Your name is the brand asset that travels social spheres, appears in conversation, shows up on a package, signage and will likely be uttered from the lips of your CEO. How important is your name? Find something else this central to your brand strategy. Find something else that permeates everything you do. A name is so valuable, yet anyone can identify a word/phrase and register it with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Seems simple, doesn’t it?
If you’ve tried to name yourself, you know the pain of discovering your “brilliant” name is already registered. Then, you start compromising with names that are not memorable or relevant to the brand strategy you’ve defined because you’re getting desperate. After way too many hours and too much stress for what seems like such a simple task, you identify a name. Just before you sign the USPTO office paper work, you wonder: are there professionals who do this for a living? Heck, yes!
If you think naming is merely a process that starts with brainstorming words and ends with picking one and asking for legal clearance, you’ve not had a real naming experience. While pointing out all the pitfalls of doing it yourself would encompass many blog posts, we’ll start with the basics. Naming professionals use criteria to filter through the debris until they find the right name.
