Naming Your Business

[ad_1] Deciding on a brand name can be a difficult and lengthy process, but when time and effort are invested in finding the right name, it will grow into one of your most important brand assets.  Names are simple little things. They are jumbles of letters, actual words, phrases or …

[ad_1] Let’s be honest, branding your startup is one of the fun parts of launching a new startup. You get to name your baby exactly how you want. For once, you don’t have to take anyone else’s opinion into account. This world consists of nearly 6,500 spoken languages. Thousands of new, weird words …

[ad_1] As an entrepreneur, you understand the importance of protecting your business name. Think of the sales you might lose if another company opened up using your same name. If you’re building a brand, investing in advertising and hoping customers can find you, you’ll want to make sure you’ve properly protected …

[ad_1] Once you have poured your blood, sweat and tears into a business, the last thing you want is for your company name or logo to be hijacked by another business. A trademark protects the word, symbol, design or combination associated with your company from being replicated. By obtaining a …

[ad_1] The science of memory breaks down into three parts: encoding, storage and retrieval. We encode through all five of our senses. Two of these senses, sight and hearing, are under more control during the naming process than the other three. However, taste, smell and touch are part of the …

[ad_1] Imagine having 30 million customers familiar with your company name, seven million of them active users, and then changing it on them. What do you think they will do? Will it be confusing to the point of losing users? The answer is no, not if you rebrand a company …

[ad_1] Right after I left Goldman Sachs to join our startup NerdWallet, when I would tell people where I worked, a common response was, “Nerd-what?” It didn’t roll off the tongue. Was that because it’s a bad name, or just because it’s a strange one? Is that strangeness a liability …

[ad_1] When naming something, it is human nature to want to describe what you are naming. This is, of course, the most direct route to relevance. Many historic and well-known companies have names that describe what they do or make. For example: International Business Machines, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing and …

[ad_1] They say everything is in a name. It’s hard to argue with that when you look at how Kleenex and Xerox have forever changed what we used to call tissues and photo copies. Sure, you can build a brand around a product name, but can you do the same around …

[ad_1] Every new baby gets a name before it is introduced to the world, and yet some entrepreneurs continue to send me business plans with TBD (to be determined) in place of a business name on the front page. They don’t realize that the name they choose, or lack of …