4 Tips For Choosing an Impactful Name For Your Brand

Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder, once said there’s only one boss — a customer.

Walton’s statement might seem straightforward. Yet, many entrepreneurs struggle to apply it in their businesses, often making a weak first impression on their customers. 

A solid first impression is the best way to attract your audience’s attention to your brand.

How to make a great first impression? Simple! With a perfect brand name. 

Getting a catchy and attractive brand name can put your business at the top of your customers’ minds whenever they need products or services your business can offer.

How to choose a brand name?

Finding a perfect brand name is often challenging for many entrepreneurs because they don’t have adequate skills and knowledge to manage the task.

If you are looking for a unique and catchy brand name, these tips will help you find an impactful business name for your company.

How to choose a brand name

1. Fully understand your brand

Customers first recall the brand name when they want to interact with any company.

Therefore, the first step to discovering an excellent brand name is fully understanding your business.

For example, it took time for a consulting brand like Accenture to create a memorable brand name and identity. The modern, classy, and high-end tone of the brand’s name was perfectly engineered to promote its image. It works perfectly for one of the leading consulting firms but wouldn’t work for household tech products like Alexa because it doesn’t align with their brand image.

An exceptional brand image is a crucial first step to properly naming your company. The capacity to envision your brand’s personality is known as a brand image.

Ask yourself the following questions to better understand your brand image:

• How does your brand feel and look?
• What are your brand’s principles?
• What tone does your brand communicate?
• What feelings do you want to evoke in your audience?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can start a thorough naming process by answering the following questions:

• Who are you as a company?
• What do you represent to your clients?
• Who do you stand compared to your competition?

Solid answers to these questions can help you better understand your brand identity and how your audience should view you.

The next step is to consider your brand’s tone of voice in light of your business’s identity. The tone of voice of your business will determine its personality or attitude. It should appeal to your company objectives while striking a chord with your audience.

When it comes to the tone of voice, you can choose among five popular options: 

1. Pre-eminent tone: Ideal for showcasing luxury, class, and sophistication.
2. Modern tone: Exudes creativity, innovation, and disruption.
3. Emotionally powerful tone: Used to connect with customers’ wants.
4. Playful and Fun tone: Excellent for giving your brand an exciting and lighthearted feel.
5. Pragmatic tone: Focuses on your brand’s products and services.

For instance, Louis Vuitton, a French luxury fashion house, sounds expensive and prestigious. It ideally appeals to the company’s target audience.

2. Think of creative brand name ideas

This is a challenging but exciting part.

Prepare some markers, a whiteboard, and a team, whether they’re colleagues or family members. Ensure you give them the creative freedom they need. At this moment, there is no need to evaluate names.

Let your creative energy flow, and things happen as they do. The following tools can help you boost your creative process:

• Thesaurus
• Industry slangs
• Rhyming Words
• Branding marketing naming contest

Furthermore, it’s essential to consider your customers’ demography because they have different perspectives on classical vs. modern names. 

Squadhelp conducted brand positioning research in 2021, where they discovered that older age groups, 45–65 years old, were more willing to accept classic brand names. On the other hand, younger age groups, 25–34 years old, tended to choose innovative and trendy brand names.

3. Shortlist potential brand names

Now, match your brand name ideas to your brand tone and value proposition.

A branding brief that illustrates your brand style should be available to the naming crew working on your brand name project.

You can evaluate names based on how well they reflect your brand’s identity, how they sound and appear on various platforms, websites, or social media, how they make you and your audience feel, etc.

Collect opinions on most brand names and consider how memorable they are.

Your aim should be to have less than ten names left after this step.

Exclude emotionally potent names if your goal is to be perceived as a pragmatic brand. However, there is always a floor for experiments. If you like a practical and solution-focused name, you can play around with different spellings like Lyft or a short and energetic one like Zoom.

4. Verify and validate

This is the last step of your brand name research process, where you’ll be able to validate your intended company name by:

• Getting feedback from your target audience. If you intend to run your online business, ensure your brand name is appealing to your target audience. A linguistics test should also be performed to make sure your brand name can be easily spelled and does not have a different meaning in other languages.
• Checking the domain name availability for your website. A website is an essential part of any business nowadays. Before registering a preferred brand name, double-check if the exact domain name is available. If not, try alternative spellings, omitting vowels, etc.
• Checking trademarks. Trademarking can be challenging, but it will help you save a lot of hassle down the road. The majority of famous business names have trademarks. You have to ensure your preferred brand name passes the trademark test. Avoiding this step may result in undesirable consequences in the future, like receiving cease and desist letters.

Your brand name can change the game

An amazing company name can excite and attract potential customers if it aligns with your brand’s character and tone of voice.

Therefore, it’s worth investing your time and resources to choose an ideal brand name. To do this, you must thoroughly understand your brand’s personality and the perception you want to convey.

As a next step, brainstorm creative brand name ideas, shortlist the most memorable ones, and validate them.

This simple approach will help you find a brand name that accurately describes your business and propels your company to succeed.