Business name ideas: 5 steps to brainstorming a name for your business

How to name a business

For most of us, our business isn’t real until it has a name. Or maybe you have a name, but need to validate it. I’ve worked with a lot of consulting businesses on custom branding projects where they’ve loved their business name but just want to do one more round of checks to be sure they’ve made the right decision. The process outlined in this article can help to either confirm a choice, or replace it with something that might work better for your target market.

It’s true that more time spent brainstorming and examining customer profiles does produce more ideas, so if you’re having trouble getting a list of names that you’re happy with then you may need more help, but this method is a terrific way to get started, fast.

These tips will help you frame the process and narrow down your choices to get you closer to that final decision.

Step 1: Know your business and what you want your brand to represent

Naming a business can be fun, but it can also be surprisingly stressful. Maybe you already have a name in mind but you need to validate it—I’ve worked with a lot of consulting businesses on branding projects where they’ve loved their business name but just want to do one more round of checks to be sure they’ve made the right decision. The process outlined in this article can help you to come up with an original name, confirm a choice, or replace it with something that might work better for your target market.

Before you start dumping ideas on a page, it’s worth doing some groundwork. As for every aspect of your business, from the tools you use to the way you structure your website, taking a bit of time upfront to lay good foundations for your branding will make an easier job of the process as you move forward.

You will likely have answered a lot of these questions as part of your strategic thinking around setting up your business. If so, great! Get those answers to hand so they’re front of mind as you embark on this naming exercise.

• What industry are you in?
• What problem do you solve?
• What’s your nifty solution?
• Who are your main competitors? What is effective in their branding?
• What’s your unique value proposition (UVP)? What makes you awesome?
• Who do you help? Try to identify your audience in as much demographic detail as you can to help narrow in on who you are naming the business for.
• What are the key personality traits you want to be known for? Here’s a list of brand personality traits to draw from if you need some inspiration.

Big list of brand personality traits

When you are starting to think about the branding or rebranding of your business, it’s important to start with the fundamentals of who you are. Narrow down the core identity of your business through the lens of some key personality traits that may define your ethical values, the way you want to work with clients or how you want to be perceived in the market. Doing this will give you an edge over your competition as your brand will be more fully fleshed out, tangible, relatable and connectable. Nailing your brand’s personality is key to a clever start to your business and building a brand that your potential clients can truly engage with.

Why does the personality of brands matter?

You don’t want to be a boring brand with no personality, so thinking about the traits that define you is an important step to consolidating your brand — be it through your brand name, logo or your website. Brand personality traits are key to how you present yourself to the world.

The big list of brand personality traits

Here’s a big list of brand personality traits for you to draw on as a starting point if you need some help identifying how you want to be seen and known. Once you get going, you’ll be able to think of far more words than these to help describe your brand personality.

Aa adaptable adventurous approachable authoritative Bb bold boutique brave bright Cc calm capable clever comfortable confident connected conservative contemporary control Dd delightful diligent direct discreet disruptor dynamic Ee efficient elegant elite energetic entertaining ethical exciting Ff fair faith fierce free frank friendly

Gg generous gentle good guided Ii Iconic idealistic imaginative independent individual informative innovative inspirational intelligent Jj just joyful Kk kind knowledgeable L Lasting Learned local loyal luxury Mm mature misfit modern moral Nn nice nostalgic Oo open optimistic organic organised original outrageous

Pp personal pioneering positive pure professional Qq quirky Rr rational rebellious relaxed reliable resolute Ss serious simple sincere sophisticated strong successful supported sweet Tt thoughtful tough traditional Trustworthy Uu unusual Vv Virtuous visionary Ww wanderlust warm Well wild wise wonderful worldly Yy youthful

Step 2: Brainstorm your business name ideas

You’ve spent some time thinking about what your business is all about, and you know the message you want to send. The process of finding the right name can be tough, so we put together this list of tips that should help make things easier for you to come up with a good list of options.

There are loads of tricks out there for effective brainstorming, but these are the ones that consistently work for us when we help new or evolving businesses decide on a business name. Sometimes coming up with an original idea or using word mashups can lead to unique results. It might also be helpful if you take into account how personal your brand will feel (if at all).

To get started with brainstorming, you don’t need any fancy tools. A good ole pen and paper will do the job, but feel free to use Notion, Trello, Evernote, or your go-to note-taking tool if that’s how you work best.

