When establishing a business in any particular industry, you must first gather a deep understanding of your industry, prepare a proper business plan, build a suitable website, and develop a brand strategy that best suits your company and target audience.
Your brand identity must communicate a compelling promise to your customers about your business’s services. The best way to communicate this promise is by getting a solid brand name.
And since a strong brand name will raise client expectations and encourage them to test your brand, using a weak, offensive, or downright insulting name will be disastrous to your products, services, and brand image.
Far too many entrepreneurs with weak naming skills succumb to these naming issues, even though they could have simply avoided them by researching and using a product name generator to craft already thought-up business name ideas.
And to help you avoid falling into any of these mistakes, we’ve compiled a list of common naming mistakes you must avoid when naming your firm.
Three Naming Errors You Must Avoid When Branding Your Company
1. Extremely Long Brand Names
Ensure you avoid names that are very lengthy and difficult to remember when naming your company since clients may struggle to pronounce, identify, or recall your business.
Using extremely long words instead of shorter ones, as your brand’s domain name will restrict the accessibility of your company website. Also, simpler words capture customers’ attention better than longer, more complex ones.
If you make the mistake of giving your business a lengthy, boring name, many of your customers will need help remembering it. And that could make them less inclined to tell their friends, coworkers, and family about it. But if you must use a long, complicated name, consider abbreviating it, as MAC or Microsoft did.
And since 80% of customers forget branded items within three days, your number one goal should be to give your enterprise a distinctive name that’ll help it stay on top of your customer’s minds.
2. Brand Name With Adverse Translations
Having a powerful online presence for your business allows you to communicate with clients from all around the world. However, having a worldwide identity has drawbacks. For one thing, it exposes your company’s name to people from various cultures and languages who may find it insulting or uncomfortable.
Potential clients will not be motivated to use your services if they detest your company’s name. This was demonstrated when Spanish-speaking customers rejected two popular items, Mazda’s Laputa and Nokia’s Lumia because the names of both products translate as “prostitute” in Spanish.
This shows that you should open up your linguistic research to more than just one language when verifying your brand’s name. Ensure you only choose a brand name after thoroughly researching the most commonly used languages internationally and in your target market.
By following this approach, you can ensure that your business’s name will be acceptable to customers worldwide.
3. Names Built on Touchy Socio-Political Trends
While this may appear easy to avoid with proper branding and marketing, most brands with great brand names make the mistake of jumping head-first into any and every socio-political trend. And trust us, it’s very easy to annihilate a good chunk of your customer base like Gillette.
This is because people care deeply about specific social, health, and environmental concerns and are more likely to support a firm that shares its values. But individuals who disagree with the causes you back and find your message offensive will be unlikely to buy your products or use your services.
As an entrepreneur, you must recognize that even though the best method to attract your clients to your brand is to get a captivating name, that would mean very little if your brand has a negative image to them.
So, as you concentrate on coming up with a distinctive, pleasant, and exciting company name, also ensure you exercise caution with political issues.
Place Your Clients First
Although it might appear simple, many business owners are still too concerned with their company’s financial performance and lose sight of their business’s primary goal, which is to serve their target market.
So ensure you keep your customers first in everything your business does from business naming to idea generation, product design, and marketing. This would help you build a brand that quickly draws customers.
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 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, supporting clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies.
