How do I choose a name for my business? Part 2
Ways to get creative with your company name.
First off, if you’ve not read part 1, I’d advise you go back and read that. If you have, great, let’s crack on.
As we were coming up with potential names, we applied the techniques below to see if we could make something more original. We also played around with names we liked that had already been used to see if we could make something similar, but different enough to be unique. I’m not going to go into any great depth as to what each of these are, I’ll just give a brief description an an example.
Alliteration
These are words that all start with the same sound or letter, so ruby red riders, Tom’s tailors, Foxy’s fine flowers
Rhyming words
Fairly obvious how this one works, jeepers creepers, helter skelter, smooch pooch
Homophones
Words that sound the same, but are spelt different and have different meanings, like steak and stake, break and brake, hi and high.
Anagrams
This one is easy too, just take the name you like and mix up the letters to see if you can come up with a new word.
Misspellings
This is useful if you find a name you like that’s a common word, it helps you make a little different, so dolphin could become dolfin
If you’re at this stage of reading and you’ve still not actually started to look, or you’ve not found anything you’d like to use as a name yet, here’s an idea.
When we started looking for our name, we wanted the word blue in it, or for it to be related to the word blue, so we just simply used blue flowers, blue beetles, blue plants, blue butterflies and so on to see if anything popped up that caught our eye.
We also looked at alternative names for shades of blue, like cyan, teal and duck egg. We looked at what the names for blue were in other languages and old English or old fashioned names.
We came up with our name pretty quickly, so didn’t need to use any other techniques. But, here are some other ways you could generate a name, depending on how much time and effort you want to put into it, cos I’m nice like that.
If you want the whole process to be quick and easy, I’d go for an online name generator. We wanted our name to be something of us, have meaning, not just be a random word. We wanted to take our time and find something we really loved. But, I get that it may not be that important to you to have all that, so there’s nothing wrong with getting this bit done using a name generator, like BNG Business Name Generator.
If you want to make the choosing of your business name a more involved process, you could do the following to give you a starting point:
- use a slang dictionary, all kinds of fun stuff in these. Peevish a good one, don’t go if you’re easily offended though, it’s a little bit rude in places. For a more gentile version, try Greens Dictionary of Slang.
- use the letters in the names of your family members to make a new word either in an anagram or the start of one name and the end of another.
- you could do this other words that describe what you do too, like Groupon did (group and coupon).
- think about the things that make your service or product different, benefits and features, things like that. Or what you want your product to do for the people who use it, make them feel comfortable, happy, content, loved.
- use a few words. There’s a company I know that make pickles called Rubies in the Rubble, not at all what you’d expect for a company that does food.
That’s your lot. Part three will look at the more practical things you need to consider when choosing business name.
