Coming up with a business name: harder than I first imagined

Going in circles

Early in my process of coming up with potential names for my company (read: my first company ever), my main criteria were:

• Do I like the name?
• Is the .com domain name available?
• Are there existing companies with similar/identical names that people could get mixed up with mine?

That seemed logical enough at first. But a few weeks in, it felt like I was going in circles around the same names. And I was not satisfied with any of them.

I finally decided I needed a new perspective. I needed some more guidance, more structure. Soon after, I discovered this podcast episode:

Listening to this really helped me understand what my process was missing and how certain aspects of my approach weren’t ideal.

From the get-go, the host emphasizes connecting with the audience over one’s own sentimentality about a name. The role of a brand name, he explains, is to connect with the audience. So it’s less about how much I like the name and more about how my potential clients like it. This alone was a big shift for me.

Over the rest of the podcast, the host describes the two main goals of a brand name, seven different types of brand names, and a six-step process for choosing a name.

I want to tell you a bit more about how I’ve been going through this six-step process.

Six-step process for choosing a brand name

This six-step process of choosing a brand name has been especially helpful for me. It’s given me a methodical way of doing something that once seemed open-ended and overwhelming. And the good news: there’s still plenty of room for creativity!

Here’s my understanding of the process:

• Before even jumping into brainstorming names, the first step is to create a buyer persona. Who are my potential customers? Since the primary role of a brand name is to connect with the audience, it makes sense to first reflect on who the audience is and what they want. I spent some time writing about this in my journal.
  
• The second step is to define what differentiates my business from other, similar businesses in the market. Again, more journaling.
  
• Step three is brainstorming keywords. The words that I brainstormed were mostly based on what I had written in my journal in the first two steps. The recommendation here is to be exhaustive. So for all of the words that I thought of, I did a thesaurus search and got all the related words as well.
  
• For me, step four is where the fun really starts: coming up with potential business names. This is done by combining keywords–and parts of keywords–from step three. A recommendation here is to write down anything and everything that comes to mind. This is the step that I’m currently on.
  
• Step five is about sifting through the names generated in step 4 to determine how memorable and strategic they are.
  
• The final step is real-world application, which includes comparing with competitors’ brand names and putting the potential names into mission statements/etc. to see how they sound.

Looking back, looking ahead

Sometimes, I tend to jump head-first into projects without taking much time to consider my approach. Sometimes the initial excitement and vision is enough to make it work. And sometimes it isn’t.

Looking back at the criteria I was using before, I wasn’t completely misguided. But I was definitely missing some things. For example, I needed to de-prioritize my own sentimentality about the name. And I needed to spend time thinking about my customer persona and what differentiates my business from others in the field.

To be clear, before I discovered this podcast episode, I was seeking advice from trusted friends and family. And they touched on various aspects of the process that I am now following. But hearing it all explained in an organized and comprehensive way really helped me plan my direction forward.

For a project like this–naming a business–I’m glad I finally realized that many others had probably walked the same path before me and has come up with systematic ways to approach the challenge. Using the six-step approach laid out in the Brand Master podcast, I feel like I’m actually making progress towards coming up with a business name now.

If you’re in the same boat, I highly recommend listening to this episode.

Any thoughts or ideas? Any personal experiences naming a business? I’d love to hear from you below!