Getting creative at naming your excellent idea, or new business, or products, or services, is the heart of authentic marketing. While you need to be professional in your marketing, I believe it’s more important to let your passion and personality shine through, rather than try and impress people with all your knowledge, experience and credentials.
Thinking in a creative way or tapping into the huge store of information in your subconscious mind is skill that can be learnt, and this 5 step technique provides a process to help you use imagination to find solutions to problems like creating a unique and compelling name for your idea or business.
Step 1 – Gather all the information needed to think deeply about your business idea or name: Describe the solutions your idea or business provides in 30 words or less. List the benefits of your idea, business, services and products – what benefit do you want your customer to know about you? Are you the best, highest quality, most caring, most reliable, most unique? List the main benefit your competitors promote – how do you want to position your business in your customers minds compared to your competitors? And who are your ideal customers – describe a typical person who will want what you provide – and what main benefit will they receive?
Step 2 – Begin the task of digesting all this information about your business: Take the different elements of the information which you have gathered and identify the words that relate to key benefits that you need to keep uppermost in your mind, in order to think creatively about naming your idea or business. What you are seeking now is the relationship between all the facts above, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle. To maintain your focus, write your key benefit words on sticky notes on your computer screen or on your fridge, so that you can keep the need to resolve the name in front of you.
Step 3 – Conscious and subconscious processing task: Brainstorm as many names around a single customer benefit – as you can – there are no right or wrong answers now – just name ideas generation. Avoid the big words. Keep it simple. Just use plain English about the problems your customer is facing and how you can help them. Pick out the words that represent your business – can any of those words be grouped together in a way that is either a description of your business, or a fictional or made up name using these benefit words? Are any words suggestive of the benefit for your customer? Select your favorite words and again, write them down on sticky notes, to keep them in your mind.
What you have to do now, is to turn your creative thinking over to your subconscious mind and let it work while you do something else. When you reach this third stage in the production of a name for your idea or business, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Exercise, listen to music, watch TV or a movie, read something completely irrelevant to your task.
Step 4 – Allowing the name to come into your mind: Everything will click in the fourth step of what will seem like an “a-ha” moment. Out of nowhere the name will appear. It will come to you when you are least expecting it, while showering, or exercising, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may even wake you up in the middle of the night.
Step 5 – Putting your new business name to a reality test: It requires a patient working over to make most business names fit the exact conditions in which they must work. This is where many good name ideas are lost. Many are often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put name ideas to work in the current environment. It’s now important to submit your name idea to the criticism of friends and mentors. When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good name idea has self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it, to add to it. And possibilities which you have overlooked, will come to light.
The aim of naming your new idea or business should be to create strength in the minds of your customer. The words need to resonate in their minds and stand out from the rest. Once you have some strong name ideas – you can easily understand how searchable your words are by using Google’s Keyword tool.
Get your business name right and you get the branding as a bonus. When your potential customer senses you’re speaking to them authentically, odds are they’ll be more likely to want to do business with you. And its more fun to work with people you like!
Give it a shot. You might just be surprised at what happens! Leave me a comment if you are?
About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to research their customer market; create their authentic marketing message; attract more ideal customers; and create a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012/2013. She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coaches customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled “Create your Authentic Message” workshop on 6th June, 2012 or request distance coaching online –please contact me.
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