First of all, congratulations on wriggling out of the rat race and having the courage to start your own company.
Now that you’ve decided what business you want to get into, naming your business appropriately is equally important. It is not JUST a name. It is much more than that. It is going to be with you forever. It represents you and the product or service you wish to offer. I was recently chatting with a friend who started his digital marketing firm last December. When I asked him about how he arrived at the name for his company, he said, “We spent week after weeks deciding on a name that will make us stand out. There came a point where we grew so frustrated, we stuck to the first name that we could come up with. After all, the kind of work we do matters more than the name, right?”
While this thought process holds merit to a certain extent, it is not necessarily the right approach. Some serious thought has to be put into naming your company.
How to come up with a name
It should sound right
Just because you’ve opened a restaurant serving Vietnamese food, you can’t call your restaurant “Món ăn Việt Nam tuyệt vời nhất”, because you think you serve the most awesome Vietnamese food. Make sure it sounds right and is easy to pronounce. It’s like those really intelligent, creative ads on TV, where people remember the ad and the characters, but cannot recall the brand that was being advertised for. Bounce the name off of a few people and get their opinions. You don’t want people to say, Well the food at that restaurant is brilliant but I can’t for the life of me recall the name. Don’t get too flowery or too exotic with the name. Although coined brand names like Google, Kodak, Mercedes, Yahoo, or even Hotmail have done tremendously well for themselves. See if you can come up with a cool name like some of these companies did
Will it hamper when you expand
You don’t want a restrictive name that hampers your company when you’re looking to expand. When you’re deciding upon a name, think of both the present and the future. Think of all the possible verticals, products, or regions you might expand into. Tata is a great brand name. They can pretty much attach it to any business area they wish to enter: Tata Steel, Tata Salt, Tata Consultancy. But supposing they had named it Tata Steel to begin with, they might have looked something like this today: Tata Steel and Salt and Consultancy. Just an example.
Cashing in on a hot trend
Trends or fads are like a passing train. One goes and another comes. It is highly risky to name your company based on a current trend. When the millennium fever had taken over, lot of people got car number plates with 2000, or used the number in other ways. A year later, it looked stupid and irrelevant. You want your company name to last forever. A good example would be, Löwenbräu, German for "lion's brew," which is considered to be one of the world's oldest brand names. The first beer was brewed by the proprietor of Lion's Inn, in 1383.
Research
OK, so you have come up with the most ingenious name ever. But before splashing it everywhere, make sure you do a thorough research. You don’t want to be spending months coming up with a name and then finding out that there’s a porn company by the same name. Google is a good place to start. Also check if a domain name is available to go with your company’s name. One other important thing to consider, if you’re planning to expand to overseas markets, is that the name shouldn’t mean something completely different in the local lingo. For example, when a hotel owner was looking for names for his newly-opened Thai restaurant, he came up with a Thai phrase that he thought meant, "Welcome and see you again", but in truth it meant, “Go Away and Don't Come Back".
So there you have it. Now that you have named your company, go and make some money.