Brain dump

Start by writing down as many words related to your business as you can think of. Get friends and family to do the same. You can structure this by creating word lists based on your answers to the business questions. I tend to group lists by industry, audience(s), personality traits and unique value proposition to get a bunch of lists or ‘buckets’ that you can start then dumping words into.

Wordplay

Once you have a bunch of different lists, you can start playing some word games to expand on the lists and generate some interesting cross-list combos. Start by trying to make up new words, like made-up brand names Google and Ikea. Play around with alliteration to see if you can come up with some clever combos that roll nicely off the tongue, like PayPal or Get Grants. Try focusing on purpose combined with personality or audience to come up with names that clearly define what you do. Startups like TidyMe and Airtasker have done this to great effect.

Define your parameters

Now that you’ve got a bunch of ideas down, it’s time to reign them in a bit and start thinking even harder about personality and purpose. The key things you want to be thinking about here are what you do and who you do it for. After all, your business name isn’t really for you. It’s for your clients. Of course you want to like it, but at the end of the day, you’re not buying from your business, someone else is. Depending on your audience and industry, your business name might be more effective if it’s a quirky made-up word, or it might resonate better for being traditional and trustworthy in a professional service setting (although most of our clients are trying to break that ‘traditional’ stereotype!). Think about what you need your parameters to be and set some rules of your own around what the name needs to represent.

Second brain dump

Now that you’ve created some extra rules to follow start on a second brain dump with these new parameters in mind. You should by now be thinking in a different way from your first attempt and will likely be able to come up with a host of new and different ideas.

Create word ‘buckets’ and fill ‘em up

Create categories or ‘buckets’ for words related to your business. I like to create buckets in the following categories:

• Industry/product words: what does your business do? Words that fit into this bucket could include ‘airline’, ‘donuts’, ‘makeup’, ‘websites’.

• Audience: get into the demographics of your target market. What is the main age group of your target market? What gender are they? Where do they live? What do they do in their spare time? Think of as many words as you can that help define the commonalities among your audience group. Even if your audience is wider — and you ideally want to avoid wide where possible as it’s easier to market to and service a specific niche — you can use these terms in the future to market to your individual audiences separately, so it won’t be a wasted exercise to name everything you can here, but maybe create sub-lists to separate your audiences out if you need to.

• Personality traits: what’s your brand personality? Words in this bucket should represent the way you want your brand to be perceived and the way people to feel when they interact with your brand. Word like ‘helpful’, ‘reliable’, ‘healthy’, ‘excited’ work here. Refer to our big list of brand personality traits for more word ideas to fit this category.
• Unique value proposition (UVP): what makes you better than your competitors? Add all of those words here. Think words like ‘faster’, ‘stronger’, ‘best quality’, ‘lowest price’, and ‘first-ever’ to reinforce your UVP.

Once you’ve created your buckets, fill ‘em up with as many words as you can think of. Once you have some nice, full buckets, you can start playing some word games.

Invent new words

Make some words up! Think Google, Xerox, Kodak. Can you come up with some fun ways to create new and quirky names from your word buckets? The name could come from your UVP bucket, like Fiverr. If it’s easy to say, easy to spell and doesn’t accidentally mean something nasty in another language, then you could have found yourself some fun and catchy names that will fit your demographic. These sorts of made up names can be especially effective when you are trying to present your business as new, cutting edge, or different from the norm. For my business, I needed to come up with a variation on the word ‘clever’ as it wasn’t available for use. So CLVR came to embody more than just the same word without the vowels, but also a metaphor for taking a shortcut, which links integrally to my UVP of helping consultants work faster, not harder.

Have some fun with Amusing Alliteration

Try using the same letter at the beginning of both words for a two-word brand name that combines some of your words from different lists. For example, you could combine an industry word with a unique selling proposition, like Dunkin’ Donuts. Or combine an industry word with an audience word like American Airlines. Or you could use alliteration for similar sounds, like ‘Site Kite’. Other well-known brand names that use alliteration include Coca-Cola, Krispy Kreme and BlackBerry.

Focus on your service and purpose

What problem are you solving for your clients? Keep that in mind and see what names you can come up with. This can be a great way to come up with a business name idea that instantly conveys what you do to potential leads. If a customer can read your business name and not need to know any more to understand what you’re on about then you’re halfway to building a memorable connection. Using the business name I came up with for a client as an example, I was trying to come up with a business name that explained the idea of website design for a fast launch: on a very long list of website and acceleration synonyms was the winning idea: Site Kite. Other startups that have good service-specific names include the cleaning company, TidyMe, Airtasker, Autopilot and Campaign Monitor.

