Brand Name: Here’s How to Choose the Name for Your Brand

Practical tips to find the right name for your brand / product and examples of successful Brand Name inspiration. Here’s what you need to know in order not to miss such a strategic choice.

Making naming and create a Brand Name is an activity based in good part on the strategic imagination, combined with strict rules. Choosing the right name for the brand, as well as for a product / service, is a key moment for your business, so it is important to understand how to move to be successful.

  • Brand Name: What it is
  • Brand Name: Tips for choosing the right name
  • Brand Name: Examples of success

Brand Name: What it is

The ‘ naming ‘ is an activity that serves to give the name to a brand, but also to a product / service, so as to make it recognizable and associated with the company’s strengths. Creating a Brand Name is a complex operation that requires the right mix of creativity and marketing strategy in order to define with a single word or phrase, a complex set such as that of the corporate identity.

Making Naming is a Challenge that We Face Essentially These Three Objectives:

  • Identify the brand.
  • Draw the attention of the target.
  • Compete with the target market.

Brand Name: Tips for choosing the right name

The question we want to answer is the following: “ Is it possible to build the perfect name for your brand / product at the table? “. By following some marketing rules and putting your imagination into play, you can find a Brand Name with the right characteristics and that meets these requirements:

Brand Potential: the name must be aligned with the brand image so that it can be declined in the various communication and promotion scenarios.

Attractiveness on the Market: speak to your target with their language and offer what your audience expects. The name should reflect the strengths of the product and the corporate mission.

Visibility and Uniqueness: find a name that is easy to search online and that does not get confused in the competition.

And now, after understanding what the objectives of naming are and what characteristics a successful Brand Name must have, let’s see how to do it in practice:

Semantics of the Name: what does the name of the product / company want to express, what is its meaning? In some cases, a descriptive name will suffice , that is, in one / two words summarizing exactly what it is, or what the product or company does. An associative name, on the other hand, refers by association of ideas to the functions of the product / service, for example Microsoft’s “Office” which provides software tools for office tasks.

The neologism is a fancy name that does not exist in the dictionary, such as “Kleenex” which sounds similar to “clean” (clean in English) and is then entered in everyday language as a synonym for tissue. Arbitrary names: they are the most dangerous, but also the most challenging, because they do not describe the product in any way, but they can sound good and be easily remembered. The most striking case is the name “Apple” – the company founded by Jobs and Wozniak – about which many legends revolve.

Market Research: basic action in any good branding strategy. Try to understand what the names of the competing products / services are or what the brands that compete in your sector are called. Check that you are not infringing any copyrights and that the name is not too similar to other existing brands.

Creativity and Experimentation: put your imagination into action and experiment. The hit name is also often a mix of well-associated sounds: play with synonyms of common words; combine two words to create a neologism; add a prefix / suffix to generate curiosity etc.

Brand Name: Examples of success

To give some examples of successful Brand Names, we have thought of global brands in the e-commerce, technology and retail sectors: Amazon, Google, IKEA.

Amazon : Preeminence and ‘each’.

Jeff Bezos, founder of the global e-commerce giant, said that the name was chosen for contingent factors and for the association of ideas. The letter A allowed to be at the top of the alphabetical lists, while the Amazon river referred to the main freight artery in the immense Amazonian area. An excellent premise for what would become a giant in the sector of selling and shipping of goods on a global level.

Google : Mathematical error.

Larry Page and Sergej Brin wanted for their newborn search engine a name that would summarize the ‘crazy’ aspiration to organize and make all the information available on the Web accessible. We needed a hyperbole that was found in the term ” googol ” coined in 1938 by the mathematician Kasner to indicate the number 1 followed by 100 zero. When registering – not knowing exactly how to spell that word – they will transliterate it according to the pronunciation: thus the name of the product “Google” was born, today a world brand.

IKEA : Euphonic acronym.

The progenitor of the empire of modular furniture Ingvar Kamprad wanted to remember his initials IK in the name of his company, followed by those of the Swedish village where Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd was born and raised. The result is a short name, easily memorized and with a ‘right’ sound.