Naming and Branding
Both naming and branding are deeply personal things and can be wildly subjective. In this post, I'm going to attempt to break down the process I go through when deciding how I go about naming and branding things, primarily as it relates to naming a business, product, or service.
By no means are these finite rules (there are exceptions to everything) and certainly there are plenty of businesses that are successful that don't fit some of these criteria. This is simply a list of the processes I go through for myself. The timing of this post coincides with the decision for launching a new business so I'm going through these processes right now. Hopefully this list is helpful to others thinking about naming and branding for themselves.
Naming Base On What It Does
As a general rule of thumb, I hate defined names for businesses and strongly prefer undefined names but prefer the opposite for products and services. What do I mean by this?
Apple, Amazon, and Google are great examples. None of these companies have anything to do with apples or fruits, a river or a rainforest, or mathematics. You could argue if Apple didn't exist and someone named their company Apple today, it would immediately make people think they sell apples (the fruit), and you wouldn't be wrong for thinking that.
When it comes to businesses, I prefer names that don't define what the business does. If Google had chosen a name that fit their original idea, they would have been named Search instead. But that greatly limits what they could have gone on to do. Today, Google is a conglomerate that is involved in many different businesses, products, and services, and thanks in part to the ambiguity of their name, they could continue to expand to other areas.
On the flip side, I do strongly prefer names that fit exactly what a product or service does to avoid or limit confusion. Github is a hub for git repos. The name literally describes what the service does. Netflix had the foresight to name themselves Netflix years in advance because they knew someday they'd be streaming videos over the internet, even though for years they were a DVD by mail service. Both of these are great examples of names for products or services (unfortunately they're also a bad example because they happen to be used as company names as well).
In short, I love ambiguous undefined names for businesses but more straight forward descriptive naming for products and services.
Name Characteristics
While this is not a hard rule, I strongly prefer a shorter business name and the upper limit of how long a name should be is usually 7 characters, though shorter is preferred. Why 7 characters? It's an arbitrary number I came up with based on how comfortable I am with how long a business name should be when typing it out, and also because it happens to be the upper limit of the number of characters you can fit onto a license plate (where I'm from) or vanity phone number. Those are not important factors in any way but keeping the name to 7 characters or less makes it easier to type and simple to tell others.
When it comes to product and service names though, I'm much more lenient in terms of character limits and focus more on having a simple name that easily describe what the product or service is about. While that is not necessary true in all scenarios, I like a well defined product or service name. Of course in both cases, it should be a name I feel I could build a brand around, whether its for business or for products and services.
Ideally it should be a name that is easy to sound out, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and should not cause any confusion with different versions of the name. If the naming of your business, product, or service can have great ambiguity between the singular and plural version of the name, such as Color or Colors, that's not ideal. Some words can get around this but often times, it's better to avoid words that commonly can be confused for one version vs another. This gets compounded when you consider that a word might have multiple spellings too, such as Color versus Colour, based solely on geography. I try to avoid words that can create these kind of confusions.
Ideally when you verbally tell others the name, it should also not cause confusion with how it could be spelt or what word you're saying. Amazon was originally supposed to be named Cadabra (as in Abra Cadabra, the magic phrase), but when Jeff Bezos was saying the name over the phone, someone mistaken it as Cadaver (a corpse or dead body). Thus he chose Amazon instead to represent the vast selection they were going to offer. Google went with a mathematical term represented by 10100 but the actual spelling of that math term was googol, a very uncommon way to spell the word. Google is probably the more likely candidate for how people would imagine spelling the word by sounding it out and that's the option they ended up with.
Another characteristic I am mindful of is how generic the name is or if it is a generic one word name. Apple and Windows are brands that are highly established but both existed long before the world wide web came to be. Today, if you try to brand a generic word, with exception to attempting to build the next unicorn, it would be hard to make that generic word work. For example, while I generally don't like misspellings, I think Lyft works a lot better than Lift would have. And in those instances, a brandable misspelling would be acceptable. However, as a general rule of thumb, I'll usually avoid names that are too generic in favor of names that can be much easier to brand.
Next, I'm not big on startup trends that were happening awhile back where people were making up stylized names in favor of not being able to get the domain they want. This is how you get startups like Flickr (rather than Flicker) or Twttr (instead of Twitter, granted they eventually got Twitter). Portmanteau style names are okay though such as Pinterest.
Lastly a name should preferably have 1-2 syllables. Apple and Google fits this definition but Amazon doesn't. This last rule isn't a hard rule but I generally prefer a simpler term.
Domain: .com is King
99.99999% of the time, I will always go with the .com. If I can't get the exact .com I want, I'll go with the a variation of the name but still get a .com. In an extremely rare situation, I might go with another top-level domain but generally I almost always avoid doing anything other than the .com.