Search for synonyms

Synonyms are your friend! When you can’t think of any more words, go into your search engine and start looking for synonyms to the words from your buckets. This task alone will exponentially add to your list of words and you’ll come up with new ideas to mix things up.

Keep it personal

If your business is all about you, then going for personal branding could be a good bet. Even if you don’t want to use personal branding in an obvious way, getting your name into the mix can help you come up with new ideas.

Personal branding, can of course, be used very effectively when used for solo or small operators in service-based industries, where there is a high level of personal interaction. You’ll often see personal names used effectively for therapists, coaches and financial planners, as well as for professional law firms — in fact, most law firms, from tiny practices to global firms use the names of their partners in the company name specifically because the professional reputation of the individual is so intrinsically tied to the success of the firm.

Make some mashups

So many well-known brand names are created from up mashups of other words — SquadHelp, Mirvac (their placeholder name mashup from Miracle Vacuums—that placeholder is nothing to do with their property development business, apparently the vacuum was in the meeting room during the founders’ brainstorm—but the name stuck!), Pantone (‘all’ + tone), PayPal.

Try combining some of your service-specific names with your personal names to see if there are any interesting combos. These could make sense or be totally made-up words that make no sense at all — some of the best brand names are made-up words that are mashups of other words.

Narrow in on what gives your business heart

The best example of using the heart side of the business for the business name that comes to mind for me is Koala. This Sydney startup makes mattresses and furniture, and they set out to disrupt the old-school mattress industry by offering a quality, affordable product with super-fast delivery that also has a socially-minded twist. They adopt a koala with every mattress sold. So for them, the name koala made perfect sense. But you can be totally random here. Have fun going off-piste and see what words you can come up with to describe what gives your business its heart.

Still stuck? Try a brand name generator

You can do some further exploration by exploring brand name generators online.

If you’re looking for a quick way to come up with some business names without having to rely too heavily on your brain, there are now a bunch of business name generators out there. Always marry these up with your defined brand parameters to be sure you’re on the right track. These tools use a variety of processes, including simple word blends and AI-powered tools. Here are some of our favourite free brand name generators:

• Namelix: what I love most about this brand name generator is how easy it is to use and how pleasantly refreshing the user interface is. It’s nicely designed, which helps to make it more user-friendly. Not only does this site generate business name ideas based on a range of different criteria — keywords, number of characters, word type (compound, rhyming, real, foreign etc), it also allows you to see what domains are available and gives loads of tips on what makes an effective business name.
• Another one is Novanym: UK-based, similar to Namelix in the way you can create names based on style. On providing the name, they also tell you the price to buy the .com and 3 logo concepts from them, so you can get a unique and professionally designed custom logo using this option, just remember to check for ASIC and .com.au availability (or other domain requirements) too.

Paid brand name generators and crowdsourced ideas could be an affordable solution to give you a broader range. Now these paid services can be helpful, but there’s a huge caveat here: what you get back is only as good as what you put in. You need to be solid on your unique selling proposition and your brand values to get names that suit you and aren’t too generic.

• Atom
• Frozen Lemons
• Brands are Boring
• Or, get 10 crafted brand names included with Studio Clvr branding services.

Step 4: Validate your shortlist

Check your favourite options are easy to say, easy to spell and translate clean

Once you’ve got a lot of ideas down, start highlighting your favourites. Then check your shortlist of brand names against the following make-or-break criteria to validate them. If these boxes don’t get a big tick then move on to the next name.

Your business name should be easy to say (and therefore hear)

Say it out loud — is it easy? Can it be understood when said fast? The last thing you want is to have to constantly spell out your business name for people to understand what you are saying. I used to sit near a growing startup in my co-working space in Sydney. They were on the phone a lot as they were calling customers for bookings all day long. For every call they were introducing themselves, then having to awkwardly spell the business name to get the customer to understand where they were calling from. I even often heard them confirming that, yes, they were calling from Australia and struggling to convince their local customers that they were in Sydney too. The business name was so hard to understand that customers were clearly struggling with trust and transparency. These were existing clients not cold leads, yet there was clearly zero customer recognition or recall for the brand name. That’s an uphill battle better avoided and was losing them customer loyalty! In short: keep it short.

