brandXpress blog

Since we talked here earlier about Naming Don’ts, let’s see some DO’s on the matter. Without any doubts, choosing a name is one of the most important decisions a company can make when launching a brand. More than that, when we’re talking about small businesses it seems that the most stressful thing about starting a new company was not manufacturing of products or advertising to customers, but coming up with a name.

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Michael Kanellos, editor at large at CNET News.com, has an interesting article providing some advices for nowadays business naming, that even if is focused on tech companies, is still useful for businesses at large:
In any event, for you start-up execs, here’s a handy guideline for how not to name your company:
1. Avoid [...]

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The Strategic Name Development Blog has an excellent post about the notion of pormanteau (a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words), titled Company Naming: What’s in Your Portmanteau?:
It was Lewis Carroll who first used the word “portmanteau” to describe a word made up of other words [...]

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Boston Herald on branding:
What’s in a name?
Just about everything if it identifies your company or organization and tells the public what it can expect from you. Which is why the fin de siecle trend toward re-branding that picked up steam in the late ’90s is unlikely to end any time soon. “Old” businesses and organizations [...]

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From Martin Neumeier’s The Brand Gap: Revised Edition (2nd Edition) here is a lis with 7 criteria for a good name:

Distinctiveness.
Brevity.
Appropriateness.
Easy spelling and pronunciation.
Likability.
Extendibility.
Protectability.

via

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A recent study among small business owners in the United States, sthow that the most stressful thing about starting a new company was not manufacturing of products or advertising to customers, but coming up with a name for the small business. Entrepreneurs spend weeks and even months trying to develop the perfect name.
Along with the [...]

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Whether we’re talking about Sony’s Walkman or a 3M’s Post-it Note, there are some of the landmark brand names that made it so far that their trademarks turn into common nouns. And this should be the good part of branding: a brand name on everybody’s lips.
Meanwhile there are cases that we use such a noun [...]

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Naming is an important part of branding a product or a business. More than that, an important first step when naming a business, product or service is to figure out just what it is that your new name should be doing for you. The most common decision is that a name should explain to the [...]

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After the 5 Tips on Brand Naming, here is an interesting post of Steve Rivkin is the co-author of The Making of a Name : The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy on 5 Myths of Brand Naming:
Myth #1: Size doesn’t matter.
Yes, it does. Shorter is better in everything from memorability to packaging.
Myth #2: [...]

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Naming a new brand without taking enough in consideration the main target market may lead you to unexpected surprises. Here is an interesting NYT article on such a case:
What better way to honor the brash origins of this city, the owners of Houston’s new professional soccer franchise reasoned, than to name their team “Houston 1836,” [...]

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