Making Your Brand Name Stick

Some restaurants have funny names; but none, that I know, has a funnier name than one that I visited months ago near Airport Hotel, Lagos, Nigeria. Its name is ‘Mine Thing Hot Restaurant’. The name stuck. I told it as a joke to many of friends; I shared it on facebook; I wrote a story about it titled ‘What’s in a name’ that was published on www.234next.com and I recommended the restaurant to friends, at least for them to verify the bizarre name. All that advertisement were neither solicited nor paid for. That is the advantage of naming your business right.
When choosing a name for your brand, these things should be consider:

1. Your brand name should be distinct: This means that it stands out, especially from the lot of competitors in the same market with you. Giving a name like ‘Panasony Electronics’ to your new electronics producing firm will reduce its value. The name will essentially portray your firm as a ‘Panasonic and Sony wannabe’. With that alone, the integrity of your brand will be in doubt and that will result to low acceptance in the market and of course low or no profit.

2. Your brand name should reflect you unique selling point: People, including your would-be customers are busy. They will be even busier in the future. So the faster you can come across to them, the better. Don’t make your prospect go through the trouble of figuring out what they will gain from patronizing you and not your competitor. While interviewing the owner of Mine Thing Hot Restaurant, a middle-aged woman who runs the restaurant alongside her two daughters, she said, “...my food is always hot, that’s why my customers come here.”

3. Your brand name should be witty: You have to play with words until you get something catchy. Get all the words that individually portray essential aspects of what your firm is offering, particularly the ones that make you different. Work with them until you get the one word or combination of words that is memorable enough to that a person who sees it once can remember it unconsciously. The name has to appeal to the emotion of your target customers. Making them rhyme helps.
With all these in place, you definitely have a name to run with. The next step is making it known to as many people as possibly. “Just put it in our faces.” On flyer; on billboards; on TV; on radio; and very importantly on the internet.