How to generate brand name ideas
Building a brand is more important than ever if you want to stand out from the crowd.
Even more so for online businesses. Gone are the days to use a keyword, niche specific name like gardeners-weekly-for-retired-men.com.
To build an online business, means building a brand. Something that can be remembered and associated with more than just a website — a community, speciality, authority.
Your brand name is everything. It needs to resonate with your ideals, ethics and niche. It has to look slick, professional and clean. It is what will make your business succeed.
Examples of great brand names
Let’s take a look at some of the most successful and largest businesses on the planet. You’ll find that a lot of these companies have names that are just made up words, names that at first glance would mean nothing, but given their brand strength, have so much influence and weight on your everyday lives.
This is an online article, so let start with the most obvious. What in the world does this word mean? Well, nothing.
In fact, the way Google actually got their name was derived from a misspelling of the original planned name, googol which is a mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeroes.
So the name came from something, but in the end, the actual name is a made up word. It’s a brand name.
Brand name comes from a misspelling
Microsoft
Next, we can look one of the largest companies in the world, the founder having been the richest man on earth for several decades.
This brand name was created out of a description of what they were originally selling, microcomputer software.
The word Microsoft comes from Micro-Soft. So this brand name comes from joining two description words together.
Brand name comes from products being sold
Toyota
Moving away from computers and internet products, let’t take a look at a very old, very familiar brand.
Where did the brand name Toyota come from? It actually stems from the founders name, Sakichi Toyoda.
The founders son later rebranded the company as Toyota when they shifted to the automative business.
So here, there is a play on someones actual name, changing it slightly. You see this kind of tactic with domain names where a real word is spelt as it sounds, but using incorrect spelling.
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Brand name comes from play on a real name.
Coca Cola
Everyone knows this brand name. It’s a much loved brand and has been strong for over 100 years.
You only have to say it’s name and people immediately want the product. It has built a perfect brand name to sell its product.
So where did it come from? The drink was originally made from cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine-rich extracts of the kola nut.
So as you might have guessed, the words Coca Cola are derived from its ingredients, cocaine and kola, but put together and spelt differently, but as they sound.
Brand name comes from the products ingredients.
Apple
One of the most iconic brand names in history, this name is simple, powerful and incredibly successful.
It’s not just the main brand name itself, the release of “i” products. You can even see this idea getting used in unrelated products from other companies.
So where did this name come from?
Apparently, Steve Jobs came up with the name simply because he liked apples. Jobs chose the name because “it sounded fun, spirited and not intimidating, plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book”.
As you can see, this name has simply been plucked out the air, just because of how it sounds. It has no reflection on the product, service or anything. Yet, because of its brand strength, you immediately associate it with computers.
But notice how this is a real word, spelt correctly. The word has been given another meaning.
Brand name has been plucked out the air.
Coming up with your own brand name
As you can see, brand names always have a meaning somewhere. There is usually no brand name that has been chosen for no particular reason at all.
That said, you can use a domain name generator tool to give you some ideas. See below a list of brand names that have been generated from domaingenerator.app tool which might provide you with a starting point.
Given most of these poplar brand names have been created from real words, we can start by using the “Feeling Lucky” tool on domaingenerator.app to start combining words.
1 Noun and 1 Verb
Here are some generated combinations using a noun and a verb.
