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Hello fellow fastlaners. I mentioned that I do copy and naming in another thread and since it got some interest sparked, I decided to finally write it. When making explanatory posts like these, I often use examples to get to the point. There are plenty of great names out there without breaking the rules and if you end up not being able to find a name, you can always hire professionals to do it.
"Brand" here refers to your product, website, service or company name.
1. Why is it important to have a good name for your brand?
Let's clear that up first.
You need to have a good name because you must present your brand clearly, distinguish yourself from competitors and grab people's attention. If you are a startup, you need to gain traction in order to get customers and rise to the later levels of the investment process. You will not get there if people cannot remember your name.
As an example familiar to most of us, if you have a generic book name, like "Get Rich and Become a Millionaire", chances are you will not be given importance and attention enough for success neither by people nor the search engines. If you named your book something like "The Millionaire Fastlane ", you will get a unique, clear, exciting and easy-to-remember name. Turns out, people do judge a book by its cover.
The name could be literally the ONLY thing that will ultimately decide whether your brand is a success. In the world full of products and brands requiring people's attention hundreds of times in the day, having a bad name will just put you in people's "ignore" list.
2. What your brand should NOT be called?
Okay, so now that we have covered why is it important to have a great brand name, let's go ahead and go through a few examples of name categories you should NOT have:
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. - Charles Mingus
3. Which criteria should your brand's name follow?
Let's go and follow the road to the right name!
This is important, so pay attention. The formula to a memorable name is NOVELTY, ATTENTION, CORRELATION and EMOTIONAL IMPACT. Timing is also important, but as you often cannot control this, you should use the 80/20 rule and focus on the first four.
This is it! There might be a few things I will mention that are somewhat related, but this is it. If you get anything out of this thread, THIS IS IT! The quality of your name depends on these 5 factors, and the better they are, so is your name.
Let me explain these 5 briefly:
NOVELTY - if your name is novel, new and fresh, it will spike people's attention because it is in our nature to pay attention to things that are new. Novel names make us curious and curiosity creates action. Action equals attention and that is what you are looking for.
ATTENTION - as we already saw, novelty provides a certain path to attention. However, to further make you name memorable you have to have a certain WOW factor, something that will grab their thought process and vacuum in their attention. Another aspect of the attention factor is repeatability. People remember things that they see multiple times and this is why ad re-targeting is so popular!
CORRELATION - If your name is related to something familiar to its reader, it is a basic memory principle that they will remember it more easily. You would certainly rather remember Virgin Airlines if you know that Virgin Music exists than you would remember Optolic Airsoft Guns. A second correlation comes to mind when the name you have relates to the things the brand does. For example, Mechanical Turk associates people to menial jobs board and OkCupid simply relates to Cupid, the god of love.
EMOTIONAL IMPACT - The last important aspect of a successful name is the fact that the name evokes something in the person reading/listening it. When you read "The Millionaire Fastlane " it evokes powerful emotions such as envy, adventure, lust, bravery and a myriad of others. Do you remember the time you broke up with your first girlfriend/bf? Do you remember what you did a week ago?
How do you know if your name is good enough? By using a quanitifable method of to check whether you have a goodly name! If your name has more than 30 points in total on the Hasic Name Quality Scale, then you should probably go ahead and use it. The Scale consists of four ratings consisting of a 1-10 grade of name quality. It is shown below and you can print it to rate the name you came up with. I named it by my last name, but you can call it whababozo for all I care. You can download the printable version HERE.
I promised examples for companies that possess these qualities, so here you go:
- Google gets 10-8-3-9 (invented, so it does not relate to anything much, but it is extremely novel, huge attention grabber and has somewhat of an emotional impact)
- Band of Outsiders gets 8-8-7-9 (comes together to nicely grab the 4 most important factors)
- Jonnie Walker 8-8-6-8 (the man, the legend. Named after the legend of Jonnie Walker, it is an attention grabbing, highly memorable name)
- Entspresso 8-8-9-8 (one of those names that performs well when it comes to in contact with a certain target audience, in this case entrepreneurs. The name ranks well on the 4 factor list by appropriately addressing all)
- Airbus gets 8-7-9-8 (uses simple word combination to product a straightforward name impact)
That is a checklist of things you should know when you are deciding on a name for your brand. Never forget that your brand name should align with your target audience, so don't dumb it down if you have a smart audience. Don't appeal to the lowest common denominator!
Take your time, but don't procrastinate on doing the other important things you have to do. Go through all options, check for similar names in your industry and you are all ready to name your brand.
Hello fellow fastlaners. I mentioned that I do copy and naming in another thread and since it got some interest sparked, I decided to finally write it. When making explanatory posts like these, I often use examples to get to the point. There are plenty of great names out there without breaking the rules and if you end up not being able to find a name, you can always hire professionals to do it.
"Brand" here refers to your product, website, service or company name.
