I read an article containing tips for naming your company. I felt as though this article was very repetitive in its ideas, yet the ideas given were all very practical and useful.
The main idea I took out of the article was to gain as many ideas as possible and do not limit yourself. The larger pool of words you have, the more potential you have to develop a great idea. The article gave great resources as well, such as the Visual Thesaurus - this takes words that you want and creates new words that customers will associate with your word. I tried it for myself by entering the word WINTER into the search bar. It gave me the options of WINTERTIME, OVERWINTER, and WINTRY. It creates a "web" on the screen and connects all of the words. The program allows you to click on one of the new words and it will automatically construct a new web using the newly selected word. Unfortunately, it only allowed me to make 5 or 6 clicks before closing the window because I used up my free instant trial. But it gives you the option of signing up for a 14 day free trial, and then you can also purchase this tool. For a start up business, this would be a very valuable tool for generating that list of words to associate with your company and maybe use in your company name.
Prior to reading this article, I was under the impression that companies using real words chose their names due to the meaning of the words behind them. This article changed by view entirely. It brought an interesting point, "the etymologies of words or word parts that you use in your name don’t matter. What do matter are the associations people make." Your company name may have a great origin, but if the name has a bad association, that is what the customers will think of when they hear your company.
This article has many useful tips for naming or renaming your company and also gives thinks to various other website resources. Check it out:
http://www.thenameinspector.com/10-tips-for-naming-your-company-product-or-service/
Here is the link to the Visual Thesaurus:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
This is really cool! I feel like I'm not very creative when it comes to naming something, so this would be a valuable tool for me and others who are creatively challenged. I also find the tip about word associations to be very useful, because you don't want potential customers relating your brand to something negative. The power of customers to define brands is mentioned in Made to Stick (Italicized): once the message leaves the marketers hands, consumers are free to assign new meanings to something ("if you're not first, you're last"). So it makes sense to make sure that possible associations would be helpful, not harmful to a company's brand and still communicate the core message.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting article, it really makes you think about companies and their names. A name really can make or break a company. After reading this article I feel like it is going to make me curious of companies names and where they came from. The names of companies may seem simple and obvious but a lot of the time there is much more behind the name of a company.
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