Ask HN: How do I pick the best brand name? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I pick the best brand name?

8 pointsmcgeadyd13 comments

Ok so I've come up with a half dozen brand names for a product that I'm developed, and I want to find a method to pick the best one. Of course I can ask friends and family, but beyond that are there any ways to run it by many people quickly and cheaply? Any ideas are really welcomed!

View on HN

If it's for a product, I say start with the name that most clearly communicates what it is that the product helps with / problem it solves. Think "Can Opener". That's the kind of name you want for your brand or product to start. Even the big brands started out more specific... McDondald's was "McDonald's Hamburgers" for a very long time before removing the Hamburgers. Apple was "Apple Computers Inc" a long time as well.

When you are small you have to be more specific because you have a lower number of impressions ( chances to talk to your potential customers ) and you need to make sure you are sending the right message. The big brands can afford to put their message in more places, so they can be more abstract. Small brands don't have that luxury.

Make sure there are no live trademarks associated with the name. Also, go for a natural sounding made up name and avoid combining common dictionary words, it's more defensible that way. Use the wordoid tool for this purpose.

I guess what I'm wondering is if I follow those suggestions and I end up with maybe 3 candidates, how do I select between the 3? The obvious answer is to ask friends and family and then ask facebook friends. Beyond that though, was wondering if there might be another way of picking a winner.

Also: 1. Thanks for your comments people - genuinely appreciated 2. Wordoid is awesome! Never seen it before, but its a lot of fun! Will certainly play around with it 3. Yeah, I'm ruling out anything that doesn't have a free .com domain name (twitter handle gets bonus marks!)

One thing you could do is lock down the brands you've chosen (all social media services, Gmail acct, domain + privacy with a deep discount promo code, etc) and put up temp pages (i.e., Launchrock). Then soft promote them (PPC, build links, Facebook, etc) and see which one resonates better with your target market. Don't spend too much money/time on this though unless it's for a project where you can recoup your costs/investment. Keep in mind though that people typically associate more with what's actually behind the brand - quality/consistent blogging, engaging conversation on Twitter, insightful presentations, video, events, etc. - and that's where you'll find the traction/following that will eventually build your chosen brand.

Write it down. Does it look nice?

Is it easy to type?

Is the spelling obvious?

Is it easy to pronounce?

Does it explain something?

Does it sound similar to something else? If so, is this a good thing?

Also, does it have a good domain name free, and a domain name that fits your market? If your market is old ladies, you may want to avoid choosing a ".io" address.

Domain. Yes. Forgot the obvious one. :)

Also, try Googling the name to see what shows up right now (kind of similar to it sounding like something else) and check if the most obvious twitter handle is available or not.

Besides the obvious (lignuist's post is good)

One thing my friend did with naming his service was to ask his friends about the names. Two weeks later he called them back up and asked: What was the name of the service I asked you to name? He overwhelmingly got 1 answer that they could remember.

I used Amazon Mechanical Turk to run a multiple choice survey. That got me several hundred opinions in a day or so. (Make sure you have the domain reserved first, just in case.) It is fairly easy, even if you haven't done it before.

If you ended with only two names, try Pickfu.com to choose the best. It worked for me really well, I got 150 people reply in about 2-3 hours.

This is an amazing blog about naming http://www.thenameinspector.com/

Ok, what I might do is Ask HN to pick from my 3 favorite brandname candidates!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com