What's in a Name?

The Bard, William Shakespeare wrote in "Romeo and Juliet" that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

But what about a business? Would it still be as profitable if had another name?

Your business' name is the first thing that you customer will connect with. So what do you want that contact to be?

In Small Business Trends, Richard White has an article entitled "How to Choose the Right Name for Your Business." So how do you do it? White offers several ideas:

Descriptive or creative? Real words or fabricated ones? Location-based or general? The questions are numerous. However, all of them are intertwined. Everything boils down to the basics – whether you need to choose a name that informs people about your business or a name that generates people’s interest, making them want to find out more.

There are no hard and fast rules to name a business. What works for one business may not work for another. This makes it even more important to think hard about the type of name that will be good for your endeavor.

You also need to decide whether to include a location in the name. While a location may define the proximity of your business for your target customers, it may become a problem if you expand your business to other locations later on. Just because your new business is small today doesn’t mean it will remain so in the future. The ideal name for your business should be the one that conveys the uniqueness of what you bring to your customers. But, the ideal may not always work for every business.

Here are a few tips to name a business that do work for all businesses:

• Pay attention to what your clients want; not to what you want.
• Don’t choose a long name with difficult words.
• Use words that evoke familiarity.
• Don’t use puns, as they may not be understood.
• Incorporate your business before you use the “Inc.” in the name.

Professional firms often use a simple trick to come up with business names—morphemes. These small, meaningful units of words provide a good base for an interesting, yet informative business name.

So let's look around. A good descriptive name is "Tippmann Design Build." As descriptive as it gets. 

How about "State Street Bar and Grill? This is both descriptive and location based.

Let's look at a failure. Remember the 1990s Tom Hanks movie about a one-hit wonder band entitled "That Thing You Do?" The early 1960s band tried to use a homonym as a naming gimmick. They first called the band the "Oneders." Instead of calling it the "One-ders," as intended, the band would be call the "O-need-ers." Not cool.

So the band's name was changed back to its linguistic root, the "Wonders."

And let's end with this one. A barbecue and catering business in Fort Wayne called "Shigs in Pits." The Author has never eaten there, is a vegetarian, and will withhold comment.