Oct 1, 2009 Posted by alan jones on Oct 1, 2009 in Branding, Marketing, Startup | 3 comments

How to choose a startup brand name

One of the many things that can bog down or trip up your startup team is deciding on a name for your company and your product. Without the right process you can bat ideas back and forth for weeks without making any progress at all. Through hard-won experience I’ve learned a few rules, and found some useful tools, that can help save you time and help you avoid many of the common problems.

How important is a brand name?

First, let’s recognise that a great brand name doesn’t make a great product. Neither does a bad brand name condemn a company to failure. Can you think of a successful business with a crappy brand name? Let me see… Google, Wal-Mart, GE, Ford — if we were sitting around a coffee table with $5,000 and an idea, none of these would be in a top 5.

It’s possible to build a strong brand by building a strong company around it. Brands can also be strengthened, tweaked, broadened or focused over time — you don’t have to get it completely right the first time. But it helps.

There are many dimensions to what makes a good brand name and ‘branding’ is a specialist marketing discipline. Brand consultancies can help you find the best-possible brand for your startup if you have the money and the time. But you’re a startup and you may have neither right now. You may have four weeks to get some code running on a web server, with a pitch to an angel investor in six weeks… you  need a business card, you need a logo on a slide deck, you need a holding page on a URL, you need something to call this thing, and you need it now.

What makes a good brand name?

Assuming you could choose anything you want, what makes one brand name better than another?

The list of criteria could be as long as War And Peace but when you’re in a hurry and you know you can tweak it later, there’s only four that matter. They are:

1. Essential: you must be able to trademark the brand name (you must not risk infringing someone else’s trademark either.) You don’t need to register a trademark today, but you do need to be able to do it in the near future.
2. Essential: you must be able to register an internet domain name for it.
3. Important: it should be easy to type and to spell. If you went with the brand name “Szyzygy.com” Think of the time wasted in the next five years spelling this out every time you call and leave a message for someone. Think of the mistakes people will make typing your domain name into their browser. Think of all the competitors who’ll register Szyzygz.com, Szyzzgz.com, etc and redirect traffic from those domains back to their own businesses. Think about how annoying it will become.
4. Important: it should relate in some way to your product, its benefits, features, attributes, or to your customer.

There are many other criteria you could consider helpful — brief, emotive, exciting, etc — but these are all dependent very much on the nature of your business/product and they are all nice-to-haves.

What process should I use to find brand and choose a brand name?

This is an adapted version of the process I use with clients, simplified so you can run it yourself.

There’s one essential rule that applies to this process: capture and keep everything. Branding is not a linear process — you may need to take backward steps and sidewards jumps, and you will always need to understand how you arrived at where you are. Don’t throw anything away, no matter how crazy it might initially seem. In the winnowing stage below, make sure you don’t trash the stuff you remove, just file it for later.

1. Brainstorm

1. Make a list of the brand name ideas you already have — it’s likely that one or more of you will already have some ideas (that’s just one of the things we lie awake thinking about at 2am, right?). Capture those. Need more ideas?
2. Make a list of words that describe some of the features of your product or business. For example: balance, tally, track, report, reconcile, transact, export.
3. Make a list of words related to the benefits of using your product or business. For example, save, time, money, share, streamline, cloud.
4. Make a list of words that could be used to describe your customer. For example, SME, businessperson, business, salesperson, sales, accounts, clerical, book-keeper, manager, working, ambitious, planning, growing.
5. Make a list of words that could be used to describe yourselves. For example, driven, passionate, fun-loving, fun, laugh.
6. Wordoid is a great online tool that helps find prefixes and suffixes and latin roots and foreign language ideas for brand names and domains. Input your word lists from the previous steps into Wordoid and see what it comes up with.

2. Prioritise

• Try to sort your lists by how important each word is to your customer and yourselves. This step isn’t essential but it can be helpful to agree which words are more important to you. If nothing else, they may become helpful to brief marketing employees and external agencies at a later date.

