Some of our favorite brands had rather different names when they started out. Would Google have become the ubiquitous search engine if it had stuck with its original name “Backrub”? It seems doubtful: Googling something is now firmly part of our vocabulary in a way that “backrubbing” it never could have been. Could Instagram have taken the world by storm if were “doing it for the Burbn” instead of “for the ‘Gram’?

While Backrub and Burbn made great a choice by bailing on their names, this is the kind of thing you want to get right first try. Once you’ve named your brand, it’s very hard to change and only 18% of consumers look favorably on brand name changes.

By the time you’ve finished this article, you’ll understand why Google and Instagram are such powerful names, and how they contributed to the massive success of each of these brands. You’ll know how to come up with a brand name and be ready to start your brand naming journey.

Why a Brand Name is so Important

You know a powerful brand name is important. But how important? Well, brand name guides 77% of consumers toward a purchase and 82% of investors consider name recognition an important factor when deciding where to invest.

A strong name makes almost every aspect of business easier, from finding customers to attracting investors. And early investment in your naming process can pay dividends: Apple’s name and logo are valued at over $408 billion. Investing time to find a strong brand name and matching domain at the outset means you have a long-term asset down the road.

Here’s what a good name does: 

• Attracts new customers, reducing CAC (cost of customer acquisition).
• Ensures old customers return, increasing CLV (customer lifetime value).
• Gives an instant understanding of your business, reducing marketing costs.
• Creates a buzz around your business, attracting investment.

A bad name, on the other hand:

• Allows better-named brands steal your customers.
• Leaves you forgettable.
• Hampers expansion into new markets.
• Is a long-term deadweight, and costs you revenue.

Convinced yet? You don’t just need a good name for your brand, you need an incredible name. So let’s find out how to choose a brand name.

How to Come Up with a Powerful Brand Name in 6 Steps

Brand naming isn’t easy. It’s an art and a science, requiring both creativity and objectivity. However, there is a formula, and we can help. Here are 6 key steps to follow when choosing a brand name.

1. Define your Brand Identity

Maybe you’ve come up with an incredible hot sauce recipe that packs a punch, or you’ve built a new email marketing tool that streamlines outreach. Whatever your great idea, I’m sure you’re eager to give it a name.

However, before you can come up with a name for your new brand, you need to understand your brand identity. Your name needs to tell customers everything about your brand, or at least hint at it. From the creative way you’re solving problems they might not even know they have, to the deeper values you’ve built your business on, your name needs to encapsulate your identity as a brand.

There are two main points to consider:

• What is your USP — the unique selling point that makes you stand out from your competitors?
• And what is your brand tone going to be?

To define your USP, look deeper into the way customers interact with your product. What’s your mission, what’s the solution you’re offering customers, and what does a single iteration of a sale look like, from start to closing?

When it comes to brand tone, you have lots of options. Here are some of my favorite characteristics to build a brand around:

• Historied and trusted
• Modern and innovative
• Quirky and playful
• Emotionally impactful
  

Let’s go back to hot sauce. Maybe you’re sourcing (saucing?) your chiles from ethical, community-owned farms, and reinvesting in those communities? Green Zest or Sustainable Spice might emphasize those values.

Or perhaps you think a historied brand tone will build trust with your audience — a name like Uncle Zinger’s could give the impression of years of experience.

Of course, you know your brand best. But it’s easy to get lost in the details of your new product or service, and brand is about the bigger picture. So if you need some help to begin building your brand, try out our AI-powered brand-building tool.

2. Assess Industry and Audience Expectations

From Tabasco to Louisiana via Texas Pete, there are some clear industry trends in the hot sauce world. Whatever your industry, you should explore what your competitors are doing before naming your brand.

Naming trends can take many forms. In the above hot sauce brands, location is used to emphasize authenticity. Meanwhile in the tech world, using suffixes like -ify and -ly has become the norm for handy apps and web tools: see Spotify, Wealthify, and Grammarly, for example.

Once you understand the trends, you have a choice to make. Will you follow those trends and get a headstart in communicating your purpose to your customers? Or are you going to reject them and become a trendsetter yourself? Both paths have merit; choose carefully.

