How to Create a Brand Name that Resonates with Consumers

So, you’re ready to officialise your business by giving it a name. You’ve come to the right place.

Undoubtedly, choosing a brand name can be a highly stressful affair. Not only does it need to represent and convey your brand appropriately to consumers, but it also needs to stand the test of time and be memorable.

If you’re feeling stressed about this and wondering how to come up with a brand name, you can rest assured that it will work out. All you need to do is take the journey step by step, which we have outlined below:

1. Understand what makes an effective brand name
2. Choose the type of brand name you want to go for
3. Plan, brainstorm, and narrow down your list of potential names
4. Get help from an online tool if you’re struggling to generate ideas
5. Complete tests and checks to feel confident in the brand name you choose

Without further ado, let’s get into it so you can understand the steps you need to take to create a highly effective and resonant brand name:

5 traits of effective brand names

From the pool of countless brands in existence, we can identify which names have been successful enough to make a lasting impact on consumers since they all share some crucial traits.

If you want your brand name to be successful, too, these characteristics will be essential to know.

We’ve whittled them down to the following five traits:

1. Memorable: the name is easily remembered, catchy, and perhaps concise
2. Unique: the name is distinctive and not confused with any others that exist
3. Future proof: the name will stand the test of time, especially when the business scales
4. Accessible: the name is easy to pronounce, even internationally
5. Visual: the name can be turned into a logo easily and still remain distinctive

Testing your brand names for these traits

Each one of these traits can be tested or accounted for. When it comes to testing your brand name with a group of participants, you can ask questions that relate to the name’s memorability, accessibility, and uniqueness. If the results show that your tested name fails on any of these qualities, you can go back to the drawing board and make the required changes.

To test whether your brand name is future-proof, you can theorise about how the name would be affected by things such as relocation and a broadened product range.

Before deciding on a brand name, ask a designer to produce a range of drafted logos. That way, you can be sure about how your brand name will be reproduced across marketing materials and decide whether you’re happy with its visual reincarnation.

8 categories of brand names

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, it might help to know the different types of names you could go for. For instance, most brand names fit into one of the following eight categories:

1. A person’s name
2. Descriptive
3. Mythical
4. Made up completely
5. Metaphor
6. Acronym
7. Plays on sound or spelling
8. Geographical

There are pros and cons to each of these types, explained below. The most important thing is choosing a name that’s best for your business.

A person’s name (e.g., McDonald’s and Ben & Jerry’s)

Pro: If you have a unique name and decide to use it for your brand, gaining a top space in the SERPs could be a breeze because there won’t be much competition. Plus, if you’ve already built a following with your face and name, it’ll be easier for fans and followers to find your company, as they’ll know what to search for.

Con: Despite the SEO advantage described above, potential customers might not know your name if you’re not famous. So, lots of marketing efforts will be required to get your name out there and build a brand story around it.

Descriptive (e.g., Burger King or We Buy Any Car)

Pro: Descriptive names easily convey the function of a business or its products and can be easily remembered if marketed appropriately.

Con: Though highly functional, descriptive names don’t always pack a punch, so rely on other marketing efforts to express brand personality. In addition, descriptive names can be difficult to trademark as they’re often constituted of very commonly used words.

Mythical (e.g., Hermes and Nike)

Pro: Names relating to myths and legends can carry a high impact, especially if their origin stories are well known by consumers.

Con: If the story behind the name is too obscure, consumers will have difficulty understanding its intended meaning.

Made up completely (e.g., Häagen-Dazs)

Pro: Names that are completely made up will be easy to trademark and are entirely unique.

Con: Since made-up names have no definition when they’re first created, a lot of marketing is needed to help them become well-known by the general public.

Metaphor (e.g., Jaguar and Gorilla Glue)

Pro: If consumers understand the metaphor, a great impact can be achieved.

Con: If consumers don’t understand your metaphor, it won’t carry the weight you hoped it would. Plus, you run the risk of appearing boastful if your products or services don’t live up to expectations. E.g., if Gorilla Glue wasn’t very strong.

Acronym (e.g., ASOS and NASA)

Pro: Acronyms are good if the company name becomes too long or complicated for consumers to remember.

Con: These names lack meaning and emotion.

Plays on sound or spelling (e.g., FedEx, Instagram, and Dunkin’ Donuts)

Pro: Lexically playful names offer great memorability and can help consumers understand companies and their products. They can also be highly unique and, therefore, less likely to run into trademark issues.

Con: Consumers aren’t always impressed by wordplay as it’s so commonplace – so it has to be extra clever to be pulled off well. Plus, playful brand names aren’t really suitable for serious industries.

Geographical (e.g., American Express, KFC, and La Roche-Posay)

Pro: Geographical names offer a sense of heritage which can help consumers feel an affinity with your brand. In addition, companies can piggyback off the prestige of specific locations.

For instance, skincare sold by La Roche-Posay has a ‘natural’ and ‘healing’ reputation since the brand name refers to the rural town in central France, famous for its natural springs.

Con: The brand name might no longer be appropriate if the company grows and begins serving other regions.

What category of brand name should you go for?

