Do you have any tips for coming up with a brand name and/or slogan?

Name: What Should I Name My Brand?
Uploaded: 2020-06-25T22:57:37+00:00
Duration: 7 s
Channel: Royston G King
Description: In this brief interview, Speaker B advises that the first step in naming a brand is to verify domain availability, warning that many founders waste time…

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What Should I Name My Brand?

25 Jun 2020 · 0 min

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0:07

In this brief interview, Speaker B advises that the first step in naming a brand is to verify domain availability, warning that many founders waste time on perfect names only to discover the domain is taken or overpriced. He then explains that a brand’s strength comes from its underlying building blocks—values, beliefs, products, and solutions—rather than the literal meaning of the name, citing Google, Twitter, and Starbucks as examples of names that have become associated with their categories over time. Speaker A adds that brand names fall into categories such as fantastical (made‑up) versus descriptive, reinforcing that securing a domain remains the top priority. The conversation emphasizes practical, value‑driven brand development over reliance on the name itself.

Questions this video answers

First, ensure the domain is available; then build the brand around its core values, beliefs, products, and solutions, because the name itself does not create the brand. Different name types exist (fantastical vs descriptive), but securing the domain remains the top priority.

"Do you have any tips for coming up with a brand name and/or slogan?" Oh man.
Well, the first thing I would do if you're coming with a brand name is make sure the domain is available. I know that sounds really like tactical and like silly, but there's a lot of founders I've worked with who have spent hours and hours and hours coming up with the best name, and then they go to buy the domain and then it's not available. Or it's like a zillion dollars. So availability is one. And second of all, what I will say to that is you build a brand based on the building blocks of your brand. So, and what I mean by that is like Google is what it is today because we know it as Google, right? But what does the brand name Google actually say? Like it's literally the word Google. Like it doesn't say anything about the internet. It doesn't say anything about like like what Google is, right? Same thing for Twitter. So when you, when you sort of like, again, like peel back all the shininess to the brand, right? Twitter is just like, it was just like some made-up like random name for social media, right? It's a bird. Like it actually has nothing to do with social. Same thing for Starbucks. And these are all big giant brands that we've, that we've grown to associate within certain categories. So What I mean by that is it's not specifically the name, right? You make the name and then you build off of the name. Your values— goes back to that value system— your values, your beliefs as a company, your products or services, your solutions, all these things are what make the name. The name alone doesn't make the brand. Does that make sense? Is that helpful?
Yes. Yeah. And there's— I think so. And there's definitely different types of brand names as well, right? So a lot of them we talked about are like, I believe they're the fantastical type logos is what they're called or something like that, as opposed to like a descriptive brand name or something. Yeah, there's a lot to go through there, but having the domain is by far number one.