Today that’s 300 million brands some brands as big as Apple and coca-cola others are smaller than one person business with so many brands in the world it’s getting harder to create and find a unique name so how do you create a great brand name how can you win the name game. You can create with these three effective steps
1. First, select what type of name you want there are seven different categories of names and pretty much every brand in the world falls within one of these seven categories
- Eponymous names like Disney and Burberry work by embodying the vision and beliefs of their founders these names are okay if you’re feeling lazy or just have a big ego Adidas is more unique it’s derived from Adi Dassler the company’s founder and Tesla wasn’t created by Nikola Tesla he died in 1943 but the name is an homage to Tesla’s electrical engineering achievements
- Descriptive names like Indian Airlines or naukri.com by telling you exactly what the company does but these names can be a mouthful and are much harder to own and protect.
- Acronyms like GE and BP are just shorthand versions of descriptive names some acronyms are more strategic Kentucky Fried Chicken switch to KFC because Fried Chicken didn’t sound too healthy and the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank changed to eight that chose to hate HSBC to help the bank expand globally or PNB for Punjab National Bank
- Real words like uber and slack a rip right out of a dictionary and suggest attributes or benefits uber literally means an outstanding example so it works well for a company with big broad bold ambitions beyond ride-hailing now real words might seem like good ideas but in a world of 300 million companies it’s getting harder to find a name how’d it hard? it’s hard to find any real words left in the dictionary.
- Composite names like Facebook and ray-ban are created by gluing two words together these names have a kind of one-two punch and can be really memorable because it’s so hard to find real words. companies like Pinterest of invented names by changing adding or removing letters for impact now inventing names can be highly unique but if you’re not careful they can start to sound like pharmaceutical drugs or worse.
- The Amazon in South America is the world’s largest river, therefore, the earth’s biggest selection of books clothes content and so on. and Red Bull a drink with bull light qualities such as power and confidence some brands are derived from non-English languages like Samsung which means three stars in Korean, Lego means play well in Danish, Zappos comes from the Spanish word Zapatos for shoes and Hulu comes we bet you didn’t know that Hulu actually comes from a Chinese proverb a Hulu may be a ball accustomed store precious things.
- Finally, the seventh type is a tabbed abstract name like Rolex and encoder these names have no intrinsic meaning but instead rely on the power of phonetics to create really powerful brand names. So once you’ve decided what type of name you want.
2. Now you need to decide what you want the name to say and look of course it’s tempting to create names that talk about who created them or what you do or wherever you use however the most effective brand names do not describe they indicate an enormous planones that translate into emotional attractiveness. Nike is about winning, GoPros about heroism, Apple is about simplicity and usability and Google comes from the math term that’s a one with a hundred zeros. After it so that really big number helps support the company’s really big original vision to organize the world’s information. So as you think about your new brand think carefully and ask yourself what’s your big idea.
3. The third step is to check the name isn’t already taken you might have to create hundreds of names perhaps thousands before you find one that’s even available and of course don’t forget to check the name means doesn’t mean anything negative in other languages or countries the last thing you want is an embarrassing naming fail.
finally a few words about alphabet the parent company of Google are now one of the world’s most valuable companies much has been said and written about the business strategy but we’ll say a few words about the name is alphabet a great name you bet first of all the name is an idea as we all know an alphabet is a set of letters that forms the basis of all language and communication second the name provides a playful link back to the companies underneath G for Google C for calico so on.
The name encourages investors buy this stock and you’re making an alphabet one that will outperform others and last of all the name is a real dictionary word which is a rare find these days now there was only one issue with an alphabet car company BMW owned the URL alphabet.com but you know here’s the thing only the dot-com doesn’t matter as much these days now that we find stuff through Google search and we connect with brands through social media and smartphone apps so alphabet the company forgot about alphabet.com and instead found a shorter and more unique web address ABC. XYZ