds related to your products, maybe one of them will work as a good name, take the example of chocolate “Crunch”.
You can also try using juxtapositions, that is, combining two words to form a name, so you can use a characteristic and your niche to make it easier to identify your brand. This is what brands like “Burger King” or “Master Card” did.
Another strategy you can use is to duplicate a letter if you have chosen a common word for your name. This is what brands like Zappos or Kellogg’s did.
6. What do you want to convey
Finally, don’t forget to list the message you want to convey. If you can include a part of this message in your name, you will have a name that, besides identifying you, will help you position yourself against your competitors, because you will be making your objectives clear from the beginning.
We hope that naming strategies for your business will be very useful and will help you in the difficult task of finding the ideal name. Let us know which is your favorite strategy.