Here’s how to create a successful brand name that audiences will love.
When you build a brand, coming up with a name can take from five minutes to an infinite amount of time. If you’re a fan of AI and generators, you can utilize free brand name generators or tools and choose your name in five to fifteen minutes.
However, if you’d like to know how to create a successful brand name for your business, you might take the traditional road of brainstorming and coming up with different name ideas. Brand name generators can help you still, but you might want to run some surveys or polls; dive deep into the company background, vision, mission, and target market; and make sure every business aspect is tied up nicely with the brand name.
If making a great brand name has been a tricky task for you as a business owner, you’re in the right place. Check out these five key points of a successful brand name creation.
Simple steps to create your own unique brand name
As the representative of your business, your brand name should be true to your brand identity, memorable, scalable, and respectful to your potential customers. It also needs to be law-abiding, to avoid unnecessary problems and drama in the long run.
1. Reflects Your Brand Purposes
This process is similar to determining your five brand pillars, but you would want to focus primarily on your brand purpose and personality here. Why does your brand exist? How does your brand make an impact?
After answering these questions, you can list down the adjectives and nouns related to your purpose. If your brand aims to raise awareness of gender equality, for example, you can write down words like power, feminine, beauty, heroine, or lady.
2. Easy to remember
To be memorable, a strong brand name doesn’t necessarily have to be short. Sure, less is more. But if you end up with a pretty long brand name, you can always play around to make it rhyme, like Coca-Cola or Famous Amos, or abbreviate it like KFC and M&M.
3. Future-ready
As your business grows and scales, your brand name will need to be able to adapt to new products, new services, new campaigns, and many more exciting things to come.
Avoid choosing a brand name that limits the business growth — something that is too ‘trendy’ and not everlasting, or something that ties you down to a certain year or era. For example, there was a music group that the whole world really loved — LMFAO. While it was a great name during their peak years, and apart from their music, the group name wouldn’t really hit it off that well today since the abbreviation is no longer that powerful.
Conversely, choose a versatile name that goes well with different phrases, sentences, and even expressions. You will have an easier time creating campaigns, slogans, and taglines when the time comes.
4. Respectful
Some words may sound beautiful in one language until you find out it’s not that pretty in others.
Conduct quick research before you decide on one name:
- Is it a rude word in other languages?
- Does it have a double meaning?
- Does it violate some cultures?
Doing so will not only create a professional, thoughtful image for the business but also make a way for international expansion. Dream big!
5. Law-abiding
The last key point of creating a successful brand name is that it complies with the law. It is crucial that you can protect your brand name legally with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for trademark registration.
Imagine spending many hours and efforts promoting your brand under one name only to find out that you infringe on someone else’s brand. If this happens, you will have no choice but rebrand, repeating all those efforts.
To avoid this, check out how you can protect your name legally here.
Making a successful brand name in a nutshell
Picking a good brand name is more than just making it catchy and one in a million. It represents the entire business — the products you sell, the services you provide, and the company running behind the screen. So, when you’ve decided on a name, make sure to come back to this article and double-check.
Bonus tip: invest in good logo design so your business card looks amazing!
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