Brand me
- Fran Molloy
- 5 August 2009
Transforming a great idea into a viable product - or a whole new business - can be a long and frustrating road. It's often hard to maintain that creative momentum when confronted with the plethora of mission-critical decisions that need to be made in the early days.
But one of the most important pieces of research for a new business might initially seem relatively unimportant: what do you name it? And what sort of image will your new ‘thing' have?
Seems easy. And sometimes, when inspiration strikes, a great solution can be found in minutes.
But if inspiration doesn't strike, the process of choosing a business name isn't quite as straightforward as choosing a colour scheme for your office. The name of your business is a vital component of its core essence: the brand.
Hey, there's a reason that brand consultants get paid the big bucks. Finding a business name and an appropriate logo to go with it that will turn heads in the marketplace is often a difficult and time-consuming exercise.
However, for new businesses short on cash but keen to invest some time and energy, there's plenty of resources on the net that you can tap into to help you come up with a killer brand for your new venture - without shelling out for a high-end agency.
What's in a name?
"A business name is very important - it's something you as a business owner will have to say a million times and explain to everyone from customers to investors - so you'd better love it," says Scott Maxworthy, who heads up Sydney-based digital media strategy and online communications agency Maxy's Media.
In the pre-internet age, many businesses adopted names like ‘Aardvark' and ‘Acme' to try to lift their business to the top of the classified listings in directories like the Yellow Pages, Maxworthy says; these days, alphabetical order is irrelevant.
"When you're coming up with a company name, you've got to keep in mind that most people will begin their hunt for a product at a search engine," he says.
“Ideally, you’ll build your brand and your domain around a word that people will search for when they are looking for the product that you sell”
Maxworthy adds that, while you might have your heart set on a really creative and unusual name, you will probably be better off with a name that doubles as a search engine keyword.
"Ideally, you'll build your brand and your domain around a word that people will search for when they are looking for the sort of product that you sell."
A branding exercise often involves a careful see-saw between a great product name and a practical, memorable word that relates to the product in some way.
"Good marketing often involves being remarkable and creating something different," he admits.
"So an obvious name, like Joe's Commercial Cleaning, is going to be really boring and won't really cut through. The challenge is to try to create a brand around the name you come up with for your business, whether that name is a word you'd find in the dictionary, a made-up word, a combination of words or an acronym."
Branding basics
Dr Bruce Perrott, research director of marketing strategy and technology at the University of Technology, Sydney, says those fundamental choices about naming and developing your brand name and image are critical decisions that should occur in the very early stages of business development.
"The main purpose of any business is to build the brand, because the real worth of a company is the future income stream that comes from that brand," he says.
Perrott explains that the real value of any business, on top of its fixed assets, is the ‘brand equity' - marketing-speak for the value of the future revenue that the business is likely to generate because of its brand.
Three key ingredients of brand equity are awareness (or recognition), loyalty and value - and it's important to get those right at the outset.
"Often a company will believe their brand might be in a particular position, delivering strong value - but their customers may not see them the same way, they might not have the attributes that are important in the consumer's mind," he says.
Much of the feel of a brand is invested in the name, Perrott says; but what is behind the name or the logo, is what you are trying to communicate when you market your brand.
He says that a good, strong brand doesn't need to discount prices to gain market share; but if don't feed your brand with good marketing, communication and consumer messages, it may well fade away.
"Most small businesses are started by entrepreneurs or technically skilled people who often don't have a lot of business or marketing education," he says.
They're missing a key component, he says. "Marketing is the core of any business, it's about linking products and people."
Perrott says that engaging a brand consultant at the start-up stage can fast-track your marketing education and is a very worthwhile investment for any small business that doesn't start out with strong marketing skills.
"Any business starting out should have a business plan and a marketing plan before they actually start trading," he says.
"Without it, you just won't know if your business is going to be viable in the first place."
Getting the right domain for your brand
Domain names are integral to most brands these days - and the search for an appropriate domain name is often the first step on the way to branding a new product or service.
"A lot of people starting up a business will base the whole business name around the availability of a domain name," says David Lye, CEO of Netfleet, an online auction brokerage for sales of Australian internet domain names. He adds that there is little point choosing a business brand name only to find that another company already owns the domain.
"If the domain name happens to be owned by a competitor then much of your marketing work could benefit somebody else."
