In our series around the branding of your startup or small business, we already talked about how you can use lean startup principles for branding your company. We also talked about the 6 P’s of branding, which helps you make up your brand story (positioning, promise, personas, personality, product, and pricing).
Every brand story, however, needs a hero, somebody who people can relate too. Recognition will start with your brand name. The name appears on your website, your business cards, your social networks, your product, and everywhere else.
In both offline and online, to identify your company and your company’s products and services. Today we will be looking into one of the most frustrated items around branding: the naming of your startup.
Naming your newly founded company is often met with a lot of frustration. It’s hard enough to come up with a name that isn’t already in use, but in the end, your entire team has to agree on the name as well. At the end to only found out, you forgot to check if the Twitter, Facebook or any other social handle wasn’t already taken and you’ve got to start your searching from scratch again.
Not to put you under even more stress, but getting the right name for your new company can help make or break your branding.
For example, in 1997, athletic gear company, Reebok, launched a new women’s running shoe with the name Incubus. The big problem was, though that an incubus is a male demon who visits women in their sleep to rape them, as pointed out by a newspaper in Arizona. Reebok recalled 18,000 boxes of shoes and had to apologise for the mistake they made.
So how do you come up with a good and effective name? What things should you do (or do not do) when naming your company?
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