How to select a name for your brand, company, or alter ego

Transcript

Hi friends, welcome to this episode of The Pool Party. Today we are talking about choosing a name, and that is a name for your product, business, or service. If you're an artist and you're trying to come up with an artist's name, this is also extremely helpful. A lot of artists come up with alternative personas, or what do you call it, alter egos, in order to better embrace their art.

And there are a few things that I would suggest you consider when you pick your name, just for the sake of longevity, and then also fitting into this larger context of branding, which ultimately I've described as a way to easily communicate with your artists, any people you might work with, and then also communicating your mission and values to yourself.

Unifying and aligning all of these elements are what I've found help Good brands last and also good elements of brands. Of course you can always change them, but consistency is key and the longer you can be consistent, the better for you and your story. All right, so let's go ahead and dive into choosing a name.

I'm going to give you a quick outline of the components we will talk about today. We want to consider uniqueness, the length of the name. If there's a dot com or at handle available, and this is incredibly helpful in the age of promoting yourself online. Then we're going to discuss values and audience.

Towards the end, I'm also going to recommend some ways that you can brainstorm for your name. And then a bit of an exercise for seeing if your name sticks. So there will be a few questions for journaling at the end, but let's go ahead and dive into the first facet of choosing a name. And this section is going to be on considering uniqueness, conciseness, or length of the name.

And then we'll go ahead and get into checking online domains and handles to validate your name. So first of all, when choosing a name, you want to make sure that it's unique. And typically I would say that the most important aspect of branding is making sure that it's specific and concise and with your names you want to do the same.

But there are so many different registered brands out there these days, so many different artists that sometimes you see people using similar names and that ultimately can be not a great thing for you when you're trying to stand out. Or let's say someone is discussing, your brand and then it reminds them of something else or it's really hard to really trigger people that you're talking about your brand and not something else.

So with this, I would also recommend not choosing something that's a little bit too weird. I'm going to make. an example that I think can be easy. If you are a peanut butter brand, you probably wouldn't decide to name yourself Skippy or Jif, because there are already brands out there that are named Skippy and Jif.

They have brand legacy, they've been around for years, and on top of the fact that you might just legally not be able to take their name, it would do you a huge disservice to create a spin off brand of your own. And name it Skippy or Jif, because if someone were to Google those brands, your brand wouldn't come up.

You just don't have enough content online, and the two legacy brands with those names would dominate the internet. So you want to choose a name that is unique, but with this you also want to make sure that the name isn't too out there. So if you were to tell your name to someone, would they be able to spell it easily.

Is this like a name that is seen somewhere else? So we want to keep these names short still, and I would say aim for

So we want to keep our names short. We don't want to make them more than 10 letters long. You can even have compound names, and that helps a lot. These days, because you can't always pick a three letter name, and a lot of people love that because short names are easy to Google.

They're easy to search up. But that's just something to consider before we start to brainstorm. So that goes with being short and concise, and Again, you can choose names that are multiple words long. Sometimes you might even take your nickname and tack another word on there. So if I'm thinking of artists one artist that comes to mind is Megan Thee Stallion.

So that is a unique name, but it's quite long. This might be a little bit different for musicians. I think musician stage names sometimes have multiple Letters, words, they can be longer, but for example, if you are a startup or a brand that is creating new products, you might want to consider just really keeping it short and rememberable.

And also make sure that you're not overlapping too much with other people in the same space as you. I see this a lot with tech startups where people try, they come up with names that already exist or they heard it somewhere already and that's also not great because it does the same thing that I mentioned before where, it might sound cool but if it already exists, that other brand already has content out there, they already have legacy on the name and I would say that's not going to be great for you or them and it's going to introduce unnecessary competition.

All right. So now that we've got into the space of talking about other people and the uniqueness and competitiveness of a name, we want to see if maybe there's a dot com available for your name. So this is another way to consider whether your brand name, your business name, your artist name is going to be a great choice.

You can just type in your name. We will use the same example again, MeganTheStallion. com. And I'm going to assume that MeganTheStallion. com is already taken. So you would not want to name yourself that. So you want to make sure that you can at least get like a com, a co, a org. And these types of URL and, domain ends are going to be Ranked higher in SEO, I would say stay away from like dot xyz's or things that are different and unique as dots because there's a lot of different like dot domains these days and sometimes like the the downside to choosing these domain urls is that your email, if you were to create an email from this website, would get straight sent to spam.

