Naming a Business or Product

Naming a Business or Product

Naming a business, a product or a service for a small business person is like naming a child: It's important. It's become more difficult to name anything now if you want to get a website address that matches the name. Get tips on naming your company, a product or service to help save you time, money and end up with something you'll be really proud of for years to come.

This article covers general tips and advice for naming a company or product.

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Tips on naming your business or a product

1. The name is the most visible representative of the brand

You'll want to learn about Branding and Positioning
How to Brand a Company
How to Brand a Product
How to Brand Yourself as a Person (called personal branding)
How to Create a Logo
How to Create a Tagline

Know this: a brand is not just a logo. It's a lot more than that. It's perceptions, reputation and the sum of everything a company does.

2. Choosing a name may be a process of "What's available?" if you want to use the same name for your website

Unfortunately, there aren't many good, short website addresses available. There are 193+ million internet domain names that are already taken. You can try to buy a name from the company that owns it.

How to Choose a Website Address (domain name) explains the process to get or buy a website address.

3. .dot? .net? .org? or other? What's best?

".com" is best. .com is what most people put in first so if you have a name with a ".net" or ".org" for your URL (web address), people will go to the site that has the ".com" and may think that's your company, product or brand. This is true even if you're a non-profit organization that is supposed to use ".org" instead. Many of the largest non-profit organizations have a ".com" address.

If you choose a website name with a ".net" or ".org," you will always need to emphasize the exact name. That's another thing for a prospect or customer to remember or get wrong.

TIP: In addition to checking for availability of a suitable website address, you should also check what names are available for Twitter, and for company/fan pages on Facebook, LinkedIn and other popular social media sites.

When evaluating options for names, they should

Not be taken by someone else (if you'll be selling online and asking people to visit your website)
Be easy to spell
Be intuitive for how it's spelled (so when they put in what they think is the website address, they end up on your site, not someone else's)
Be easy to pronounce
Not be too long - think of how the name will be used in search ads and Twitter posts. If you have a long name for your website, you'll be using precious space for that instead of the message you want to convey. There are tools for Twitter to shorten URLs but that impacts how your brand is represented. Same for telling someone your company email address.
Be descriptive and convey a benefit relevant to the product/service/company
Not mean something bad in another language - an important consideration in this global world. Remember the story of the Chevy Nova? "No va" means "It doesn't go" in Spanish. That's a name that got lost in translation.

IMPORTANT TIP: you may want to consider naming your business using the most relevant and popular keywords. That way your business will appear first in search results on Google when someone searches for those exact terms. For instance, someone named their website "fishing.com" to they are listed one page one of search results on Google. Learn more about how this works on Naming Your Website

When naming your business, you'll need to go through a legal process too

We're not lawyers, but you'll need one to make sure you set up your company and any names in the proper way so that you can protect them.

There are more than a million names, slogans and logos registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

If you're thinking about using the last names of the owners or partners for the name of the company...

How hard will that company name be to remember?

What happens when a partner retires and the company is best known as his/her name?

What happens when you have new partners and shareholders?

What will the "nickname" of the company become? Do you want to be known for those letters? Anything inappropriate about them?

Made-up words for business names

"Twitter" is one of the most popular words used. Other popular made-up names: Google, Verizon, Häagen-Dazs, Wii, Viagra, Oreo, iPod. These companies all spent a lot of money to create brand name awareness. Will you be able to do this?

Resources and experts to help you with naming

There are companies and consultants that specialize in naming
There are more than fifty firms that specialize in this globally. They work for the largest companies and brands and won't be an affordable choice for most small businesses and non-profits, but some of their people may take on freelance projects.

Best Sources to Find Marketing Freelancers

TIP: Look for who has given advice on this article. If they've created a listing, you'll be able to link to their profile page to learn more about them.

There are free tools and paid services to help you generate name options

Top Naming Services and Suppliers covers those

Are you starting a new business?

Congratulations! We know you are very busy, wearing far too many hats and could use some free, expert advice on marketing to help you with how to launch your company successfully and spend the least time and money doing so.

Marketing How-to Guides For Startups

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How to Buy a Website Domain Name - cautions and information you need to know if you want to buy an existing website from someone else.

How to Register a Domain Name

How to Name a Website

Naming - a company, a product, a service

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