You’re hunkered down with your cup of coffee, legal pad and Pilot gel pen. Today’s the day. You’re not going to leave your desk until you finally crack the code and figure out a name for your product or start-up. Maybe you fire up ChatGPT to see what it craps out (hint: it’s a great tool for revealing new routes to explore, but it’s horrible at drumming up interesting and intriguing words onto which you can build a brand story).
How do you know which naming pitfalls to avoid?
Eli Altman, creative director at A Hundred Monkeys, and author of Don’t Call It That, warns that, before you get too attached to a name you like, there are some guardrails you want to consider prior to calling in a trademark attorney.
1. Being too descriptive
Remember that your brand name will never exist in a vacuum. There will be context and colors, visuals and supporting copy. If your name attempts to describe exactly what you do, your customer won’t really pay attention—they have too many other messages coming at them to consider the less-interesting ones.
Consider the name of an imaginary business, San Diego Plumbing. Actually, it might be real. It’s probably real. But I’m on a plane without Wi-fi and can’t be bothered to research after I land. There’s no confusion as to what San Diego Plumbing does. That is a positive. But it’s so familiar and common, it’s like a category title on Craigslist rather than a unique company. Reading these words barely make a blip in your brain and you skip on by.
Have some fun with it. After all, Apple doesn’t sell produce. Tinder doesn’t manufacture firewood. How they apply those words to their work, however, says a lot. Save the descriptiveness for your brand story.
2. Trying to say everything
We were working with a branding agency back in 2021, attempting to name one of their environmental engineering clients. The ecological firm had seven branches of their business across two divisions. They wanted to somehow speak to all of them in one name. Their first request—which is often the default—was to slap on the word “solutions.” Don’t do yourself dirty like that. We convinced them to avoid doing that and instead settled on a different name.
A good (which means bad) example of this is Big Ass Fans. Big Ass Fans is an American manufacturer of enormous whirling blades for industrial and commercial settings. Their business started to explode in popularity in 2014, and with all the extra revenue, Big Ass Fans started branching out, creating innovations in oversized LED lighting, HVAC and refrigeration units.
They have a great name with “Big Ass.” It’s fun. It stands out from their competitors. Memorable. But they had broken rule #1 and got too specific with “Fans”—they were stuck where many successful companies find themselves—a descriptive name that no longer described what they were doing. So, they decided to change their name to Big Ass Solutions to explain that they were so much more than just fans.
It didn’t work. Two years after an expensive rebrand—something the CEO claimed was part of their “200-year plan”—the company had abandoned “solutions” and returned to calling themselves Big Ass Fans. It was a lesson learned.
3. Making up words
Sure, you recognize the name Verizon because they’ve got a market cap of $200 billion and spend nearly $800 million on advertising annually (again, I’m not going to fact check myself, but you know they’re a whale). No one encounters the name “Verizon” the first time and says, “Oh neat, it’s a mix of vertical and horizon, how smart and interesting.” To the human mind, made up words look just that—made up—your move right along to the next thing.
When you use real words for your brand name, there’s some built-in recognition. Even when you get esoteric with your word choices, there’s a familiarity because at the least the word(s) is built around a shared language (versus smooshing together something from Latin and something from English).
4. Prioritizing the URL over the name
Getting the exact URL as your brand name is great. And it used to be important. Not so anymore. But, like people who still insist on putting two spaces after a sentence, old habits die hard. As search engines have changed their algorithm and people have gotten good at searching, there’s no need to throwaway great prospective brand names just because the “dot com” is being squatted on by some Romanian domain hoarder.
Of course, it’s still a priority that you have an easy-to-read, short-as-possible URL. There are just many more options and reasons to be open to not having the exact dot com, including:
Aftermarket URLs can cost hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars versus an alternative, available domain that might be $9.00
Only psychopaths type URLs directly into the Google address bar—everyone else searches for your name along with a modifier or two
Newer top-level domains have become available that can help distinguish what you do (ex: identical.agency; identical.marketing; identical.branding)
Remember, if people want to find you online, they will find you online.
5. Going with your gut reaction
You must be open to many names, even ones that don’t initially strike a chord. People like to think that when they’re going through the naming process, sizing up dozens even hundreds of potential brand names, the right one is just going to pop out at them. Negative, Ghostrider.
Sure, there will some that naturally rise to the top of your favorites list, but we have clients tell us that the name they ultimately landed on was initially a “pass” feeling when they first saw it. It was only after time and building up some meaning that they came to love it and see how powerful it could be. Remember, there are just too many variables that influence whether a name will actually work for you (or legally be allowed to be used).
Failing to follow our own advice
When we were developing the business that would eventually become Identical, we planned on using a different name. The name was fun, available, painted a great visual, and the few friends and colleagues we shared it with seemed to like the name. The problem was, I hadn’t thought about how the name worked in a most important setting: when first meeting prospective agency partners and clients (our “end user” essentially).
As I started to go to networking events and identify myself by the name, I realized I was kind of embarrassed by it. The name, while initially fun, came across as cheap and quick—not what companies would be looking for in a brand-naming company. Luckily, we pivoted on the name before going too far down the road with the wrong name, and Identical was born.
If you want to avoid naming issues, and are interested in learning more about naming your company, product, service or start-up, please contact us or email me directly: joe@identicalco.com
