When it comes to finding the right brand name, there are usually two camps of people – those who dread naming and those who are energized by it. I am one who is energized by it, although I admit it is not easy work. The more you know about your ideal audience, their problems, how you solve their problems and your unique benefits, the easier time you will have landing on the perfect name for your company, product or line extension. Using a little bit of structure to align your name with your brand strategy can help give you just the edge you need to stand out in a crowded market.
It may seem counterintuitive to say that using a process and having structure will help you unlock your best creativity, but by giving yourself parameters to operate within you can focus your creative energy (and many online thesaurus searches!) on the key brand concepts that best describe your brand. Staying focused on those core brand concepts will help make sure that even while you let your imagination run wild during your naming brainstorm, your work will deliver results that are relevant and energizing versus the draining feeling you can get when starting with an entirely blank sheet of paper and you say “time to be creative–go!”
In order to help you focus your efforts and avoid that brain drain feeling, I’ve created a 7 step process to help you brainstorm a name that supports your brand strategy. By implementing these steps and giving yourself a helpful structure to work within, you can focus your energy on the names that will move you closer to your brand-building goals.
7 Steps for naming a food company, product or line extension:
- Set your decision criteria for what makes a winning name. What do you want your name to communicate to your ideal audience? What feelings do you want it to evoke? For a product name, what is the standard of identity that will appear on the package, which will be “working together” with your brand name to describe your product?
- Review your brand strategy and pull key concepts/words as inspiration. This could be functional benefits, emotional benefits, features of your products, a nod to the geographic roots of your company, the WHY behind why you’re in business, etc.
- Choose your top 5 concepts and begin brainstorming as many words as possible related to each concept to create concept clusters of words (get out that thesaurus…there’s no filtering yet!).
- Review clusters for each concept and begin narrowing down to just a few clusters of words that energize you the most based on your decision criteria.
- Start identifying names by narrowing your list down further, and focusing on words within the clusters that could be actual product or company names.
- Perform a competitive search for potential conflicts with existing names.
- Seek feedback from your ideal audience, or people who understand your ideal audience and your objectives.
There are different ways to turn your brainstormed word into actual names if you love a word but it doesn’t stand well alone. Some interesting ways to turn a word into a brand name include adding a prefix or suffix, compound words or word blends and action words. You can also look at fanciful words, creative misspellings and acronyms…although I caution my clients in these areas because while they can work, they can also lead to confusion. To work, it has to really be a great fit and still align with your decision criteria of what’s important to you in a brand name. Clever can be interesting but being too clever can be confusing. And we all know that since we only get the attention of our shoppers for a few seconds at shelf, confusion will lead them to move on to a competitor that does not confuse them.
Naming isn’t easy. But using these steps it can be more efficient, effective and yes…fun!
In This Episode:
- How working within parameters can improve creativity when brainstorming
- 7 Steps for naming
- Next steps after you find you land on the perfect name
Quotes:
“When you set up your criteria first, it helps you make sure that at the end you have name that will move you closer to your goals.” — @RealFoodBrands
“When your brand comes to mind, what are the core things you want people to think about?” — @RealFoodBrands
“We want to be laser focused on the things that gave us the most energy and felt the most exciting to align with our consumer’s needs.” — @RealFoodBrands
“Clarity trumps creativity. Make sure that you are not so clever that you leave people guessing what you do, who you do it for, or why you do it.” — @RealFoodBrands
Resources: