What Is Your Brand Name?
The first, and most concise expression of what your brand represents for potential customers.
Brand Name Definition
Your brand name is typically the first point of contact customers have with your business. Your name is the first opportunity to express something meaningful and memorable about the value your brand provides.
The process of creating a meaningful brand name can be a challenging and stressful exercise. Beyond any best practices criteria that help define a good name, there’s always a high level of personal preference that’s impossible to escape.
The good news is that even the most famous brand names in the world can be teased apart to show varying degrees of strengths and weaknesses. There’s no perfect name. There will always be some people who like your name and some people who don’t.
Ultimately, it’s the value your brand provides that determines your success, not your name. But you should still try and maximize the impact that your name can make with customers.
Brand Name Exercise
As you explore brand name ideas, it’s important to consider all the factors that impact its effectiveness.
If you’re in the process of developing a name for a new company or for a full rebrand, you can use our rubric to grade the name against 10 criteria to evaluate its strength.
The goal with the rubric is to provide some structure for more objective, productive conversations with your business partners, team, family, or anyone else involved in the process.
Use the rubric to score each individual name (including your current name if you have one) on the criteria and total up the score to see which options are best:
Get Help Crafting Your Brand Name
Free Brand & Marketing Workbook
Get immediate access to our 10 page workbook to help you define your Core Purpose, Vision, and Core Values, along with resources for Brand Archetypes, Tone of Voice, Messaging, and more!
Hands-on Brand Strategy Help
Transform your best business thinking into an actionable, shareable, growth-oriented guide. Click below to learn about the Brand Guidebook process.