Some of the most vital elements you need to put in place before starting your business is acquiring a strong understanding of the sector you’re entering, getting a great business plan, and securing a good location.
But it doesn’t end there because your physical or digital store needs a visually appealing layout and—most importantly—a brand strategy that best matches your business and target market.
Your customers want to know that the products and services they buy from you will live up to their expectations. Positive expectations attract customers to your business. And giving your firm a unique name is a trusted way to arouse customers’ thoughts and expectations.
But even though there are several strategies each entrepreneur could take, such as using croudsource naming services or brainstorming, we’ve noticed that the problems entrepreneurs confront while naming all follow a typical pattern.
So, if you’re searching for an appropriate brand name, staying aware of these naming errors will enable you to avoid falling prey to them.
That said, let’s look at a handful of these damaging mistakes:
Typical Naming Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Brand
1. Names That Can Mean Something Negative
Sales will surely increase for companies that share the same social, cultural, health, and environmental values as their key clients. The average customer gives a lot of thought to these complex topics and is more inclined to support a company that shares its beliefs.
Your business will ultimately turn away a considerable number of your customers if you decide to promote these concerns through direct messages, branding, or commercials like Gillette, did, as individuals who don’t agree with the causes you support are less likely to use your services or buy your products.
Recognize that selecting distinctive names for your brand is the most effective way to represent and impact clients’ impressions of your company. As a result, if your firm’s name is horrible and offensive, like Pee Cola, it stands to reason that your clients would shun your brand and have negative views about your organization.
2. Names That Are Long and Difficult
Watch out for names that are too long and difficult to remember when starting a business since these are needlessly tough for clients to pronounce or recall when searching online.
Fitbit and Target are two well-known companies among an extensive list of them with short, distinctive names. This is because short, simple words catch your clients’ attention more successfully than long, complex ones.
Making the mistake of choosing a business name that’s long and bland will result in many of your clients struggling to remember your company’s name, and this will affect the likelihood that they’ll recommend it to their family and friends. Yet, if you must use a lengthy name, consider reducing it, like what Kentucky Fried Chicken did with ‘KFC.’
Furthermore, given that 80% of people forget about branded content after three days, creating a clever, distinct, and unforgettable name for your firm should be your first focus.
3. Negative Name Translations
The benefit of having a strong online presence for your company is that it allows you to communicate with customers from all around the world. However, having a worldwide identity has problems.
And one sure way to kill your brand’s performance is to pick a name that people from various cultures and languages find insulting or offensive.
Potential clients will be hesitant to hire you if they don’t like the name of your company. This was proved when two well-known products from Mazda, the Laputa and Nokia’s Lumia, were rejected by Spanish-speaking buyers because the names of both products could be translated as ‘prostitute’ in Spanish.
If your company wants to establish the best potential brand image in any market, you shouldn’t limit your linguistic research to a single language. Make sure you pick a company name only after extensively researching and confirming that it means something positive in the most widely spoken languages throughout the world, as well as the common language in the market you’re attempting to target.
4. Selecting Your Brand Name Without Validating it With Your Target Audience
The primary goal of branding is all about shaping how you want your target audience to see you, and picking a brand name without actually getting enough knowledge about your core audience would only leave you with a weak brand name.
A study we conducted on brand positioning revealed how younger audiences are attracted to companies with modern and creative brand positioning, while older customer demographics were more inclined to choose businesses with traditional brand positioning.
Verifying your name with a select sample of your target customers would help you know if your audience is drawn to fun and lively brand names or practical and pragmatic ones. This way, your business can easily connect with your customers and succeed in branding.
Furthermore, as a business person trying to get the best out of their brand name, you should know that relying on your emotions to decide if a name is the best fit for your business is just as much a disaster as not understanding your target audience.
Remember, the ideal way to get a good brand name is to conduct market, audience, and linguistic research properly. Only with proper knowledge can you be sure to avoid having a bad name that would come back to bite your business.
Prioritize Your Customers
Although it may seem like old news, most modern entrepreneurs are so obsessed with financial success that they lose sight of the reality that customers only patronize their business because they can solve their problems.
Instead, stand out and be different by ensuring your organization prioritizes your customers’ wants and preferences, as customers soon lose interest in businesses emphasizing profits over client needs. No one wants to do business with greedy companies that don’t seem to care about finding unique answers to their needs.
So, in summary, the ideal way to position your business is to choose a name that has been properly thought out, has good connotations in your main languages, and is easy to speak and locate online. Keeping all these in mind while researching the best name for your business will surely lead you to it.
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed 1 million+ names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. We are also the world’s leading crowdsource naming platform, and supporting clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies.
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