Introduction
Welcome to Part 2 of the brand name guide series. This segment is all about hands-on approach—generating brand names from scratch. Make a pit stop at Part 1, if you haven’t already. This’ll help you create quality brand names right off the bat. We believe the best way to teach is by using real-world examples. For a practical demonstration, we’ll walk you through the exact steps we took to coin our own brand name—Brandfolds. Let’s get started!
DIY BRAND NAME GUIDE:
Part 1: Brand name basics (Understanding Good vs Bad)
Part 2: Create a Brand name from scratch (Tools & techniques to generate names)
Part 3: Register and protect your brand name (Securing your brand name)
STAGE 1: Identify your keywords
First, gain some clarity by building a list of keywords that most resonates with your brand and it’s vision. At this stage, keep the list small with only the most important words. (We’ll expand this list in Stage 2)
To help you with the brainstorming activity, we’ll explore ideas in two spaces: (1)
A. Own brand
Here are a series of questions to ask about your own brand. (We list our answers for ‘Brandfolds’ as examples)
- What is our brand’s goal / vision?
A: Help people build and grow their brand –> Branding, Learn, Growth - Who is our brand targeted towards?
A: Businesses & individuals on a budget –> Small, Budget, Frugal - What personality should our brand have?
A: Knowledgable and friendly –> Simple, Trustworthy, Beginner friendly
Answering these will make sure your name aligns with your brand’s purpose and communicates the right message to your audience.
B. Competitor research
You ideally should aim for a unique brand positioning, so your audience can easily distinguish you from other brands in the same category. Here are a series of questions to ask:
- What are the top brands in the category?
- What’s the most common types of brand names in the category?
- What makes our brand unique from the rest?
- What’s the name style of the most popular companies? Formal or playful or any other?
Collecting these keywords contributes to setting up a good brand strategy, so you can generate better brand names, as opposed to generating brand names at random. (1)
STAGE 2: Generate name ideas (Refer tools & techniques)
Now comes the most fun and creative part of actually coming up with names. We outline some tools and methods for you to start generating name ideas. This is an iterative process and does not follow a strict order. Keep your creative juices flowing, mix and match the below tools and techniques until you find a name!
1. Generate ideas using a name generator (tool)
First, get a quick head start by typing in your main keyword(s) into an online name generator tool for quick suggestions. We’ve tested and curated some of the best business name generators to save you some time. We highly recommend these over generic name generators.
Just note down names that caught your attention and start expanding your keywords list. See how you can find new and interesting keywords below.
2. Expand using Thesaurus (tool)
Using a Thesaurus is a great way to come up with a list of alternate words you can use in your brand name. Now, go back to the name generator and use these for some new ideas.
As you gather more words, the list can get messy. Hence, we show you how to organise your keywords effectively below.
3. Organise using Mind maps (tool)
You can organise all the words you’ve collected using a mind map tool. This helps to get a bird’s eye view to quickly pick words to combine or explore deeper by finding more synonyms.
In our case, we picked the words ‘branding’ and ‘manifolds’ as a combination, which we finalised on later.
4. Slice and combine (technique)
Sometimes, you can slice words to make them more catchy or to make the overall name length shorter in case the original words are tool long.
In our example, we chose to cut short ‘manifolds’ into just ‘folds’ and combined it with our keyword ‘brand’.
5. Modify and invent (technique)
With millions of brands in the word today, it gets hard to find a brand name right out of the dictionary. Hence, you can also get creative and invent your own word by making slight modifications to the original word and see if you get something interesting.
Dribbble was created by adding an extra ‘b’ to the word.
STAGE 3: Shortlist and finalise brand name
Now that you’ve generated some brand names, it’s time to find the winner! The following steps can help shortlist and finalise your brand name ideas.
Checklist ranking
Use the brand name checklist shared in Part 1, to help you evaluate and rank your brand name ideas. Higher the number of checks, the better.
Initial feedback on your brand name
It can be quite useful to gather some feedback on your brand name. You can do this by selecting a few people from your target audience (preferably ones you don’t know personally) and get some unbiased thoughts on your brand name. Some important questions to ask:
- Are people finding the brand name simple and unique? (This aids brand recall and recognition)
- What do they think the brand is about?
- Are people confusing it with some other brand?
- What word or phrase can I modify to make it more clearer?
Based on the feedback, keep revisiting the various tools and techniques mentioned in stage 2 and until you’re able to create the brand name.
Found your brand name?
We hope this guide helped you create a brand name.
Once you’ve come up with the brand name, you should ideally claim the domain name and also the social media handles soon. You don’t want someone to easily take it away after all that effort!
The next stage in your brand building journey comes visual identity and later comes building your brand awareness.