Choosing a cool and catchy business name or company name is important, we all agree but why it is so significant to have an awesome company name? Regardless of what your company does, what it sells or what kind of services it provides, there are three main reasons to have a good company name from marketing point of view.
- To have a good first impression on customers
- To have a good impression on investors
- To make your company web friendly
Many naming experts suggest that the company name should be a real word or combination of words rather than a fabricated word because the name should represent the business itself. Having a pleasant company name means the customers and even potential customers will get a pleasant feeling. If your business is going to operate on the local level but you have plans to make it global in the future then make sure the name you select does not have a different meaning in another major language.
Investor might not get excited or impressed with a catchy name that your customers love so in that case you can register your company under the legal name and operate under a different name. The point is to treat customers as a different entity than investors while naming your company. Before you finalize a catchy company name, confirm the domain name is available too. Whether you are going to have company website at that moment or not, obtain the relevant domain name anyway because you might not get it in the future.
Even if the dot com domain is not available you can go with a different or regional domain name like dot us or dot net. Many professional firms offer such services. They not only propose catchy company names but also confirm the availability of domain name. Entrepreneurs and new business owners try to find unique company names to stand out from the crowd and sometimes they end up with weird names. Following are some popular brands with unusual names.
Skype may not sound weird but actually it got its name coincidently. They named it Sky Peer to Peer but that wasn’t a good name so they decided to change it to Skyper but that wasn’t available so they end up with Skype. That’s how the world’s most popular and widely used IM and call service got its name. Etsy is a well known business platform and it got its name just because the founder wanted a meaningless name.
He watched numerous Italian movies and the word “Etsy” means “Yes” in Italian. How this meaningless word became a popular brand is a whole different story. Twitter has billions of global users and the majority of them don’t know Twitter was earlier known as Status. They changed that name to Twitch but that wasn’t catchy so they named it Twitter. Zynga is a social video game website and its founder had a dog name Zinga. He wanted to name his company Zinga on his dog name but the domain name wasn’t available. So he settled for Zynga.
Pandora Internet Radio is the most popular video streaming service in the world with more than 100 million users. Interestingly, it is only available in USA, Australia and New Zealand as it still has more users than other streaming services like Spotify and iHeartRadio. They named their company after Greek Goddess Pandora who is actually considered Goddess of Music. The company uses Pandora Internet Radio as their official name and Pandora.com as their domain name.
Speaking on music streaming services, Spotify is the second more popular music service which is available in more than 50 countries and has millions of users. Before the launch of their company, co-founders were brainstorming name ideas and one of them misheard a name as Spotify and they ended up with this name. Like Etsy, the founder of Meebo also wanted a catchy yet meaningless name and after some effort they come up with Meebo.
In case you haven’t heard about Meebo, it was an IM service which Google bought for $100 million and shut it down. They used its technologies to design and develop Hangouts. GHD is a well known name that every stylist in the world knows about. GHD manufactures hair products and its name GHD means Good Hair Day. By selecting a catchy and interesting name, they actually did a huge favor to everyone in the world who uses hair products.
WD-40 is a pretty useful product that is used to move rusty parts of any type of machines. However, people have discovered its numerous other uses like removing stickers from laptop etc. WD-40 is kind of mysterious yet catchy name. WD means Water Displacement that this product does and the number 40 refers to the 40th attempt of developing that formula. Yes, the previous 39 attempts failed.
Pepsi was known as Brad’s Drink in its early days and of course that name was simple and self-explanatory those days. However, the founder wanted to globalize his product and company so he changed company name to Pepsi which is based on Pepsin. Pepsin is the main ingredient of this drink. Similarly, 7Up was earlier known as Bib Label Lithiated Lemon Lime Soda. No need to mention that was a silly name that could have destroyed the company.
They changed the name to 7Up based on 7 ingredients used in this drink and the bubbles which always go up. Yandex which sounds like Index, is a well known Russian search engine and the founder named it Yandex as an inside joke. The word “ya” is pronounced like “I” in English language. Sometimes Yandex is also referred to “Yet another indexer”.
GoDaddy got its name because the previous name they selected wasn’t available as domain name. GoDaddy is a well known hosting service and now it has become a billion dollar company. Founders wanted BigDaddy as their company name but that was already taken. Earlier GoDaddy was known as Jomax Technologies.