Your business name should be easy to spell

Will a potential client need you to spell the name or will the spelling be obvious? Test the name with people who don’t know you to confirm that they can intuitively work out the spelling — this reinforces that the name is easily understood and will improve client recall.

No nasty acronyms or foreign translations

The name doesn’t translate into anything that could be misleading or — worse — offensive. Checking on other meanings for a brand name is so often overlooked, and I’ve fallen into this trap myself. Around a decade ago, I launched a sideline startup called Zift. The business connected startups with quality designers. What I didn’t realise until after we went live, was that if you type zift into Google, page one is full of results for Zygote Intrafallopian Transfer. Nothing to do with graphic design, nothing to do with my brand personality traits, nothing to do with anything that could remotely be related to the business!

Obviously this could be overcome by spending on search engine optimisation, but it was a huge barrier to word-of-mouth referrals and early search volume. The startup didn’t get off the ground for a number of reasons, but it was a great lesson on naming that has stayed with me! Always do an internet search for the business name and check for any acronyms or foreign translations that may make things hard for you. Starting a business is difficult enough without adding hurdles like these!

Your name shouldn’t be too similar to something else that already exists

While you won’t be able to use an already registered business name (more on that in the next section), the first check you want to make is that there isn’t something similar out there that might be hard to compete against for search engine keywords. Search Engine Optimization is evolving as AI gains dominance, but sites with existing high authority will always be hard to beat.

Here’s another example from my years working out of a startup incubator. I launched a side-business to help startups launch websites super fast. It was a tricky business for a lot of reasons (mostly because startups can’t move as fast as they’d like to because they struggle to know where they’re going), but I named it Site Kite, which was most unhelpful due to the existence of Google’s Site Kit — a website tool. Guess who won that battle in the search engine results? Yeah, not me. The Site Kite process has now been absorbed into Studio Clvr, so the work on the project is still in use and helping businesses today, even if it didn’t make it as a launch in it’s own right.

Step 5: Check for business name availability

By now you should have a decent shortlist of names. The next step is to check for their availability. This will narrow down that shortlist fast! Try not to get too attached to anything on your shortlist, because if they’re taken, they’re taken! You’re better off moving on. The 4 key availability checks to run are:

Is it available on ASIC?

Run your shortlist through the ASIC Business Name Availability search tool to see if what names are genuinely available for use.

Is the domain name available?

Now you know the business name is available on ASIC, double check you can get a decent domain. You don’t want to have a great name but be stuck with a .net. Having said that, you can get creative to make this work, just look at Flywheel’s getflywheel.com and Fathom Analytics’ usefathom.com. For more info on nabbing a good domain name, check out our Business name availability check: 6-step guide to registering your business.

Are social media profiles available?

If you want social to be part of your marketing strategy, then being found easily on those platforms (and by association on Google) for your main brand name is essential. If you need a name for your social account that is different from your brand name you risk losing brand awareness, diluting your brand and creating mistrust among potential clients — ‘is this different brand name really the company I’m looking for?’.

Is the name trademark safe?

You may also want do a quick search for any trademarks. You don’t want to go to all the effort of launching only to be sued for trademark infringement! Check out the IP Australia website for more info and do an Australian Trademark Search. Once you’re set up you might consider talking to an IP lawyer about registering your own trademark to protect your new brand.

For more details on the nitty-gritty of name availability and business name registration, check out our Business name availability check guide for more info.

How to name your business: summing up

Defining your business starts with coming up with a great company name. I hope these tips help you frame the process and narrow down your choices to get you closer to that final naming decision.

Your business will be more successful if people can easily pronounce the name and remember it. The five key steps to naming a business are knowing your business well enough to know who you serve as well as how your audience perceives themselves; brainstorming potential names (try many different options to build a good list); Creating a shortlist and culling it through validation; and checking whether your shortlisted ideas are available for you to nab. After deciding on a perfect moniker, get some strategic help to build your brand and your website so customers can get to know you, know you understand them, and become part of your world by buying your services.

Has this brainstorming and validation task helped you whittle down a name? Now it’s time to make that idea live on the web, and we can help! Our branding services and custom website design packages will not only turn your idea into business reality but will provide the technical framework for the very core of your business operations.

Deciding on your business name is a very personal choice, so it’s always good for the final decision to be made by you, the business owner. You have a great idea, now let it out into the world!