How to Pick a Winning Business Name

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

1.A Notepad and Pen 2.A thesaurus (online of offline) - Online
ones save a lot of time 3.A computer with Internet access 4.A
language conversion tool (Preferably online)

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.

1.Make a list of all suitable keywords you can think of, which
relate to your business, or help describe your product or
service. 2.Think of companies selling similar products or your
competitors and note down their names. 3.Use a Thesaurus to look
for synonyms of all the words you have gathered. You should have
a good list of words by now. 4.Use a language conversion tool
such as the one at freetranslation.com and look for French,
Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, etc. meanings of your words.
Some of those words can be very trendy and especially suitable
for businesses targeting the youth market, or in the hotel &
entertainment industry. 5.Make combinations of partial words.
You can even try combinations of English + Other Languages.
Although these would be suitable only to certain creative
business types.

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.

Is the name easy to remember and pronounce?
Is it easy to spell?
Will it appeal to your target audience?
Does it tell you something about what your business does?
What are the first thoughts that you want your readers to have as soon as they hear your business name?
Is it somewhat unique?
Is it already in use?Is there something in it, which would want to make the listener know more about the concept behind the name?
Is it a geographical name? (This can affect expansion in future)
Is it broad enough, so that if you decide to expand your product line in the future, the name still represents them?

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.

Take the list to all your family members, relatives and friends and ask them to choose their top three. Try to reach your target market in order to see which ones they like. If you are planning to open a gymnasium ask people who regularly visit the gym. ?A great way to reach your target audience in masses and without any expenses can be online message boards and forums. These days there are online forums on virtually every subject.

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:
Ashish Monga is a Business Student at the University of Central
\r\nEngland in Birmingham, UK. He also runs
\r\nhttp://www.business-students.com , an online community and
\r\nresource website dedicated to Business Students and anyone who
\r\nis interested in gaining knowledge or sharing their business
\r\nideas. He can be reached at ash.monga@gmail.com