After more than 30 years of working with startups and new products, it still shocks us at how difficult finding a good brand name is. Just last week, we were talking with a founder who shared her startup’s name and then asked what we associated with that name. I can assure you our immediate associations were quite different from what the startup does. Her response, “Yes, we hear that all of the time. So, here’s our tagline – We’re not an X. Instead, we’re an Y.” So we thought it was time for Brand Naming 101.
Finding a good brand name is hard. It has creative aspects. It has legal aspects. And it has emotional aspects.
Let’s start by talking about the roots of the term “brand”: It was a stamp put on a cow so that ranchers could tell which cow belonged to whom when they were all grazing out in the fields. For a startup (or any company), a brand name is a way to distinguish your offering from every other company’s. You want it to be different, memorable, and positive.
The first rule of brand names: At a minimum, it should be an empty vessel. Ideally, you would like the brand name to do some work for you. We can find plenty of brand name examples where the name itself tells us what the brand is about – WeWork (a co-working space), Lessonly (a training platform) and E*Trade (online stock buying). But, there are many more examples where the meaning of the brand name was created by the company itself – Verizon, Starbucks, and Xerox all taught us what their names mean. What you want to avoid is the situation that we described above where the brand name is working against you. That startup is wasting the first four words of its message saying what it is not “We’re not an X.” Moreover, you have people thinking about what you are not rather than what you are! You can fill an empty vessel by creating your own associations. But, it’s too hard and expensive to overcome a bad name. Startups cannot afford this. So at a minimum, find an empty vessel.
Check out the legal aspects of the brand name before getting too excited about it. The legal aspects include trademarks, existing urls, and even common use. You want the brand name to distinguish you. So notice how many other companies are using a similar name. I was searching for a startup on AngelList recently, and I found five very different companies with the same one-word name: AI for inventory management, coding academy, video development, sales automation tool, and employee benefits. I guess that word has a lot of potential meanings. But we have seen too many startups that had to change their name because someone pursued them legally due to name infringement. Check out your potential brand name carefully before you start using it. Spend the money to get legal advice from an attorney. Changing your name after three years is no fun.
Be consistent…right from the beginning. It takes time and repetition to get a brand name ingrained in an organization and in society. So you have to use the brand name the exact same way every time. It’s not crazy glue or Crazy glue or Crazy Glu. It’s Krazy Glue. Use the exact same name in your logo, on your letterhead, on your business card, on your website, in directory listings, as your domain name/url, and even on social media channels. Everywhere, it should be identical…identical. Can’t get the internet domain name that is exactly the brand name you want? Then make your brand name the url you can get.
Last word of advice on brand names: If you discover your brand name is working against you, change it sooner rather than later. Building brand equity takes time and money. Don’t keep investing in a bad name. Like removing a Band-Aid, change it quickly and move on. Another startup we spoke with recently shared that a potential investor wouldn’t invest unless it changed its name. While the startup wanted the investment and knew the brand name had problems, it felt it didn’t have the funds to invest in changing it. That’s backwards – it didn’t have the funds to keep a bad name. Pivots are always better earlier rather than later.
Don’t be afraid to do a little name testing before you fully commit to a brand name. Spend a couple of hundred dollars and find out what others think the name means. Hopefully, it has some positive associations. But make sure it doesn’t have any negative associations. Take the empty vessel, and fill it with what you want it to be.