Creating an effective marketing brand name is probably one of the biggest challenges of starting a new business. Make the wrong brand name and customers will have no idea what your business does or what it stands for. Make the right brand name and every customer will immediately understand your value propositions.
This is why creating your brand name is not a task that should be taken lightly. Your brand name will offer a promise to your customers and differentiate the values that your brand offers from competitors. Most importantly, it does not matter if your brand name makes any sense to you, it only matters if it is meaningful to the customers.
Here are 10 easy steps you can follow to create a brand name that differentiates yours from others and resonates with your customers.
1. Develop a Brand Strategy
Do not try to make a brand name without developing a brand strategy first. How can you know if you are choosing the right brand name without knowing your brand’s promise, unique value proposition, and strategic direction are?
2. Analyze the Consumers, Competitors and the Market
In order to create an effective brand name, you need to fully understand your market and targeted consumers. Do your research and learn what are your competitors’ brand names and how consumers react or feel with those names. Identify opportunities and gaps in order to create a brand name that leverages such opportunities and fill those gaps.
3. Determine the Message your Brand Wants to Communicate
After you analyze your competitors’ brand name and what customers want from brands in that market, you can now start refining the position of your brand. Determine that position along with the message your brand wants to communicate and its promise. Also, you can determine a unique personality of your business and use that to come up a brand name.
4. Brainstorm without Judging
Creating a brand name is something you cannot do alone. So, gather your team and start brainstorming for brand name ideas. For this process, there is no such thing as bad ideas. List everything that comes to mind, even the dumbest idea should be accepted without judging. Imagine your brand from all angles; consider all audiences, and focus on each benefit. You can also check with online brand name generators.
Check out this blog from Oberlo that provides a list of the best free business name generators to give you brand name ideas.
5. Create a shortlist
After listing all ideas from all that brainstorming, narrow down the list to 10 to 20 best brand name ideas. Make sure that the brand name ideas you included in the list include a name that can last through brand extensions, market changes and trends, geographic expansions and more. This is because you never know where your business would take you in the years to come.
6. Trademark and Availability of Domain Name
Consult with your short list and check the availability of each brand names ideas for trademarking. Surely you do not want to launch a brand name only to receive a cease and desist letter for the next few months or years telling you that somebody else already owns that trademark.
Moreover, you should also check for the availability of domain name. It is possible that the exact domain name for your brand name ideas will not be available (since someone else owns it), so you should know it earlier to brainstorm other alternatives available.
7. Make your list shorter
Based on your domain name and trademark research, you should be able to shorten your list of brand name ideas to 5 or 10 best options.
8. Develop a Brand Marketing Mock-up
Using the brand name ideas on your updated list, create business cards, logo, ad and package mockup. Make them visually appealing and sounds good. Sometimes a brand name might look great but when you add it to a package design or put it in a radio ad, it seems a little off.
9. Test your Brand Marketing Mock-up
When you finished developing your brand marketing mock-up, they are now ready for testing. You can do it through customer research and find out which brand name ideas offer more value and resonate with target audiences. Through this, you will immediately identify which brand name ideas are the best, needs a little tweak, and those that need to be crossed out quickly.
10. Launch and Monitor your Brand
Once you have determined the best of the best brand name in your list, you can bow launch and use it consistently on all customer touch points. However, be sure to monitor and conduct research to ensure that your brand name is doing well and well-received.
