Name: Hello, My Name is Awesome
Rating: 4.1 (22 reviews)
Author: Alexandra Watkins

What’s in it for me? Learn the dos and don’ts of naming your company.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” quipped Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. When it comes to your loved one this is certainly true. In business, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Having the right name will have a huge impact on what people think of you. The wrong name always stinks.

While a great name will make it easier for people to connect to your product, a bad name can alienate, confuse and quite simply bore potential customers. As these blinks will show you, a funny spelling, a quirky made-up word or a pun might seem like a good idea at first, but if you’re not careful it might come back to haunt you. Luckily, there are tried-and-tested ways to make sure this doesn’t happen.

In these blinks you’ll learn

how to make people smile when they see your brand name;
why naming your company XOBNI is a bad idea; and
why pen company PenIsland should maybe have brainstormed a little bit longer.

To leave a great first impression, ensure your brand name is super “sticky” and makes people smile.

Do you remember the first time you heard of a website called Facebook? What was your immediate impression? Did the name make it sound like a hip place to be?

Chances are, the answer is yes. And that’s exactly how it should be: a good name should create positive, brand-aligned associations without being difficult to understand. The name Facebook, for instance, instantly conjures up thoughts of people connecting.

Flickr is a more challenging brand name. Even though it’s a successful company, this photo-sharing platform has long struggled simply because people don’t know what its name stands for. You definitely don’t want people drawing a blank when they hear your name.

That’s why, in order to discover the perfect name for your company, you should follow a conceptual approach captured by the acronym SMILE. It stands for:

Suggestive: Amazon is a great name because it implies that the retailer carries everything from A to Z, and is massive like its namesake river. If the company had initially been called Bookshop.com, it probably would have followed a very different path.

Meaningful: to convey meaning to potential customers, don’t name your company after yourself, since strangers don’t associate anything with your name.

Imaginary: an evocative, visual name is hugely powerful. Think of Timberland, which suggests woods and outdoorsiness. This was exactly the effect intended by the founders.

Legs: choose names that create space for wordplay. Ben & Jerry’s is masterful at doing this with its ice cream flavors: think Chunky Monkey and Half Baked. Choose fun, playful names people might even want to see printed on a T-shirt.

And finally, a recent Fast Company article showed that 50 percent of every business is driven by emotion. For instance, just think of the fragrance, Obsession.

Above all, making people smile when they see your name is key. Because as we’ll see in the upcoming blink, you definitely don’t want to leave anyone scratching their head.

To avoid confusing customers, don’t fall into the Seven Deadly Sins of Naming.

Whenever you encounter a brand name that utterly befuddles you, chances are that the company violated one of the Seven Deadly Sins of Naming.

Any one of these violations will leave your customers scratching their head. And to remember what those sins are, we can follow the acronym SCRATCH:

To find the perfect name, work independently to draft a creative brief and then reach out to others for feedback.

In modern marketing practices, collective brainstorming is treated like the holy grail of generating compelling new ideas. But oftentimes, finding a great brand name through brainstorming is close to impossible. It’s better to go a different way:

First, draft a creative brief. This is basically an ingredient list of everything you need to combine to create the perfect name. It includes everything from target audience to words to avoid and more. This way, you’ll be able to define exactly what your brand stands for and figure out what you want the name to communicate.

Securing the right domain name is essential.

On the web, your domain name is key, since that’s where people will go to find you. And companies have big problems when their domains don’t align with their brand name.

Many firms start out with an imperfect URL. At first, Facebook was located at theFacebook.com. In such cases, companies have to belatedly spend huge sums of money to buy the domain that actually fits their identity. So, try to figure out your real name from the beginning.

Key ideas in Hello, My Name is Awesome

What is Hello, My Name is Awesome about?

Hello, My Name is Awesome (2014) is about the most important decision a new business faces: choosing a brand name that will launch the company into the stratosphere where it belongs. You might think picking a name is straightforward, but you have a lot to learn! This is your guide to negotiating the snakes and ladders of the brand-naming process – and coming out on top.