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Above all else, the right name for your business is a name that you can own. By own I mean one that you can legally trademark and secure the appropriate domain names. For what is the point of creating great brand value only to find that you can not own it and that competitors can leverage off it so easily.

So, it pays before you start down the road of naming your business to first see that the domain names are available and that you can actually own your name as a trademark. Whilst domain names are easy to check, you will need to go to your government's intellectual property website and do a search of the name you are looking at to ensure that it is not already taken and that it is actually trademarkable.

Now this immediately brings up a point of conflict because your domain-name advisor will be telling you to name according to industry recognized terms (like shoes-R-us) whereas your trademark advisor will be saying the opposite and use a made-up-name (like Kodak, intel or Nokia) that have no relationship with the product or industry.

Now, if executed correctly, your name or brand will become your most valuable asset materializing eventually in the goodwill (a payment made above the actual value of the physical assets) when you sell. For example, the COCA-COLA brand value alone has been valued by the New York marketing consultants Vivaldi Partners, at $55 billion. They also identified that some brand values contributed more than 50% of the firm's overall market value. Typical firms in this group included Victoria's Secret, Harley-Davidson and Pixar.

So, in the conflict over domain-name Vs trademark, I would go with trademark and find other ways to direct traffic to my made-up-name web site. Anyway, a quick check of the top 50 world brands will show you that over 90% of them have a name that does not directly describe the product they sell.

Apart from being able to own the name, I would also chose a name with the following characteristics:

#1 ONE WORD because 62% of the worlds top brands use only one word.

#2 6 LETTERS OR LESS so that customers will not shorten it in conversational slang. (Coca-Cola = Coke, McDonalds = Maccas, International Business Machines = IBM)

#3 2 TO 3 SYLLABLES again to ensure an easy slide into conversations without creating a desire to change it.

#4 NOT YOUR NAME because you may want to sell your business some day and new owners want a neutral rather than your personal name plastered all over their pride-and-joy.

#5 NO AMBIGUITY IN PHONETICS because you don't want your name pronounced in different ways which will dilute your market traction. Whilst there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, there are 44 sounds.

#6 NO DANGLY BITS because letters like j, p, q and y create havoc in lower case when it comes to sign writing.

#7 ADD AN S particularly if your business is a physical place because that is how your customers will refer to it i.e. Meet you at Wendys.

For more see my articles on logos and trademarks.

Learn more about this author, Peter Baskerville.
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