Make Your Business Name Memorable

by Anne Wingate
(Utah)

A small-pet shop named Fish and Chirps caught my attention at once. As I long since gave up on aquariums and don't like to cage birds, I would not shop there, but I have remembered the name for thirty years.

If you want your name to be that memorable, you have to brainstorm. My brainstorming sessions are usually just my husband and I, or just my daughters and I.

Think about similar names. Think about mottoes or slogans or proverbs, biblical or otherwise. Think of phrases that can change their meaning with the insertion or deletion of a single letter. Most important, think about whether the name of your business could be mistaken for a different kind of business.

I blew it on that one. I named my small epublishing house Live Oak House. Very soon I started getting a large quantity of wood samples for which I had no use whatever. But I'm stuck with the name, because by the time I realized the mistake I had books posted and the name was all over the web. I should have said Live Oak Publishing House. Besides that, I didn't mean Live Oak, I meant Liveoak, which is the name of an evergreen tree found in the south. But spellcheck programs reject it and I decided not to argue about it.

A beauty shop named Paint and Polish seems to be doing well enough, but I'm less than delighted with their name. In fact, it took me six months to realize that it worked on human females rather than on automobiles.

Sometimes something simple is best. Remember Smith Brothers Cough Drops? My husband and I named our writing company Wingate & Wingate, Writers, which is about as simple and self-explanatory as you can get. At least we thought it was. But rarely does a week go by without someone calling to say "What do you do?" or ask us for calligraphy.

To sum up: Try to make it catchy. Try to make it memorable. Try to make it easy for people to figure out what you do. And then be prepared for the inevitable phone calls: "What do you do?"

(No, we have nothing at all to do with the apartment complex called Windgate Village. Please look in the phone book again.)