Regulations against domain name trading in Australia were dropped around a year ago, Lye says, so premium domain names are now attracting good prices.
He says that premium domain names tend to be generic ones - and ideally, they describe what the business does.
"There's great value because by promoting that domain name, you're promoting the company name, exactly what the company does, and how to get in contact with the company. It achieves three aims in just a simple word or two."
Lye says successful domain names must be easy to spell, easy to remember and linked to the business activity of the company.
"It's very early days in the domain trading industry, so it's quite a cagey affair, with buyers and sellers still unsure of what they can offer or pay for a domain name," he says.
At the time of writing, the highest price obtained in Australia by a domain name owner was $25,550 for the domain sextoys.com.au in June 2009.
"Just goes to show, sex sells," Lye jokes.
Lye says that owning a .com.au domain is much better for any business with a target market predominantly within Australia, with Australian web users remarkably loyal to the .com.au domains.
"It's also a lot easier to find a good .com.au name, of course; there's approximately 70 million registered .com domain names, compared to just 1.2 million .com.au names."
Although businesses can choose a .net.au domain name if their preferred .com.au name is taken, Lye counsels new business against doing so.
"There's always going to be a certain amount of traffic bleed, because people often assume that a web address will use a .com.au name; so your .net.au advertising may actually benefit a competitor."
These days, search engines are critical for business exposure, Lye confirms - and they are levelling the business playing field.
"A small company [that] works hard on [its] website can quite easily out-rank a big blue-chip company, whereas with paid advertising they just can't compete."
Acronyms and domain name tips
Scott Maxworthy says that while many strong generic domain names have been out of circulation for a long time, there's still plenty of good Australian domain names available.
"Obviously, all the three-letter domain names and most of the four-letter ones went nine or 10 years ago, along with the most obvious generic terms. But you can still find plenty of good domain names that are five or six letters. The key is to find something that's short and sharp, easy to spell and easy to remember."
Acronyms can be helpful if they are meaningful and memorable, he says.
Maxworthy's team spent some time coming up with a name for his latest product, CLIVE (Customer Live Internet Video Experience) - a product that introduces a walking, talking presenter as a video overlay to customer websites.
"CLIVE was all about humanising the web, so we gave it a person's name and that helps to talk about this process of adding personality and humanity to a website. We've created a brand name that will work for word-of-mouth, but we're also trying to build in that search engine relevance as well."
Maxworthy says there are plenty of online tools that can be used to help research keywords and domain names, and it's worth spending some time online.
"When searching for a good brand name, I always take it back to basics: who is your customer, how will they hear about you and how are you going to influence them?"
Social media can provide an instant focus group, he adds. He recently used Twitter to get responses from his followers on some ideas he was considering.
"I got back some fantastic feedback, pretty much instantly."
What the professionals do
Professional name consultants develop a ‘naming brief' about the product or company, then create a master list of hundreds of names, which are then checked online for available trademarks, domain names and so on, before a final list of around a
dozen names is presented to the client. The process can cost thousands of dollars.
US-based name consultant and former journalist Nancy Friedman says that she has worked on naming projects where four team members came up with over 2000 names between them.
"Given a decent creative backgrounder and a week alone, a professional namer will come up with 250 or 300 names per assignment," she writes on her blog, Fritinancy: The Mysteries of Naming.
"Some of the names will be obscure. Most will be unavailable legally. And a few, just a few, will be good candidates for the job."
Instant brand development
Canberra business consultant Candice Edye runs a marketing coaching group for female entrepreneurs and says that many start-up businesses can get great feedback on brand development ideas from business mentor groups; hers is called Daisy & Dandelion, but there are hundreds of groups online providing a similar function.
She says that the majority of her clients run online businesses - and a lot of her coaching includes pointing them to resources that they can use online, which is either free or very low-cost, to help to build their business.
"Although I do a lot of work with existing brands, it's better when we get someone who hasn't already committed to a brand name because you can actually start thinking about building a brand and finding a category that will all fit together."
One of her current clients is investigating a new business in eco party supplies, and finding an appropriate business name that hasn't already been taken has been a big challenge.
"But before settling on the name, it's been really important to get her to think about her long-term aim; she might start out with children's parties now, but in the long term, build into something bigger - so the name needs to be able to grow with her. #