At the same time, in this research phase, assess your customer expectations. Who are you primarily marketing to — a younger or older audience? How much disposable income do they have, and what are their politics, values, and ambitions? Build your brand to appeal to your model customer.

3. Brainstorm Name Ideas

Brand identity, industry trends, and customer expectations put constraints on the brand names you can choose. Once you understand these constraints, the creative part can begin: brainstorm for unique, catchy, and creative brand names.

There are a few more rules to follow at this stage. Every name should stick in your memory, and be easy to spell and pronounce. Cute misspellings are popular among brands these days,  but I urge you to be more like ride-sharing brand Lyft than denim designer Pheelings. Replacing an ‘i’ with a ‘y’ is a common thread in naming, whereas switching an ‘f’ to a ‘ph’ is not.

For similar reasons avoid numbers or special characters in your brand name. If you want to be Number One Hot Sauce, spell out “one” rather than using the numeral “one”. Don’t replace an ‘a’ with the @-sign for your email marketing service, or use hyphens where they’re not needed.

At Atom, we love the “Crowded Bar Test” for a name. Could your brand name be shared in a conversation at a lively, busy bar, easily heard and understood across the backdrop of noise? Heck, brand naming is thirsty work so feel free to try the crowded bar test out in real life.

Staring at a blank page can be tough, so here are some ideas, and examples, to get you started. 

• Real Word: Apple, Swoop, Slack
• Misspelled: Lyft, nimbl, Pheelings
• Compound: Instagram, SnapChat
• Phrases: StumpleUpon, Ready to Rise
• Blends: Groupon, Yuconic, Winvested
• Descriptive: Whole Foods, The Body Shop
• Made Up/Abstract: Orizia, Itorix
• Play On Words: Deja Brew, EyeQ, Inner Peas
• Metaphoric: Nike, Silverline, LoanSpring, RobinHood
• Visual: Iron Flame, Blue Cabin
• Foreign words: Häagen-Dazs, Nomi d’Italia
• This & That: Abercrombie & Fitch, Lydia & Park, Owl and Lark
• Alliterative: Blackberry, Krispy Kreme, Coca-Cola

Our AI-powered brand name generator can take your business idea and brand positioning and come up with some funky, fun, or alluring names to get you started.

4. Build a Shortlist of the Best Brand Name Ideas

After a big brainstorming session, it’s wise to wait a few days. See which names stick in your mind as memorable, which ones appear to grow in emotional response, and which fall by the wayside.

Then it’s time to shortlist your names. Be ruthless here: if the name doesn’t elevate your brand, emphasize your values, and contain an emotional hook for your customers, cut it.

Whatever you do, don’t get emotionally attached to a single name either. Your customers will be the number one judge of your brand name, and before you can select the perfect name you have to validate it.

5. Validate Your Chosen Brand Name Ideas

With a shortlist of names you think you love, it’s time for your creative side to get put to bed. Now, we’re all about objectivity. Launching a brand requires investment: marketing material, domain names, and product design; you can only undertake the necessary investment with full confidence in your name.

So it’s time to validate your shortlisted name choices and see what comes out on top.

There are two steps you must take to validate your brand name

• Audience testing: In a fast-paced digital world the associations of your name could change fast, particularly if you’re targetting a younger audience with a life lived online. Our audience testing service gives you a deep dive into the mindset of your target market and will help you understand if your name is unique, memorable, and has the right emotional connections.

• Trademark check: Falling foul of trademark law can tie your business up in expensive and complicated disputes. Ensure your preferred brand names are yours and yours alone — do some online research to see if there are businesses out there operating under your shortlisted names. Get even more peace of mind with our free trademark checker tool which searches millions of active business records around the world.

6. Find Your Matching Domain Name

Over a quarter of all business now takes place online. This makes an exact-match domain name an essential companion for your brand name. Premium domain names contain strong, brandable characteristics and elite, trusted extensions like .com and .io. Don’t choose your brand name without ensuring you can get a matching domain name as an online platform for your brand.

