Don’t Make These Common Mistakes When Naming Your Brand
The business name acts as your company’s basic identity. Even when a celebrity or influencer promotes your business, your business name and the effect it produces on customers will always come before your business’s image.
Your choice of a good business name could also affect the future of your company and increase its performance. Neglecting this integral element has caused businesses to fail at matching their success in establishing a great product with their business name.
These founders end up choosing names that are uninteresting, offensive, or tone-deaf, which causes serious difficulties for businesses.
If you’re unsure of how to come up with the perfect business name that will set your firm apart, read on as we’ve prepared a simple guide for you.
Three Important Naming Pitfalls to Avoid
- Names With a Critical Undertone
Customers frequently voice their concerns when met with unpleasant social concerns. As a result, if your firm tries to speak out against these matters, even if it does so in a way unrelated to your business or product name, you will lose clients and revenue since those who disapprove of your point of view are less motivated to use your products.
Colourpop’s offensive names for their darkest shades of cosmetics, ‘Yikes’ and ‘Typo,’ only received criticism because they are demeaning and offensive to a massive portion of their audience. Even if you want to give your business an edgy tone, try avoiding names like ‘Thai Tanic,’ ‘STD Contractors,’ and ‘Pee Cola,’ as they are cringe-worthy and can put off your target audience.
Furthermore, avoid any politically charged topics, or at the very least approach them with extreme caution; otherwise, your company could end up like MyPillow or Gillette.
- Complex and Difficult-to-Pronounce Business Names
Short, simple names are great for your business because they are recognizable and easy to find on the internet. Clients are considerably more drawn in by simple, memorable, and unique company names.
If your firm’s name is hard to pronounce, you run the risk of losing customers to rivals with names that are easy to pronounce, clear, and appealing.
Many businesses have unfortunately missed the necessity of choosing a memorable company name, leaving out the fact that companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google leveraged their strong business names to secure their positions in the minds of customers.
Understand that customers prefer short, uncomplicated names rather than long, complicated ones. Keep this in mind even when using a business naming service to get a name for your business.
- Words With Offensive Meanings in Foreign Languages
Words have varied meanings for different people, and names are no exception. People from all over the world will become acquainted with your firm, either via promotion or by happenstance, and if your business name bothers your clients in their native language, they will move to other products with more appealing names than yours.
Customers were willing to quit established firms like Nokia since their flagship phone was branded ‘Lumia,’ which is a Spanish slang word for ‘prostitute.’ Mazda’s Laputa, which was also a Spanish phrase for ‘the whore,’ had the same fate.
These show that customers across the world value business names and would abandon any item with a bad name in the same way that Spanish buyers did. To guarantee that the name you choose is not insulting to clients in other nations, undertake a thorough linguistic research to ensure that customers from other parts of the world will not find it offensive.
Customers First
One of the most concerning aspects of branding is the potential for blunders to swiftly define your entire organization in the eyes of potential clients.
So, prioritize your customers’ wants and make sure that any branding decisions you make, such as coming up with a name or tone that connects with them, are appropriate. Remember that failure to meet the demands of both the company and its customers is often the fundamental cause of terrible business names.
Because these names are selected without conducting sufficient business and consumer research, they wind up misrepresenting the company, irritating customers, and severely hurting sales. Therefore, pay great attention to your business and offer it a unique business name and identity that customers will easily recognize.
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. We are also the world’s leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients such as Nestle, Dell, Nuskin, and AutoNation.