By: Sharon Urias, Esq.
I often have clients ask me to assist them in selecting a new brand name. Although I am a lawyer and NOT a marketing expert (far from it), I always tell my clients that marketing considerations aside, they need to come up with a name that doesn’t infringe on someone else’s mark. That’s obvious. The problem is that while it may be easy to come up with a great idea, it’s not so easy to come up with a truly original name—one that is strong, unique, appealing to your customers and that will make you incredibly successful. What is a client to do?
A business owner who wants a create a strong, unique and appealing brand name should follow these basic guidelines:
Think outside the box. If your company makes widgets, don’t limit your thought process to “widget maker.” What makes your company unique? What makes your widgets unique? The fact that your company makes widgets (along with hundreds, maybe thousands, of other companies) will not set your company apart from the competition.
Think about what you want to communicate to your customers. Who are your customers? What are they looking for? If you were looking for a widget, what would you want to know about it? What is different about your product from your competition? Don’t just focus on coming up with a snappy brand name, think about the associations customers will make with your brand name.
Ask your customers. Don’t just ask friends and family for ideas. Go to the best source of information about your widgets—your customers. Ask them: Why do they buy your widgets? What associations do they make when they think about your widgets?
Think about who your competitors are. Who else is selling widgets and what are they calling themselves? Look at naming patterns in your industry in order to identify areas of opportunity. Find ways to distinguish yourself from the competition.
Think about how you are going to use your brand name. Are you going to have a website? If so, check www.who.is to ensure that your top choices are available. Are you going to use it locally, nationally or internationally? If you only are going to use the name locally for now, do you have plans for expansion?
Don’t fall in love too soon! Make sure you have multiple name candidates for consideration in case you lose your first choice in a trademark search.
Consider hiring a marketing company. Find a professional marketing expert to assist you in selecting the “perfect” brand name for your widget. An experienced marketing company should be able to assist you (certainly better than any attorney!) in finding the “perfect” name to describe your “perfect” widgets. If that is not within your budget, I suggest that you think about such things as:
- Distinctiveness! I cannot emphasize enough—both from a legal and marketing point of view—your brand needs to be singular and unique.
- Unconventional combination of words to create a new word or deliberate misuse/misspelling of words (e.g. “Facebook,” “Flickr,” “Toys R Us”)
- Foreign language derivatives (use translations of key words and/or foreign roots to create a new word, e.g. Sanka is derived from the French, “sans caffein,” “Altavista” means “high view” in Spanish)
- Use a dictionary and/or thesaurus. Not just for “widget,” but also for words that describe your particular widget, whether your widget is unique due to its color, shape, size or other characteristic.
- Ease of pronunciation and/or spelling
- Appearance (do you like the “look” of words that begin with the letter “x” or “z?”)
- Is the name too long or too short? Will it fit onto your packaging?
- What message are you trying to convey?
Contact a lawyer. Have an experienced trademark lawyer vet your selections, i.e. are your proposed brand names available in the applicable class(es) in the USPTO and is there a likelihood of confusion with existing registrations? Are there other businesses in the marketplace already using names similar to your choices that may run the risk of infringement? Hire a lawyer to advise you regarding the strength of your mark and to assess the risk of infringement.
