A business name should say as much as possible about the sector, product or service your business offers. Several studies have shown that companies whose names are easy to remember, simple to pronounce and leave no doubt about what the business does tend to be more successful than the rest.
One of the most common pieces of advice experts give when coming up with a company name is to make a list of words that could describe the business perfectly. Then you can try different combinations of those words, saying them out loud at the same time to hear how they sound.
Analyze the visual impact of the name, because seeing it on a blank sheet of paper is not the same as seeing it printed on a business card, a sign or an advertisement. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about you or your company and is seeing the name for the first time.
What not to do when choosing a business name
Don’t go for a name that is long or confusing. Likewise, using the entrepreneur’s first name and surname is not recommended, for several reasons. One is “aesthetic” (especially if we use diminutives, along the lines of “Azulejos Pepito”, or “Little Joe’s Tiles”). The other is that if the company goes bankrupt, your name will always be associated with that bankruptcy.
Don’t include a geographical reference in the name, such as “Azulejos Granada” (“Granada Tiles”), because it can become a drawback when you want to expand into other markets.
Don’t include any kind of obscenity or rude word in the name, however funny it may seem. In some industries you wouldn’t be taken seriously, and sometimes you can run into trouble, as happened with “Aguardiente Hijoputa” (roughly “son-of-a-bitch brandy”), a company that had problems with the European Union, which considered the name offensive and therefore refused to register the trademark.
Don’t use names similar to another company’s, because on the one hand it confuses customers, and on the other, if you’re successful, it usually ends in a lawsuit.
And something no less important, especially if you plan to expand into other countries, is finding out in advance what your company’s name means in other languages, because some of these situations can arise, which are amusing, to say the least:
- Arkadas restaurant. This Turkish restaurant didn’t reckon with the fact that its name isn’t quite right for a restaurant (to a Spanish speaker it sounds like arcadas, “retching”).
- Boutique Pene. The staff at this upscale boutique must have put up with the odd joke (pene is Spanish for “penis”).
- Le Vin de Merde (French for “shit wine”).
- MIANO restaurant (read as mi ano, “my anus”).
- Minabo restaurant (read as mi nabo, literally “my turnip”, a Spanish slang word for penis).
- Tan Dao Vien restaurant. This may be the best known because of how it reads in Spanish: rather than Chinese-Vietnamese, it looks like a rustic pronunciation with spelling mistakes (something like te han dado bien, “they really gave it to you”).
This little problem, however, is one that even big companies make, and they have to take decisions to limit the damage to their branding.
We’ve seen well-known cases among carmakers that got the names of certain vehicles wrong, such as the “Nissan Moco” (moco means “snot” in Spanish) or the “Mitsubishi Pajero” (pajero is vulgar Spanish slang for “wanker”). Clearly, any Spaniard would lose all desire to buy a car with a name like that.
Featured image: TTTNIS, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
