Make Your Brand Name Work For You
You have a business idea, now you just need a great brand name and solid positioning in the market. How do you go about naming your brand and deciding the best way to position it in your industry and with your target audience? For small business owners who have several new business ideas frequently, it can feel overwhelming to come up with something fresh, relatable, and true to your values.
VVITCH encourages our clients to be very intentional with their brand name. That is the first step! Choosing a name can be difficult, especially if it’s your first business and you’re not entirely sure of your target audience. It’s always a good idea to bring in marketing professionals who can help you come up with a name that aligns with your mission, helps explain your products and services, and emphasizes why your brand is different.
Sounds great in theory — now, how do you actually come up with a great brand name? Here is our full process with clients who hire us for our branding services.
Brand Naming
Brainstorming Session
We start with a brainstorming session. Our team of strategists, designers, and copywriters get together with you and we dive into your business goals. We discuss who you want to attract to your brand, and all of the naming options you’ve considered so far.
Competitor Analysis
We look at the branding from your competitors — or that of other brands offering similar services to a similar audience — by researching their website, products and services, and more. We examine what is and isn’t working for their branding and what their brand name conveys.
Document Overall Creation Direction
We create a document that outlines your overall creative direction, including highlights of what we discussed during your brainstorming session. This includes a high-level perspective on your brand personality.
Descriptive Name Options
We develop a set of brand name options that are descriptive of your services and products. These brand names are more direct and rely less on a compelling brand story, an effort to help audiences understand your offer. Our client Carbon Signal, a firm of building scientists working in the software industry, went through two rounds of brand naming with VVITCH.
With a technical and infrastructure aspect to their services, we offered descriptive names that incorporated elements from their industry — i.e. “carbon”, “solutions”, and “keystone”. These words have significance in Carbon Signal’s industry. For instance, ‘keystone’ is a wedge-shaped piece of masonry at the center of an arch that keeps all the other pieces in place.
Suggestive Name Options
These are brand names that rely heavily on a strong brand story to help support the name as well as help connect the brand to your audience. When executed effectively, a suggestive brand name can stand out among competitors who rely on descriptive brand names to communicate with their audience. A great suggestive brand name can work with your brand story and messaging to create a unique relationship with your potential customers.
For Carbon Signal, we offered suggestive names that were referential to aspects from their industry — i.e. “oak”, “no trace”, and “uncharted”. For instance, an oak tree is the most efficient for absorbing carbon and bettering the environment, air quality, and repairing what already exists.
Iterations and Alternatives
Once we narrow down the best brand name options, we create iterations for your brand — making slight alternatives to see which best connects for you. For Carbon Signal, it was this final name that was one of those iterative name options that ultimately resonated best with their goals.
Final Competitive Analysis
Before we finalize a brand name with you, we always do a check to make sure the name is available and hasn’t been claimed by any other business. We also ensure there aren’t names that are too similar in your industry, which would cause confusion with potential customers.
SEO Considerations
Finally, we take a look at keywords related to your new brand name and business offerings. We particularly want to emphasize these keywords in your positioning statement and messaging pillars. To do this, VVITCH uses a tool called SpyFu to conduct research into keywords, their popularity, and the overall competition to rank for each.
Positioning and Ethos
After the process for naming your brand is complete, we move on to develop your brand’s positioning statement. A positioning statement helps to tell your brand story and can be used in full on your website, or other marketing. It often includes shorter phrases, often referred to as unique selling propositions or value propositions — these help communicate your brand values and your unique perspective and offerings.
For example, our client Intentional Design Company came to us for brand naming and positioning. As an interior design business, we knew how important it was to touch on the personal experience a client has when hiring an interior designer or team. This is why we emphasized the significance of ‘telling your own story’ as a client of Intentional Design Company throughout their positioning statement:
“Your space should tell your story — where you’ve lived, traveled, what you value, your heritage and your passions.
We’re designing for authenticity. We all have special pieces that help tell our stories…It’s an honor to help creatively direct these important places.”
Intentional Design Company’s positioning statement effortlessly connected with their messaging pillars, team-centered and heirloom-minded.
Messaging Pillars
Messaging pillars are the consistent points you make when communicating to your audience to ensure you stay true to your overall brand positioning and ethos. These pillars should be central to all of your promotions and communications.
When your brand follows this approach your potential customers are able to quickly connect with your brand story. With Carbon Signal, we helped them decide on the following messaging pillars: trustworthy, ever-evolving, and charting paths forward.
Carbon Signal is able to come in and guide their clients to the right steps that ensure cities decarbonize — this makes their brand trustworthy.
With a brand mission to decarbonize the future of built environments everywhere, Carbon Signal is always evaluating what works, needs reiteration, and requires different thinking — this makes their brand ever-evolving.
Lastly, Carbon Signal recognizes that what we’ve been doing as a society won’t work long term and they’re up for the challenge to take on current infrastructures — this is how their brand is charting paths forward.
Time for the Brand Visuals & Setting the Tone
With brand naming and positioning complete, VVITCH can provide your business with more effective logo designs. By having all of these branding elements well established before the visual branding and logo design process begins means that you have full support of your overall brand story and product or services messaging.
Other marketing factors that fall into place with your brand naming and positioning statement are tone and voice. At this stage of naming your brand and defining your positioning, ethos, and messaging pillars, it’s also the perfect time to consider the overall tone and voice of your business.
We help our clients document how their tone shifts in different scenarios, expand on their key messaging pillars, and key terminology for your business — and even document terms not to use, such as ableist or racist originating terminology.
Overall, these elements combined together make it much easier for your brand to develop a great content strategy. This ensures that your brand stands out from its competitors, feels consistent and trustworthy to your target audience, and always works in service of your business goals.
Ready to Name and Position Your Brand?
Learn more about our branding services or check out our portfolio for recent branding projects
Meet the Authors:
Kate Schaefer - VVITCH Digital Brand and Marketing Strategist
Kate has worked in digital marketing and publishing for seven years. In 2013, she identified a hole in the wedding market and started H&H Weddings, a wedding resource specifically for the LGBTQ+ community.
Kate believes every business should thrive and is dedicated to helping marginalized folx even the financial playing field because capitalism is a bitch.
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, education, and publishing since graduating with an architecture degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. While working as a user experience (UX) designer and product manager in the corporate world, Jen traveled the world conducting user research and interviewing customers to ensure their company’s products and services were well designed, accessible, and a delight to use.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
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