No business venture, new or established, can exist for very long without customers. Marketing your products and services is essential to the success of your enterprise, and some of the most important — and potentially difficult — marketing-related decisions you'll ever make concern your business name. What are you going to call yourself and why?

Ideally, your verbal identity should reflect the personality of your company and help to set you apart from others in your field, especially your competition. Linguistically, an effective business name should be distinctive, meaningful, easy to remember, easy to pronounce, and easy to spell. Practically, the name should be available as a dot com (or other desired domain extension) since the Internet is perhaps the prime medium for promoting just about anything these days. Additionally, the name you choose should be enduring so it will remain effective as language trends come and go.

Depending on the nature of your business, there may be other important issues to consider before selecting a name. For example, if you are developing a product for an international market, you should ensure that its name doesn't translate into something undesirable in another language. One recent example of an English-named product that didn't go over so well in another country was Clairol's "Mist Stick" curling iron, first introduced into the U.S. market in 2006. In German, the word "mist" is slang for "excrement," so you might imagine the difficulty the company had marketing its new beauty appliance to fashion-conscious fräuleins.

From a purely philosophical standpoint, names are simply the labels we assign to things or concepts to help us distinguish them from other things and concepts. When we also use names to describe things, such as companies and their products and services, then they take on a whole new significance and power. As advertising pioneer Claude C. Hopkins wrote in his 1923 classic book, Scientific Advertising, "The right name is an advertisement in itself."

AREAS OF EXPERISE
Business name development
Product and service name development
Tagline and slogan development
Nomenclature system development
Domain name research
Competitive industry analyses
Foreign language screening
Preliminary U.S. trademark screening

For more information about how
Word Leaders can assist you with your verbal branding needs, please email us
at info@wordleaders.com or use our contact form.