And then the other thing too is it, I don't know, being a little bit too out there and unique with your domain isn't going to be exactly helpful. It introduces more uncertainty and I would just say stick with the dot coms, the dot orgs, especially if you're an organization or a company. And if you're an artist, yeah, stick to a.

com. It's simple. You don't need to be a company to have a. com, but it, it'll definitely make sure that you don't get sent to spam if you ever create an email with a com domain. Okay. Alright, so on top of this, we also want to see if the handle or the username is available on websites like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok.

You might not be using these websites to promote right away, but if you ever wanted to, let's say, get on these platforms, we want to make sure that your name isn't like another popular name on one of these sites. For example, if you're creating a TikTok, you would not want to call yourself MrBeast.

MrBeast already has the real estate on that name, and so it would be not great for you to choose that as a name. Again, that goes along with that topic of uniqueness, but I think you get where I'm going at here. Now, we want to make sure that in this overlap of being online and of being able to talk about your brand.

Not only is it. Easy to describe who you are and if it ever came up in conversation people would know that you're talking about Your company your brand and not someone else's and then if you were to google your brand online your brand would come up with these keywords instead of someone else's who's already been creating in this space for a really long time All right so let's go back to the topic of values and You I want you to think about now if your name reflects your values.

Ideally, when you choose a name for your product, service, or artist persona, it should give you some idea of what you're trying to represent with what you do. Megan the Stallion, for example, I think is a great name because it suggests some sort of power, some strength, some majestic quality to it. Megan, the stallion, I remember her talking about how she chose her name on a blog, and she also mentioned it's because she's tall, she's a bit taller, and stallions are very tall, and they have a presence to them.

So I think that works for her stage presence. The same thing goes for you. When you think about your name think about your values, what you represent, and If there are any qualities you refer to or, any values of that nature that you think about when you create your work. For me, my artist name is Jules Pools.

And one of the reasons why I chose that name is because, to me, thoughts pool and I think that when you think of the liminal space of thought and meditation it's nice to reflect next to a pool, and Jules Pools also rhymes quite nicely, so that's why I chose that as my artist name. So those are some examples, and ultimately you want that name to reflect back to some sort of value, if anything, to remind you of why you do what you do.

And then later on you can tell that. Brand story to your audience and then it'll just tie into your brand story and your values that much further So now third question Does it connect with your audience So this name we want to make sure that it sticks with your audience This is something we could have probably figured out sooner rather than later if discussing your brands seems to make sense to people.

You can tell usually if you're discussing your company, your brand, your artist name with folks, and if it sticks, and that is usually a good sign. I wouldn't say choose your name solely on the reaction of other people trying to get a certain reaction, but if it connects to others and you consider these people to be like your sole art community, or people you want to work with, and that's a good sign.

Alright, so that is the first section of considering your name. We want to make sure that it's unique, short, and concise. If we can use it for dot com or a handle on social media. And then choosing your name should imbue some value. Brand values. And if you want to know more about how to choose brand values, you can listen to the podcast on how to select brand values.

And ultimately, if all of these things are aligned, it should really connect back with your audience. But that's always a great question to ask in the end, does your name connect with your audience? Next up, we want to talk about ways to brainstorm your name. So names, . We're going to talk about naming in the context of English and whatever name that you want to have, you could have it in a different language as well.

But just with linguistics, we can do a brain dump and create a word cloud of names by writing them down. And that's the other thing too, I would suggest choosing a name that you could actually pronounce and write out, In letters that you can type out. I've seen some artist names out there that are actually symbolic and are made with symbols and emojis.

And while that is creative, I think it makes this work really hard to search. And maybe that is the intention. Maybe some of these names I've seen that are created with emojis are actually, even more alternative personas of artists. But if you're trying to Be recognizable and searchable. I would suggest using plain letters and a keyboard to write your name So with that let's go ahead and do our brain dump take a piece of paper and just write out different words that Symbolize or relate to whatever your brand is I'm going to go ahead and use the example of that peanut butter again because it's pretty tangible But peanut butter Some words that come up, yummy, sticky, gooey, smooth, soft, crunchy, and these are delving into different types of peanut butter now, so maybe we get even more specific.

If you're an artist, let's say that you are a guitarist, maybe strings, we can get down to the materials a guitarist made out of wood, and then if you think of wood, what kind of wood maybe it's I don't know what kind of wood that guitars are made out of, but let's say, for example, it's echinacea or eucalyptus.

And I think these can be things that connect back to you, but don't think about that for now, with your brain dubbed. Just get all the words on a piece of paper. And then the next thing I want you to do is take a art walk. So go ahead and take a walk and look at the words that you've written down. And see if any of them connect to you if you want to combine any of the words together.

