Bourne Design? Or What's in a Name...
Terence posted in Branding on 17 November 2008
So you've got an idea for a business, and a plan of how to run it... but there's still one of the most important things to decide; Just what are you going to call it?
If you've ever been in the position of having to come up with a name for a business, you'll know it's no easy feat. Naturally the easiest path is to go for the 'does exactly what it says on the tin' route. Whilst this often does work, it can run into the problems of being less memorable, and can be more difficult to create a strong accompanying brand for.
Assuming you're trying to go for something a little bit different, here is a good list of things to consider:-
- What does your business do, and is it possible to communicate that message without explicitly saying it?
- If choosing a more unusual name, can any messages be more successfully communicated in an accompanying strapline?
- How long is too long? There's no fixed answer for that, but the longer a name is the harder it can be for a customer to remember.
- Is the domain name readily available? Many people look up companies online now, so the importance of a web address should be factored into any new name decision. This is something where you might need to check a few alternative variants. At the very least, always check yournewname.co.uk and yournewname.com if in the UK. If either one or both of these are unavailable, you must carefully consider whether it will cost you business if someone makes a mistake. If someone is specifically looking for you but types .com rather than .co.uk, will this competitor take your business, or are they so unrelated that they're most likely to retype. Holding pages are also something to be wary of. These are often bought up by domain name prospectors to sell at a large profit, and can usually be identified by being a long list of links to search engine results. Whilst it is sometimes possible to buy these from the owner, they will come with considerable extra cost. Unfortunately if a prospector does own it, you don't know what might show on the address in 6 months time.
- Is the company name already registered? Whilst the laws of company names are beyond the scope of this article, checking whether another big company is already using a name is a good idea. Whilst usually the domain name search above will reveal most companies, Companies House can be a much more detailed source of info. Leaving aside further comment on a website in 2008 having limited opening hours, they do provide a useful WebCheck service to allow you to check registered company names in the UK.
- Has you're spell cheque tolled you of any phonetic miss takes? This is a more surprising one to watch out for, especially if you have a website attached to the business. The consideration here is whether your chosen name can potentially be spelled in different ways, so read it out verbally to a few people and get them to write down how they'd spell it. If you get lots of different answers, you may have a problem. Admittedly this is one we at Bourn suffer from ourselves. When talking to people on the phone, it's quite common for people to think Bourne Design, or even Born Design. Whilst not critical (you can often for example register web addresses with a few common spellings), it can save you a lot of time and lost emails later if you don't have to explicitly spell out the words every time!
- Do you really need to be '1st'? For the same reason as above, be cautious with both numeric digits in a name, and numbers written as a word (like 'one'). After the 200th time telling people how they need to write that 'one' in your email address, you'll see why!
Many clients have come to us with a name already, and asked us to develop the brand around that. However we have developed corporate identity from scratch including the name in some cases, so hopefully the above will help give just a few of the things that we've found need considering. You might be stuck with a name for a long time after all!