Perhaps one of the most important decisions expectant parents is the naming of their child. The process is unique to every family or couple. Some follow cultural conventions, religious beliefs, ancestral posterity to name a few. Whatever the process, that baby will grow up to be known with that name unless he or she decides to change it at some stage in life.
For many business owners like myself, our business becomes our baby. The business starts as a concept and then we reach the inevitable decision: what do we name our business? And like most business owners, we first named our services similar to our trading name. It was good for a time until we came to an impasse because we realised that some of our services had different audiences.
For our headshot service, we initially chose a name, got a domain and even started printing some flyers already. Upon careful analysis, the initial name we chose spoke more about the next step in our journey rather than our what we were wanting to do for our clients.
Until one day, I was reading this book on mentoring and the word 'identity' popped out. I stopped and gave this word more thought. It dawned upon me that our headshot service was about the identity of our clients. It was not about creating a false perception for their customers but re-creating in our photo the personality that we see in our client whilst marrying that with the expectation their customers. We then ditched the previous name we thought of and charged to experience the money we spent on it.
There are many ways to approach the naming of a brand. It can be a related name or something completely from the left field. If the approach is to name the brand that's related to the category it will compete in, be careful that you do not name it based on where you are on your business journey rather than where you want to be. Define the exact product your customer is getting. It may seem hard at first but as you drill down on what you are actually offering, the name will eventually come to mind.
Note: I published this article on my LinkedIn profile. It is meant to share what I've learned along the way in terms of branding, marketing and business in general. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
0 Comments