The brand naming process should follow these ideal steps. Whether you are deciding on a brand name or a company name, every stage of this process must be handled with care.
1. Strategic Work: You begin with strategic work on the values the brand holds. Who will the brand address? What kind of target audience is it being created for? What are the core characteristics of that audience?
2. Competitor Work: The names and naming methodologies of competitors in the sector are analyzed, and it is examined whether there is a suffix or abbreviation specific to the sector. For example, the spreadable-chocolate category generally uses endings like “-elle” or “-ella” at the end of a word.
3. Semantic Work: Whether the brand will be meaningful, in which languages it will carry meaning, its degree of reading difficulty, and its phonetic harmony are all worked out.
4. Morphological Work: Where will the brand be applied? Based on that, how many letters or syllables will it consist of? In short, what the brand will look like in form is decided.
5. Conceptual Work: The concepts the brand should own are brought to the surface.
6. Creation Work: From all these concepts, names suited to the brand’s semantic and morphological structure are derived. As many alternatives as possible — and different variations of similar names — are generated. Generic names are avoided. The very common, familiar words themselves are avoided; names are derived by altering them or by combining them with other words.
7. Registration-Check Work: For the names that emerge, trademark registration checks are carried out for the classes in which the name is to be registered, through the relevant trademark office. It is worth getting support from an intellectual-property office on trademark registration here.
8. Detailed-Check Work: For the names that are eligible for registration, domain and social-media account checks are made. Detailed searches on search engines ensure the brand carries no negative meaning (for example, avoiding awkward situations such as the name being a porn star’s surname).
9. Registration Work: The trademark application is filed. The application document is enough to secure the matching “.com” address.
10. Brand Identity Brief: A brief is given on the visual identity the brand should have. This brief guides what the logo and corporate-identity elements should contain.