While there are plenty of businesses that have made it big on other domains and it's certainly not a requirement to have the .com to be wildly successful, there's no denying that not having the .com means you lose a lot of type-in traffic that otherwise would have came to you and there is a certain level of authority that comes with running on a .com over any other top-level domain. This is especially true for rarer, shorter, domains.
The domain name should also have only english letters. There are domains that have international characters, numbers, hyphens, and emojis these days. I would avoid these nowadays (I wish I could say I never owned domains that have these characteristics but that's not true).
Lastly, make sure the domain you eventually want isn't already being used. If it is, might be impossible or wildly expensive to acquire it later. Facebook launched as thefacebook.com and eventually bought over facebook.com, but had facebook.com been in use and was being actively built as a product or service, it might have ended up costing them a lot more.
Logos and Mascots
Your logo could just be the design of your name and shortened to the first letter if needed (Google, Yahoo, Disney, Netflix, are a few examples that do this). Or you can design an actual logo for your company (Twitter, Apple, Dropbox) are examples of these. I prefer having a dedicated logo. Apple is a rarity in that their logo also happens to be their name. When possible, I'd like to have a logo that represents the name choice as well, however, there are bigger considerations for logo designs.
I prefer logos be extremely simple. This means the logo should be so simple that a 5 year old should be able to easily draw it by hand. It should be simple in-design such that it can be monotone, scalable to different sizes, and easily placed on a variety of places and still look good. Logos that are complex, have 3D effects, gradients or lots of colors, are awful for a number of reasons. Keeping it simple generally helps with prints, makes it easier to design vector graphics for, create a CSS stylized version of your logo in code for use, and allows for simple placement in a number of places.
I often visualize how a logo would look as a favicon, an emoji, on a website, and on a business card, but also how it would look on products such as a backpack, shirt, or on the back of the iPhone if it were to replace the Apple logo. Visualizing this helps me determine if the logo meets the criteria I'm looking for in a logo and how good it could look.
Finally, while I don't put much emphasis on mascots and will usually skip this, if there's an opportunity to include a friendly mascot, I'll toy with the idea. Reddit and Github are great examples of companies that have done well with their mascots. Of course I'd give the mascot a name too.
Subname Checking
Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Apple News, Apple Music, etc... If you chose a word and extended the name to include products and services to the end of it, does it flow nicely? Does it sound awkward? I spot check this with names I've picked to ensure it doesn't sound weird. Netflix Car or Netflix Speakers just doesn't flow well.
Another thought is to consider whether or not your chosen name has any negative connotations attached to it. Does it conjure up negative impressions? Hacker in some circles are considered a positive term while in other circles it brings about a negative impression. Same with the word hustler. Then there are words that sound perfectly fine in English but may sound bad in another language. A quick check to make sure you aren't using a word that may lead to negative impressions is worth doing.
Social Media Handles
This one is often the toughest. Trying to collect all the key social media handles, especially for short common names, can be next to impossible. You may want to consider how you'll manage these and what that may look like. If your name is a compound word that happens to be rare, that might make it easier.
Legal Status
Double check for any trademark or server mark issues. This can cause a lot of headaches down the road if you get big enough. Groupon did not originally own groupon.com and the original owner did not want to sell. In fact the owner had a similar idea but because Groupon owned the trademark across multiple jurisdiction, they threaten to sue if the owner ever used the name. As a result, the owner was left with no option but to sell as they didn't want to get into a legal battle.
This is quite the shady tactic but not as uncommon as you might think. This is also not an endorsement to do the same thing to try and obtain the name you want, but rather to emphasize you should double check before trying to use a name that may cause you issues later.
Prior History Check
Sometimes a name has been used previously and it has forever tarnished that name. It's hard to imagine someone starting a new company today and deciding to use a name like Enron, if for no other reason, due to its history being heavily tied to one of the biggest sham companies in history. Though that is an obvious one, there are various reasons to avoid a name that has any negative connotation or history attached to it. Doing a bit of research here will help.
Honorable Mentions
This last one does not matter at all but sometimes I'll visualize what I'd call a user or staff member (purely for fun) base on the name. Google have Googlers and Github has Githubbers. Amazon has Amazonians and Reddit have Redditors, etc.. If you chose a name, does it sound weird to call your users or or staff members by some related term? What do you call Netflix folks? Netflixers? What if your company was named Color? Colorer? These are fun to think about.
Similarly, I imagine how the name would be shortened (even shorter) for various purposes such as stock ticker. Amazon was shorted to AMZN. If you chose a name, what would the 1, 2, 3, and 4 character variant of that name be? Again, this does not matter but its fun to think about.
New Name, Logo, and Mascot
I have a new name (though I'm not ready to announce this publicly yet) for my upcoming business that checks the box for all of the above. I have started to use the new logo for this site already but will transfer that to the new business once that's up and running. Finally, though I normally wouldn't really care about having a mascot, I got a design for one in mind that fits perfectly so we'll create one for this new business too (I even have a name picked out for the mascot).
I hope this was helpful for those of you who are thinking about your own naming and branding.