Atom.com’s Premium Domain Marketplace is the place to go. Every brand name in our marketplace has been created by our international team of naming experts and validated by domain experts. This is a tightly curated marketplace with an acceptance rate of 6 – 8% for submitted domains. You’ll only browse the best of the best.

Benefits of Buying a Domain Through Squadhelp

While there are many domain marketplaces and auction sites across the internet, none combine the powerful benefits of purchasing a premium domain through Squadhelp.

• AI-augmented assistance: Our AI copilot assists in building your brand so you find names that will work throughout the lifespan of your business.
  
• Easily searchable marketplace: Smart searching lets you filter by price, industry, length, style and the ideas or emotions you’re seeking to invoke.
  
• Brandable names, highly curated list: Every name in our premium and ultra-premium marketplaces has been through a rigorous selection process. Our team of experts (who have worked on naming projects for Alibaba, Nestle, Dell, and 40,000+ other brands) and their real-data-trained AI assistants comb through every name, picking only the best.
  
• Free logo design: Visionize your brand’s future with a ready-made logo for every premium domain.
  
• Brokerage service: 24/7 customer service provides support for every premium purchase.
  
• Payment Plan Options: Flexible payment options let you invest in your brand with no up-front costs.
  
• In-built escrow services: Our built-in escrow services give you complete security: funds are never released until domain transfer is complete.
  
• Domain Transfer Experts: Our experts in domain transfer help you throughout the technical process, and it doesn’t stop until your new domain is showing at your domain registrar.

The Biggest Brand Naming Mistakes to Avoid

Once you understand how to come up with a brand name you just have to roll up your sleeves and follow the steps. Some brands still get it wrong, however. Using Backrub and Barf Soap as cautionary tales, here are some brand naming mistakes to avoid.

• Naming your brand before you understand your brand: Google’s first name, BackRub, was created at the same time as the founders built their original search algorithm. At this time, they knew nothing about the brand they were building and had only a rough sense of the service they would provide. So of course the name was terrible. Don’t name your brand before you understand your brand identity.

• Being generic: Sure, you want your customers to know you’re offering a fiery hot sauce or a great plumbing service. But a generic name stuffed with keywords is easily forgettable. Hot Hot Sauce or Number One Plumbers might tell customers what you do, but it won’t help them remember you when the pipes burst. When the kitchen’s flooded, customers will recall Noah’s Arc Plumbing.

• Being too specific: On the flip side of a generic name comes an overly specific name. Calling your new cookie brand Grandma’s Cookies might sound smart now, but what about when you expand into traybakes, kitchen utensils, and coffee shops? Choose a name that allows for future business opportunities.

• The foreign language trap: We’re living in a global world, and it’s never been easier to sell your products online. So check that your name makes sense in global markets. Don’t be like the Iranian cleaning product company Barf Soap, who chose the Farsi word for snow, to name their brand. In Iran, Barf has all the right connotations: clean, white, peaceful. In English, not so much.

• Forgetting your audience: Remember that you’re not branding to yourself. The name you instinctively love might not work for your wider target demographic.

• Being hard to spell or pronounce: While there’s a strong incentive to come up with a unique brand name, don’t let the basics fall by the wayside when trying to stand out. Sure, Str8 Fiyah Hawt Sawz is a unique brand name, and might even be eye-catching on a poster. But your customers will never be able to Google you.

Wrapping Up

Despite all the rules, don’t be afraid to think outside the box for your brand name. Some brands have been incredibly successful by simply… making it up. Häagen-Dazs ice cream is not only difficult to spell and includes a foreign character, but it’s also totally meaningless. The founders — from New York — understood that a foreign-sounding name would appeal to their customers and wanted something totally unique. The key, however, is to validate your offbeat ideas with audience testing.

Whether it’s you, your family, or a small circle of colleagues, there’s only so much creativity you can muster. But what about when you get 300,000 creatives working on it? That’s how an Atom Naming Contest works, crowdsourcing your brand naming project through our global network of naming experts.

Brand naming is hard work and, as an entrepreneur, you’ve probably got a lot on your plate. Let Squadhelp take the reigns, and help find you a powerful, validated name with a matching domain: the ultimate platform for your brand.