Naming Your Business: 5 Tips for Brainstorming Business Name Ideas

Naming your business well allows you to provide customers with a first impression that distinctively suits your company image. A great business name is compelling, unique and memorable to your customers.

If only brainstorming business name ideas and naming your business wasn't such a daunting task.

If you're trying to name your business, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You may be completely blocked and unable to come up with a single business name idea. Alternatively, you may have a few ideas in mind, but when you look at them critically, you decide they are uninspired and ordinary, they don't suit your company's image, or they are already taken by a competitor.

I've been down that long road. It actually took me three months to name my business. In the process, I found some great resources and strategies for naming your business.

Make Your Thesaurus Your Best Friend



Start with some keywords that are related to your business, and, using a thesaurus, look up similar words. Make a list of these words.

When you are thinking of keywords for brainstorming business names, think about features or descriptions of your product or service, benefits your customers get from your company, characteristics of your target customers and the image you want to portray for your business. What words come to mind? Look them up in your thesaurus and add the results to your list.

Avoid making make too many judgments about the words. At this stage, the more words you have, the better.

Get a good variety of words and different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). Once you have brainstormed a lot of words, you can try combining words to create your business name. You will have more possible combinations that make sense if you have words from different parts of speech.

If you need more words for your list, take the words that you liked from your thesaurus brainstorming session and look those words up in your thesaurus. Again, make note of any words that you like from this process.

Combine the words from your lists to see if anything works as a possible business name.

Try Specialized Language


Plenty of areas of interest use specialized language to describe specific terms, and a lot of them use intriguing, unique and meaningful words that could help you come up with ideas for good business names.

For example, if you enjoy music or dance or science, you might search for business name inspiration in the specialized language of those subjects. Similarly, you might find inspiration for naming your business in the specialized language used in your own industry.

Mythological Figures


Searching through lists of mythological figures could help you in the task of naming your business. That's how Nike was named. Most mythological figures are known for something specific, so try choosing a particular characteristic that embodies the image you want to portray for your business and search for a mythological figure that represents that characteristic.

Idiomatic Phrases


Idiomatic phrases are figures of speech like 'a babe in arms,' or 'take the plunge'. Try searching online for lists of idioms. You may find something that is a clever fit with your company's products, services or your desired company image. Try to avoid idioms that are too common or clich� when naming your business. Remember, a good business name is uniquely your own and memorable to your customers.

Language Translators


After all of your brainstorming, you might come up with a few words that are potential business names, but for some reason, they are not exactly right for your business. To get variations on those words, try using a free online language translator to translate the words you like. Enter the words into the translator, and see how they are expressed in different languages.

Once you have used several sources for language inspiration, take a look at all of your lists and see if you can combine words from different sources. For example, a word from your thesaurus brainstorming sessions and the name of a mythological figure combined together could be the ideal name for your business.

At this point you should have a list of several possible business name ideas. Within that list, will be your ideal business name.

The time you spend on naming your business will be time well spent. Your ideal business name will help you to communicate to and be remembered by your customers and that can only be good for business.

by:Lisa McGrimmon