What Should We Consider When Selecting a Company Name?
Dan Maruschak:
I don't have much practical experience, but I thought I'd add a few thoughts I've had based on reading a bunch of books about marketing.
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Ease of use. Try saying the would-be name of your company out loud. Talk about it in a sentence. If its difficult or challenging to say, folks will either not bother or they'll brutally hack it, neither of which works well for you in the word of mouth category.
To add to this point, make sure that the spelling is obvious from the way it's pronounced. After hearing the "word of mouth", people need to get to your website either by typing your company name in the address bar of a browser or by using google, and in either case they'll need to spell it properly.
Also, you may want to make an effort to make sure that your company will be highly ranked on google when people search for it. There's a whole field of search engine optimization that I don't know too much about, but at the very least you want to avoid names that already have strong associations with someone or something else (which is a good idea from a branding perspective, anyway), whether it's a company or not.
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How about an abbreviation?
On the topic of initials and abbreviations, I find this article by Al Ries to be interesting: http://www.ries.com/iframes/articles-read.php?id=57 It's not perfectly on point (it's about companies officially changing their names to initials, but it has some interesting thoughts, such as whether the initials are actually shorter when pronouced). Personally, from a marketing perspective, I dislike initials. You're probably better off having a short name or one that can be shortened by chopping rather than initializing.
On the issue of logos, I'd suggest including the full name of your company in the logo, if you can. It's taken Nike decades and millions of dollars to associate the "swoosh" with Nike to an such an extent that they no longer need to use the word "Nike". You're unlikely to have decades or millions of dollars to work with, so you may as well make it unnecessary. Logos are a customer expectation in this industry, but you really want to fix your company name in people's minds, so I would combine them if you can.
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Further, I feel a good logo sticks in the head FAR better than even the most evocative names.
I would disagree with this point, but maybe it's a personal preference thing and some people remember images better than words, and vice versa. But in the internet world, nobody can search on your logo, and in the word of mouth world nobody can talk about your logo. Of course, if you can get a great name and a great logo, more power to you.
David Artman:
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Further, I feel a good logo sticks in the head FAR better than even the most evocative names.
I would disagree with this point, but maybe it's a personal preference thing and some people remember images better than words, and vice versa. But in the internet world, nobody can search on your logo, and in the word of mouth world nobody can talk about your logo. Of course, if you can get a great name and a great logo, more power to you.[/quote]TO clariffy, I was speaking in terms of a buyer looking for additional works by the same authors/publishers, NOT the initial buy only. Looking at other companies with largish product lines, a good logo is clearly not a hard-and-fast rule to aid finding additional products--it's less effective than a consistent book design style; viz HERO and D&D lines. I guess it's just my own taste and preferences from a marketers perspective: all collateral should be "of a piece" and that includes logos, logotype, mailing materials, receipts, invoices, letterheads, cards, etc.
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MU, as a learning exercise, check out your current employer's (or get a friend/spouse to take you in to check out) marketing guidelines--I'd show you mine, but that stuff is usually internal-only. The last one I really dug into was GSK's, and they had a TON of rules about usage of the logo versus the name versus the abbreviation and how they had to be oriented and scaled relative to each other; plus black on white and white on black and how THOSE would work; plus rules for which fonts must be used, where, for any and all external publications... there's quite a bit to unpack, when you get down to it; and it's rarely a good idea to sort it out "on the fly"--you get inconsistencies across your brand, that way (which can range from minor oddities to amateurish-looking).
Ron Edwards:
Hi there,
Here are some older threads on this topic which present a different viewpoint from posts so far in this one. However, I think that all of it is valuable food for thought, in combination, especially since the points arise from actual experience. Please note the dates on these threads (they're in order from oldest to most recent).
Game company: why?
The Something-Something Press
Name for company
How did you come up with your name?
Best, Ron
Steve Segedy:
One last thing that I don't think has been mentioned yet- see if the name of your company (or some reasonable variation of it) is available as a domain name. If so, register it! Even if you don't want a website now, your customers will expect to find one if your business is at all successful.
Along those lines, make sure your name as a URL will be easy to spell (as mentioned earlier) and not misunderstood. Be careful with hyphens and so such (indierpgs.com? indie-rpgs.com?). Run your domain name by somebody else, just to be sure.
marsuniversity:
Thanks again for all your help on this issue, everyone. With your suggestions in mind, we were finally able to sit down and decide on a name for ourselves that we believe will work out much better than our original selection.
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