3. Synthesise

1. Make new compound words by jamming together two words from the lists you just made. Write down both permutations (e.g. moneyworking as well was workingmoney).
2. Try the same exercise using three words from the lists. Write down any permutations that make sense (e.g. drivingworkingmoney but not moneydrivingworking).

4. Top-and-tail

See if you can make some combinations better by adding a suffix or prefix to the compound word, or by removing a suffix or prefix that was already there. Suffixes and prefixes can either be part-words (like “-oid” or “-ist”) or whole words like “your” or “our”. For example, from moneydriving you can derive moneydrive, moneydriver, yourmoneydriver, ourmoneydriver, yourmoneydriven, etc. Wordoid.com can also help with this.

5. Winnow

You now have lots of words! Meet as a group and remove the compound words that definitely aren’t appropriate and rank as a group the top 20 or so remaining compound words.

Now you need to check whether it already means something in another context or language. Working with social calendaring startup Mixin, I found the word ‘mixin’ is a common expression in software development. Fortunately, it had no negative connotations in software development, but it made it harder to optimise Mixin for SEO with all these references to the software development meaning already indexed by search engines. Working with mobile social networking startup Bluepulse, there was a graphic artist who used the username ‘bluepulse’ to create and publish illustrations online that… well… let’s just say they didn’t align with what we were trying to do with the Bluepulse brand.

Many words have different proper or slang meanings in other languages.

Wait, what does “Pajero” mean in Spanish?

6. Domains and trademarks

Now check the ranked compound words against registered domains and trademarks. Here’s some useful tools:

Democracy is a bad thing if you don’t have much time

Gotta hand it to dictatorships: they can sure get stuff done, fast. The biggest way to save time when choosing a brand name is to reduce the number of people making the final decision.

Early in your startup’s life, it can be fun to have everyone involved with an equal say in each decision, but if you’re grownups you’ll know that at some stage in the future, roles will need to specialise and you should each back away from the things you’re not good at. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that you hand off all the work in developing possible brand names to one person but make the final choice a group decision — that actually slows you down. The way to save time is to delegate the whole responsibility (the grunt workand the final decision) to one person or a sub-unit of your team. As long as that unit or person has the right skills, brief and process, you should be able to trust them to do it alone, while you get onto other stuff.

If you must make the final decision as a group, be smart about the decision process and recognise there’s going to be a lot of precious time chewed up on it. Put the choices up in an online form on Google Docs or use a free poll builder tool and have everyone who must be in on the decision rank the candidate brand names in order of preference. Try to get them to rank every brand name, since there may not be enough overlap if there are, say, three of you, 20 candidates and you only rank three candidates each.

Report back!

I would love to hear from you if you’ve used this process, had to adapt it, or if you have used a different process altogether. Where did you start? Where did the journey take you? What did you finish with? Are you happy with it? Leave me your comments below. Thanks!

3 Responses to “How to choose a startup brand name”

1. nedwin says:

   October 1, 2009 at 9:27 am

   Great article. I also use Domainr.com to help me find interesting ways to create domains and check their availability.

   Reply   More from author
2. alan jones says:

   October 2, 2009 at 12:33 am

   Cheers Ned, I meant to include Domainr too. Thanks for reminding me.
   Note the correct url is domai.nr not domainr.com, and that highlights
   an interesting issue with domains that include part of the brand name
   in the TLD (the part of the domain that includes the “.com” or “.biz”
   or “.net”) — it's harder for consumers to remember them. Del.icio.us
   has changed to Delicious.com for that reason.

   Though they're of-the-moment now, I think they'll be very five-years-
   ago in five years' time.

   Domai.nr is really good at finding potential brand names in the rarer
   small nation TLDs like “.ne” and “.nr” but I would recommend steering
   clear of them unless you really have no alternative.

   Reply   More from author
3. billbennett says:

   October 5, 2009 at 6:13 am

   I understand iSnack 2.0 will shortly become available.

   Seriously though, how does a large multinational with huge amounts of resources manage to get this so wrong?

   I'm coming to the conclusion small businesses, not so much dictatorships, but bands of like-minded smart people with imagination, easily trump the corporations when it comes to this kind of task.

   Reply   More from author

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