Dominant global brands appear to have transcended commerce and entered culture: from Nike to Apple, these brands have a powerful influence over the lifestyle of their customers, creating habits, setting trends, and making taste. Zooming in on these corporate monoliths, though, is like walking up to a mosaic: what looks like a single picture from afar turns out to be a composite image, composed of thousands of carefully curated parts.
At the heart of the picture is a brand name and logo. These are the foundational brand assets on which your brand identity is built. These assets must be infused with everything from your mission, values, unique selling point and brand tone to ensure that you’re constantly communicating with your purpose and using every customer interaction to build a cohesive brand identity.
Your name and logo have a key influence on your business’s success, particularly in the earliest stages. Name recognition is considered by 82% of investors when deciding where to invest, and brand name is a factor for 77% of consumers when they consider a purchase. Meanwhile, with a memorable and recognizable logo, 50% of customers are more likely to buy from your brand.
As such, early decisions about your brand identity have a powerful impact on your business trajectory. Brand strategy, name choice and logo design must be interwoven for a cohesive brand identity.
Emotion Comes First
Before you can choose your name, before you can even choose the background color of your logo, you have to understand your brand identity. Every element of every brand asset must be working overtime to weave a narrative around your brand.
This stage is perhaps most important, yet it’s usually the most rushed for founders and entrepreneurs who are eager to see their business spring to life. You know, of course, what your product or service will do for your customers — now is the time to determine how it should make them feel. Experiences associated with a positive emotion are more memorable, so incorporating an emotional reaction into your brand assets reinforces recognition and recall among your customers.
Ask yourself what emotions you aim to evoke in your audience. Do you make them feel luxurious and elegant? A gold-tinted logo and name with swooping Cs, Ys, and Bs will hint at this brand identity. Aiming to be sophisticated, minimalist and functional? Then a name with hard consonant sounds and a pared-down logo will back up your brand.
Naming with Purpose
A great business name does much more than label your brand. It needs to reflect your brand identity, resonate with your target audience and be flexible enough to grow as your business expands and diversifies. Choose a name that aligns with the long-term vision of how your brand will be integrated into the lives of your audience.
The core challenge for your name is to communicate your fundamental identity to your customers. Ensure that the big emotion of your brand is encoded in your name, the way Airbnb implies ease, and Shopify suggests creativity, or that your brand’s purpose and mission are called to mind.
Tips for Choosing an Impactful Name
When you’re choosing a name for your business, remember that there’s no one perfect name. Inevitably, any name requires a tradeoff. Shorter names may be more memorable, but may be more abstract and harder to match to a domain name. One name that perfectly communicates your brand’s purpose may lack the emotional resonance of another. However, by understanding your brand’s personality and balancing the competing features of a name, you can choose a business name that your brand will grow into.
Choose a Name Type:
With your brand identity understood, you can now lean on a naming type. This is a great way to start brainstorming, so try coming up with a potential name or two for every type. For example:
- Real Word Names: Real word names connect your brand to a real-world image, such as Dove or Shell.
- Misspellings: Misspellings tweak an existing word to create a unique name. Some great examples are Tumblr, Lyft, and Blu-ray.
- Compound Words: You can land on a memorable, unique name by combining two short words: Snapchat, GrubHub
- Phrases: Phrases can be particularly memorable, such as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! and Function of Beauty
- Portmanteaus: Portmanteaus, also known as blends, create a uniquely memorable name by combining two words, such as Shopify and Snapple.
- Descriptive Names: Descriptive names are great for brands building a ‘no-nonsense’ brand identity. Whole Foods and Southwest Airlines have grown into national brands with simple, descriptive names.
- Abstract Names: Made-up words can be equally powerful, so long as they look and sound great. Google and Kodak are both brand names with no other meaning.
Leverage Literary Devices
Literary devices are a shortcut to memorability. When choosing a name, try leveraging one or two of these linguistic tricks to create an impactful name.
- Alliteration: This trick is exceptionally common in big-name brands, from Range Rover to Coca-Cola. Combine two words, each starting with the same first letter, for a name that rolls off the tongue.
- Wordplay: Wordplay or puns are only appropriate for cheeky and playful brand identities, but they excel at creating memorable and shareable names. Names like Wok This Way and Chewy Vuitton put a smile on customers’ faces.
- Rhyme: Rhyming two words makes them easier to remember: Grubhub, 7-Eleven and Pretty Kitty leverage this trick.
- Imagery: By connecting your name to a particular mental image, you assist customers in imagining the experience of your brand. Red Bull and Glassdoor have a concrete image behind their name that reinforces their brand character.
- Metaphor: Metaphor is an abstract way into imagery. Names like Slack and Amazon have a range of interpretations that hint at the business’s purpose.
Aside from the symbolic significance of your name, there are some practical factors to keep in mind. Is your name unique enough to be trademarked and matched with a strong domain name? Ensure it’s easy to spell, pronounce, and remember to maximize its shareability among your customers.
Your name is often your first impression with your customers, so make it count. Don’t hold back from seeking professional guidance from naming experts, who understand how to condense story, emotion and purpose into a single word or two.
Your Logo Should Tell a Story
Having chosen a powerful name, you can now create a logo as a visual distillation of your brand identity. It doesn’t have to include your brand name, although it may be based around your name or the first letter. It must, however, continue reinforcing your brand’s mission, values and emotional resonance to contribute to a cohesive whole.
Typography and color psychology can be used in your logo to influence your customer perception. For example, blue often signals trust (used by banks and tech companies), while bright colors may convey energy and creativity. Similarly, sans serif font choices will reinforce reliability and functionality, while swooping, curving serif fonts will amplify creativity or elegance.
There are some crucial characteristics of all logos:
- Simplicity: Your logo should be memorable and scalable across formats.
- Relevance: It should directly connect to your brand tone and big ideas.
- Uniqueness: It should differentiate you from your competitors.
- Versatility: Test it in various sizes, as well as black-and-white.
Slack’s 2019 logo redesign slimmed the logo down from eight colors to four, and gave us clean lines for a cleaner brand identity. The best logos really are simple, from McDonald’s Golden Arches to the Nike Swoosh, but they’re far from simple to design.
Brand: Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
When your brand assets are working together to create a powerful identity, your brand is always greater than the sum of its parts. Document the strategy that drove your name and logo choice, and build a brand guide to ensure that all stakeholders are aligned on how to communicate your brand. Include logo usage, color codes, typography, tone of voice, and imagery styles. Your brand style guide is the number one resource in the fight for consistency and a powerful, recognizable brand.
All that remains is to put your brand out there: From your website and packaging to emails, social media, and customer service templates, everything should all feel like extensions of the same brand. The more consistent and cohesive the experience, the more trustworthy and memorable you become.
From Cohesion to Conversion
A strong brand makes every business move easier. With readymade brand awareness and brand recognition, you get a better return on investment for your marketing initiatives. The cost of customer acquisition is lowered because your target audience has top-of-mind awareness of your business’s purpose and values, while customer lifetime value is optimized from trust and loyalty. Just a 7% increase in loyalty has been linked to an 85% increase in CLV: reinforcing your brand’s personality through your name and logo can have a huge impact on the bottom line.
A cohesive brand identity, built on an emotionally resonant name and a memorable logo, works overtime to reinforce your most important characteristics with your audience. Your audience will know exactly who you are, and be converted from target customers to loyal fans.