Though each type has pros and cons, each has been used by brands that have become highly successful. Evidently, the efficacy of your brand name depends on several other factors, such as your marketing efforts.

It can be a great exercise to come up with eight potential brand names – one from each category – and see which type resonates the most. It’s an effective way to stimulate your brainstorming processes and get you one step closer to your perfect brand name.

How to build a brand name in 7 steps

Now that you’ve got an idea of what makes an effective brand name, it’s time to take action. If you’re wondering how to create a brand name, look no further than these seven steps:

1. Put your target audience front and centre

What kind of language is important to your target market? How do they speak?

Narrowing down your target customer, perhaps with a buyer’s persona, can help to understand the language that resonates with them. For instance, is it formal or informal? Is it playful or serious? Is it prestigious or easily accessed?

Answering these questions and understanding your target customer is essential if your brand name is going to be effective.

2. Consider your brand’s personality, purpose, and mission

Ask yourself the same questions but make them about your company. Is your brand’s personality serious or playful? Formal or informal? Is it for everyone or a small, selected group? Is it extravagant, reliable, quirky, bold, corporate, goofy, modern, exclusive, or zen?

This process is essential if you’re to discover a resonant and effective brand name. The purpose of it is, overall, asking: what do you want potential customers to know about your brand?

3. What are your competitors doing?

You don’t want to be caught out with a brand name too similar to one of your competitors. Looking at rival brands can help you with your own branding in two ways:

1) you can level up and do things none of your competitors are doing.

2) you can understand what consumers are responding well to and use this to inform your strategy.

4. Brainstorm your ideas

It’s time to brainstorm. The above steps should have begun this process already. But, if you’re having trouble generating ideas, you might find an online tool to be helpful. Scroll down to read about three of our favourite name-generating tools.

As mentioned above, it’s a good idea to use the list of brand name categories to generate at least eight different names.

5. Narrow down your ideas

Once you’ve got an extensive list with a few names you’re excited about, it’s time to narrow them down.

Run through the list of traits of effective brand names and evaluate each of your ideas against the five characteristics. Remove any that aren’t unique, accessible, memorable etc.

6. Check for trademarks

It’s crucial that you check your chosen brand name hasn’t already been trademarked. It’ll be terribly disappointing to go through a hugely creative process, to discover at the end that the name is no longer viable. Without a doubt, you must complete a trademark check before you conduct tests on your list of names.

You might also want to check for a suitable website domain. Although it’s not essential that your company website URL matches your business trading name, you might prefer it to, so it’s worth checking before going any further.

7. Test your names

The final part of choosing a brand name is testing it. You’ll need to make sure that consumers’ perceptions of your brand name are as expected and in line with your goals. Read on to learn more about conducting tests on brand names.

Testing your brand name

If you have multiple names and you can’t narrow them down, testing is a great way to choose one of them based on solid data. Even if you just have one brand name you like, testing is the final checkbox to tick in order to feel confident in your choice.

A pool of about 100 participants is the minimum recommended size to reap statistically significant results, and it’s ideal to test for the following things:

• Uniqueness
• Likability
• Memorability
• Pronunciation (or accessibility)
• Suitability
• Context

First, identify the questions you’ll want to ask your test participants:

• What does this name make you feel?
• How unique is this name?
• Do you like this brand?
• Do you trust this brand?
• How appropriate is the name of the company?
• How well does the brand name match the product range?
• How would you pronounce this name?
• How modern is the brand name?
• How similar is this brand name to others in the same industry?

Since these questions are open-ended, it may take longer to evaluate the results of your tests. To make the ‘results’ phase easier, you could turn the questions above into multiple-choice, i.e., ask participants to mark their agreement to each statement out of 10.

If you’re testing multiple brand names against each other, make sure you ask the same questions about each of them.

8 things to avoid when creating a brand name

When thinking about how to create a name for a business, there are don’ts as well as dos. To ensure you don’t make any rookie errors, use the following checklist:

1. Avoid names that could be difficult to spell or pronounce
2. Don’t choose a brand name that has already been trademarked by another company
3. Avoid names that are overly long
4. Avoid breaking your local laws and regulations regarding company names
5. Be careful about using your own name
6. Don’t forget to secure the domain of your intended brand name
7. Avoid names that will prevent your company from scaling
8. Don’t go too random

3 tools that can help make a brand name

If you need help in your brainstorming phase, there’s no harm in checking out an online name generator. The following three tools have been tested by us, are all free, and each has great merits:

Naming

Though this site looks a little basic, it has loads of personalisation options. You can enter how many syllables you want your brand name to have, choose to add Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes, as well as adding rhymes.

NameSnack

Though free, NameSnack receives a commission when you register your domain through one of its partners. It uses machine learning and offers up available website domains. We found this tool very user-friendly; however, it doesn’t check trademark databases.

Namelix

Namelix is another tool that uses AI to generate business names. Choose from creative filters such as alternative spellings, compound words, non-English words, and short phrases, as well as choosing between short and long names and varied creativity/randomness levels.

Final thoughts

Choosing a brand name is an exciting time, but you might be nervous about picking the right one. If you need some assistance with picking a brand name, reach out to purpleplanet. Our large and experienced team is qualified to help with a range of branding services.

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