One of the most common conversations I have with founders is about brand names. What to call the company, how much meaning it should have, whether it needs to be clever, memorable, descriptive. I get it. I’ve been there myself, naming things is hard. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the name itself doesn’t matter nearly as much as people think.
Apple is a terrible name for a computer company. It tells you nothing about what they sell. Google was confusing at first (was it Goggle? Goo-guhl? Go-ogle?). Nike is still mispronounced depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Louis Vuitton is hard to spell, Hermès is hard to pronounce, and Mars doesn’t sound like chocolate. Yet all of these are some of the strongest brands in the world.
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Why? Because names start out meaningless (if you pick a common word it starts with an existing meaning which is even harder to define). The meaning of the brand is injected into the word over years of repetition, marketing spend, customer experience, and cultural reinforcement. That’s what branding is, literally burning an association into people’s minds.
From my experience (and it seems to be a standard in marketing), it takes about five years for a brand to start “sticking.” You can try to speed up the name recognition with more money, but you can’t seem to skip the time it takes for people to associate a name with your company’s purpose. Which means the real questions to ask when choosing a brand name are more pragmatic:
- Can people pronounce it?
- Can you get the dot-com (if that still matters to you)?
- Will you be buried under 10,000 search results if you pick a common word?
- How much time and money are you prepared to invest in making it mean something?
Everything else is noise. Don’t overthink the symbolism. Don’t try to make the name carry all the weight of your vision. History shows us that the best brands were not “good names” when they started. They became good because the companies behind them built meaning into them.
So if you’re stuck with brand name uncertainty, stop. Pick a name you can live with, one that doesn’t get in the way. Then spend your energy on building the brand itself. Because in the end, the logo, the name, the cleverness of the word… none of that will matter if you don’t burn the meaning into people’s minds.
The brand isn’t in the name. It’s in the work.
