If you found it tough to pick a name for your firstborn that would satisfy your spouse, parents, and in-laws, imagine the challenge of finding a name that will attract the attention and win the trust of thousands of potential customers!
Illustration: Avishai Chen
Walking down the avenue or flipping through a magazine, a plethora of names jump out at you. More than just words, these names are powerful marketing tools that often manage to convey the status, age, taste, or spending habits of the consumers they attract. What goes into the corporate naming process? How and why are these names developed? Here’s a peek into the process. The multiple considerations and motivations just might turn your own baby-naming angst into child’s play.
A & B Fish. Jerusalem II Pizza. Shop Smart. Glatt Mart. DB Electronics. Onyx. The Hat Box. Corporate names range from the proprietor’s name or initials to descriptions of the business, enigmatic phrases, tired clichés and overdone copycats. For the entrepreneur, finding an appropriate name that will attract buyers can be a bewildering challenge. That’s why many start-ups utilize the services of marketing professionals to help give their venture an identity.
“We might not know your business as well as you do, but we do understand how to build a relationship between business and customer,” says Ari Treuhaft, creative director of KZ Creative. “That’s what a name is all about: building a relationship from the first word and on.”
How do marketers come up with the name? Professionals are trained for this, explains Yitzchok Saftlas. “I’ll ask a person with whom I’m working on a name to bring me two names that he likes, and two names that he absolutely does not like,” says Yitzchok Saftlas of Bottom Line Marketing Group. Saftlas, who trained in New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), is the brainpower behind many names of popular businesses and initiatives. “With my training, I can decipher what types of names do not agree with this person. This will help me get to a name that clicks for my client. It will be different than the two names he brought in, but it will give me an idea of his speed.”
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