by: Ashish Monga
What’s in a name?
Think of your business name as an external mask for your business. If it’s something your target audience like, they would consider checking it, if they don’t, in most cases you have lost a customer even before you could tell them what your product or service is. Your marketing campaign is usually like a beautiful outer covering for your business which attempts to portray it as the best business on earth for various reasons and the quality of your business name can have a great positive or negative impact on your marketing campaign. Many marketing campaigns are solely based on business names. Despite this many people, completely ignore spending time picking a good business name. This very often happens, when someone believes to have a winning business idea, and wants to kick it off as soon as possible.
Brainstorming for your name
Here are a few techniques which would help you brainstorm for ideal business names and come up with a wide variety of options to choose from.
Tools Needed:
Before you begin using the techniques below here are some tools you would need to make your brainstorming session successful
Process:
Before you begin your brainstorming process, remember that you are brainstorming for ideas and the goal is to generate as big a list as possible, therefore do not evaluate or criticise any ideas, and keep the flow going.
Questions to help your Shortlist Your Selections
Now you have a huge list of potential business names. But you can have only one (unless you plan to open different companies for the same business), so its time to scale down and shorten your list. In this stage your aim should be to cut down your list to 10 names. Match each of your business names against this checklist and start weeding out the unsuitable ones.
By now you should have eliminated many names, and shortened your list to 10 or less names, if you haven’t go down the list again and weed out some more names.
Field Testing your Business Name
Now that you have the top ten names, which in your opinion best represent your business. It’s time to find out what others think of them.
Picking up the winner
Now you have factored in everyone’s opinion and its decision time. The course of action from here on depends on the sort of results you had out of your list of ten. If you see a clear winner or people liking two particular words, you can safely pick one. If you see three or four words getting somewhat similar preference, make a list of top three, and field test them again, using the above steps. This should hopefully give you a winner, is you still find somewhat similar preference, you can do two things, start from scratch (I wouldn’t) or go with your heart and pick the one you think is the best.
Remember: Name is the first step of the Game, and while choosing one you don’t want to be lame.
© Ashish Monga