What’s in a name? Everything!
With all the thought that goes into making sure your customers read your news and blog updates, it’s easy to lose a feeling for the fundamentals. Today, we’re going to the most important piece of content for your company ever – the name. It may same banal, but a good name could be worth gold!
The Tools
There’s a lot more science behind a company name than you might suppose. OK, so you could take the more simpler approach and have some fun with the free online name-generating tools. Namemesh and shopify are just two examples of tools which will, together with the keyword-based name, also show you which URLs are still available.
But what if you want more than this? How can you make sure your company name is remembered?
The Basics
At the risk of stating the obvious, your company name has to sound good. Especially if you have an online shop and/or you’re looking to attract people to your site, you have to make sure they like talking about your site. Here are a few things to watch out for:
The Associations
Can your company name be associated with your product or service? This point goes beyond including your main keyword or service offering in the name, too. Here, it’s important to think about what is called sound symbolism – does the sound of the name evoke an image or an associatable image of your service? If it does, it’s technically what is known as an ideophone. If this all sounds a bit hazy, just do the ideophone test.
If your ideophone can’t be directly related to the product or service you’re promoting, just make sure it sounds positive. After all, consumers prefer positive sounding words, even if they are pure fantasy.
The Consonants
It’s useful to know that not all consonants have the same quality. There are hard consonants, there are soft consonants – it all depends which muscles in your mouth are used to express them. To make sure your company name is liked and loved by your clients, ensure it’s a nice combination of softer sounds. Nice round vowels are always a winner – think Opodo or Zalando, for example.
The Ease of Reading
To make sure everyone is talking about your company, you have to make its name easy to say, but also easy to read. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we move our mouth muscles with every word we read. Whenever we stumble over an awkward array of letters or sounds, it causes a feeling of discontent. Especially for online businesses, where the majority of your clients will be writing about your company rather than talking about it, it’s really crucial that your company name is easy to type, too. With a comfortable, easy to remember combination of letters, you make it easier for your clients to bring up your fantastic service and products in social media and online foren too.
The Translations
If you are planning to sell in foreign countries, make sure your name is compatible. There’s plenty of horror stories of failed names in foreign cultures.
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