A couple of my close friends gave birth recently, which meant that a whole host of names have been sought out in books and online, spoken aloud in various tones ranging from thoughtful to disdainful and, ultimately, mostly discarded.
One of my friends had her heart set on Caleb, until she discovered that it is commonly believed to mean “dog”, while my other friend must have been very grateful to have had a boy instead of a girl, and thus avoided the certain argument with her football-mad husband over whether or not to name their firstborn, Chelsea.
Similar time and concern is often awarded to the choice of a company name.
Do you favour something simple and memorable that tells the customer absolutely nothing about what the company does, but could conceivably become a brand name applicable to a wide range of services, such as Google, Orange, or Virgin?
Do you choose a name that incorporates a reference to your product or services, such as Hotel Chocolat, or that aims to convey something about the company’s ethos, such as Innocent?
Do you name your company after your founders, such as Marks & Spencer? Or do you randomly pick a name out of a dictionary, without even thinking about it?
At various stages I have considered changing my company name - but eventually decided against it. I don’t want want to harm the brand reputation that I’ve successfully built up over the previous years with All Words; but, more than this, I feel that the name sums up what I do really rather well.
Words. I love them. I write them. I proofread and edit them. I speak them.
And, above all, we believe that they are the most important element of any form of business communication, from websites to brochures, newsletters to blogs, advertisements to press releases, business reports to company names.
Choose your name wisely, then. After all, you don’t want to be the company equivalent of the nine-year-old boy I once met, who had the misfortune of trying to make his way through life while bearing the hefty burden of the name Dwayne Pipe…