1. Why is it important to have a good name for your brand?
Let's clear that up first.
You need to have a good name because you must present your brand clearly, distinguish yourself from competitors and grab people's attention. If you are a startup, you need to gain traction in order to get customers and rise to the later levels of the investment process. You will not get there if people cannot remember your name.
As an example familiar to most of us, if you have a generic book name, like "Get Rich and Become a Millionaire", chances are you will not be given importance and attention enough for success neither by people nor the search engines. If you named your book something like "The Millionaire Fastlane ", you will get a unique, clear, exciting and easy-to-remember name. Turns out, people do judge a book by its cover.
The name could be literally the ONLY thing that will ultimately decide whether your brand is a success. In the world full of products and brands requiring people's attention hundreds of times in the day, having a bad name will just put you in people's "ignore" list.
2. What your brand should NOT be called?
Okay, so now that we have covered why is it important to have a great brand name, let's go ahead and go through a few examples of name categories you should NOT have:
- Already used names.
You will get outclassed on the search engines, in customer's minds, the business battlefield and in court (copyright law). It affects brand recognition and brand recall.
- Names that don't pass the telephone test.
If your brand's name cannot be clearly understood when you tell it to someone when you are on the phone with them, then it fails this. Jeff Bezos got to the name Amazon when he changed it from Cadabra.
- Names that are plain bad.
You HAVE to get a bit creative if you want to have a good brand name. You don't want your name to be long winded (Minnesota Manufacturing and Mining, who thankfully later became 3M)( note 2: if there is something you want to say, use your slogan/tagline for that), boring (Soapy), scrambled (K-Mart), misspelled (TracR) or ones that would make a bad domain name (the famous Pen Island domain).
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. - Charles Mingus
3. Which criteria should your brand's name follow?
Let's go and follow the road to the right name!
This is important, so pay attention. The formula to a memorable name is NOVELTY, ATTENTION, CORRELATION and EMOTIONAL IMPACT. Timing is also important, but as you often cannot control this, you should use the 80/20 rule and focus on the first four.
This is it! There might be a few things I will mention that are somewhat related, but this is it. If you get anything out of this thread, THIS IS IT! The quality of your name depends on these 5 factors, and the better they are, so is your name.
Let me explain these 5 briefly:
NOVELTY - if your name is novel, new and fresh, it will spike people's attention because it is in our nature to pay attention to things that are new. Novel names make us curious and curiosity creates action. Action equals attention and that is what you are looking for.
ATTENTION - as we already saw, novelty provides a certain path to attention. However, to further make you name memorable you have to have a certain WOW factor, something that will grab their thought process and vacuum in their attention. Another aspect of the attention factor is repeatability. People remember things that they see multiple times and this is why ad re-targeting is so popular!
CORRELATION - If your name is related to something familiar to its reader, it is a basic memory principle that they will remember it more easily. You would certainly rather remember Virgin Airlines if you know that Virgin Music exists than you would remember Optolic Airsoft Guns. A second correlation comes to mind when the name you have relates to the things the brand does. For example, Mechanical Turk associates people to menial jobs board and OkCupid simply relates to Cupid, the god of love.
EMOTIONAL IMPACT - The last important aspect of a successful name is the fact that the name evokes something in the person reading/listening it. When you read "The Millionaire Fastlane " it evokes powerful emotions such as envy, adventure, lust, bravery and a myriad of others. Do you remember the time you broke up with your first girlfriend/bf? Do you remember what you did a week ago?
How do you know if your name is good enough? By using a quanitifable method of to check whether you have a goodly name! If your name has more than 30 points in total on the Hasic Name Quality Scale, then you should probably go ahead and use it. The Scale consists of four ratings consisting of a 1-10 grade of name quality. It is shown below and you can print it to rate the name you came up with. I named it by my last name, but you can call it whababozo for all I care. You can download the printable version HERE.
I promised examples for companies that possess these qualities, so here you go:
- Google gets 10-8-3-9 (invented, so it does not relate to anything much, but it is extremely novel, huge attention grabber and has somewhat of an emotional impact)
- Band of Outsiders gets 8-8-7-9 (comes together to nicely grab the 4 most important factors)
- Jonnie Walker 8-8-6-8 (the man, the legend. Named after the legend of Jonnie Walker, it is an attention grabbing, highly memorable name)
- Entspresso 8-8-9-8 (one of those names that performs well when it comes to in contact with a certain target audience, in this case entrepreneurs. The name ranks well on the 4 factor list by appropriately addressing all)
- Airbus gets 8-7-9-8 (uses simple word combination to product a straightforward name impact)
That is a checklist of things you should know when you are deciding on a name for your brand. Never forget that your brand name should align with your target audience, so don't dumb it down if you have a smart audience. Don't appeal to the lowest common denominator!
Take your time, but don't procrastinate on doing the other important things you have to do. Go through all options, check for similar names in your industry and you are all ready to name your brand.
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