Choosing a company name

There are many things to consider when choosing a name, for a product or for a company, the central concept to keep in mind is that this is your brand name, not just a name that should appear in a business registry somewhere. The first thing to consider is your product, if you chose to market your product on the basis of a certain aspect of it, what is called a Unique Selling Point (USP), you should have a name that describes the benefit. Examples of this strategy are Duracell (durable battery cells), 7-Elleven (from the original opening hours) and Microsoft (small and therefore effective software). When your product is branded on the basis of more experience related aspect, names that trigger the imagination around the experience is more suitable, examples of this include Bounty (chocolate), Nike (the Greek god with wings on her shoes) and Häagen-Dazs (made up "to convey an aura of the old-world traditions and craftsmanship"). In this way company names can help the marketing of the product.

Another way to look at it is to classify names from fictive to descriptive on a continuum, on one end you have totally made up names, like Kodak, and on the other end you have names that describe the product, like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Descriptive names can also describe the situation of use, like After Eight, the target group, like Teen Magazine, or other aspects that are relevant to the product. In between you have names that are based on other things that are relevant to the company but not to the product, like Six Apart, that took their name since the two founders were born six days apart, names based on place of origin, like Scania, which is Latin for the place in Sweden the company was founded. Names can also be descriptive without it being of the product, like Camel for cigarettes or Amazon for the online bookstore. Yet another approach in here is to describe the product in another language, such as French, Latin or Greek. By choosing names that are not related directly to the product you lose the customers instant realization of what the company does when hearing the name, but you can make names that are more distinct from others, reducing the risk you will be confused with competitors.

A third way to name a company can be based on rhetorical principles, meant to induce people to remember the name better. One way is alliteration, the repetition of consonants in the word, like Coca Cola, if you repeat the vowel, this is called assonance, for example Poco Loco. You can use rhymes or imperfect rhymes, Poco Loco again, or Black and Decker as an imperfect rhyme, names can also rhyme in the beginning of the word, Copenhagen Consulting Company is an example of this. My personal favorite are oxymoron’s, United Nations is a good example, Soft and Crunchy another. Metaphors are popular, Microsoft Explorer or Apples Safari. Palindromes are word that can be read the same both ways, like Omo, the Norwegian detergent. Spelling errors annoy people, but it does stick to the brain, just make sure it’s obvious that it’s on purpose, have you for example seen  del.icio.us? or Reddit (read it in) for that matter?

Just remember to pick a name that fits your product, that is unique, that is not too long, that has a free domain name, that is easy to remember, that doesn’t have alternate meanings in other languages where you plan to enter (like the Finnish anti-freeze Super-Piss) and that doesn’t get confused with other brands.

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