And the reason why I recommend walking while you do this is because it puts you in your body and you might even say the words out loud just so that you can get a sense for how they roll off your tongue if you like that. And you can start writing down different combinations of these words together and from there you have a sense of different combinations for names you want to choose.

From this brain dump to then taking a walk, I would probably select five to ten combinations or names. And from there, you can run these names up against the tests that we discussed earlier, being unique, short, and concise. And if the name is available through a domain address or if the handle is available.

Then next what you want to do is Sit on it. Just sit on it for a week. See if any one of them stands out to you, but give yourself time and space to digest and see if it sticks with you in the long run. And I would suggest giving it time, because if you decide to change the name, everything that you've created for your branding materials, you're going to have to change it.

It creates way more work in the end, and again, that just wasted time, I think, and then wasted creative effort that you could spend on actually creating your work. This is just a name, right? This is just a branding package. It's not the work itself, it's just one of those things that makes you feel confident.

So another thing you could do is ask a trusted second party what they think of the name, and usually I would suggest asking someone who actually works in the space that you do. You wouldn't ask a pianist, for example, what to name your peanut butter company. It just doesn't really make sense, and they'll probably tell you what they like based upon other values rather than what they could see being successful in the space.

Ask a trusted second party, but don't involve everyone. One thing I see people do sometimes when they're trying to come up with a name is they ask every single person they come across what they think about the name. And ultimately what I think happens is this leads to some sort of Analysis, paralysis, indecision.

You involve everyone. There's too many cooks in the kitchen and what it shows to me is that you're not confident about your choice. Again, you need to make the decision yourself and that decision needs to come from a place of confidence that reflects back to values that you chose and predetermined yourself and if you forego that choice, the likelihood of you changing your name is quite high.

Again, thereby defeating the whole point of a brand. So we don't need to get into why you shouldn't do that, but try to keep the process close to your chest. Ask someone you trust, but ultimately make the decision yourself. All right, now we're getting towards the end of our podcast. There are two more questions I want you to ask yourself as you choose a name and decide to nail it down.

This first question, how might your name be confusing? I know we went through this creative process of choosing a name and ways of brainstorming, but there are still a lot of ways that sometimes names can be confusing and you might want to ask your trusted second party if there are any ways this name might be confusing just to brainstorm.

And then secondly, you want to figure out if there are any ways to easily eliminate this confusion. Sometimes there are confusing elements that come up in naming that could be solved with visual elements. For example, my name is Jules Pools, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm a pool company, right? But, I do have visual elements on my Instagram, and also 10 years worth of a portfolio to show that I'm an artist.

And that is on my website. And I do a variety of things that actually do not involve pools at all. And so I find that this work in this body of work outweighs any confusion there might be with my artist name. And that is ultimately a decision I made early on that I would just create work. And when you, looked up my portfolio or my Instagram, you would understand what work I do just by my output.

So I think that's another thing to consider too. Don't let your name be the sole definer of what you do. Let the output of what you do also help bolster that name, okay? So these things flow into each other and I do believe that sometimes people forget this when they are on branding and I think that branding is something that You should be able to nail down relatively quickly through a branding process.

It needs to stick and resonate with you, but you should not be changing your branding every month, especially as a company or an artist. Maybe think about your branding in terms of changing it every, Two to three years. And if you've been around for a long time, don't change it. Change your body of work.

Find other ways to express yourself. But if you're constantly changing the name, I think the likelihood of consistency and recognizability, will go down in the eyes of other people and honestly that is important because ultimately you should cater to your audience and try to build a fan base. So we want to be less confusing to your fan base, to your customers.

And the best way to do that is just to make some decisions. All right. So this has been the episode of the pool party, how to choose your name. We talked about a few things today, including uniqueness, choosing a short and concise name, and ways to see if this name is available online. We again, talked about Seeing if your name reflects your values, if it connects with your audience, and then a few ways to brainstorm your name by taking a walk, doing a brain dump, and then selecting a few pairs of names in order to see if any of those stick.

Ultimately, I say give yourself time, but not too much time. Take about a week, see if it sits. Ask a trusted second party, but don't involve everyone. We don't want too many. Cooks in the kitchen, and then if there are ways that your name might be confusing, don't let that stop you. Just make work that defines who you are, and a name is just a name.

Ultimately, you get to decide what you do just by doing it. So make sure that you give yourself the opportunity to do it by nailing down your brand name and moving on, running with it, being confident. All right, this has been a special episode on branding and naming in the Pool Party. If you like this episode, there are two other episodes available on selecting brand values and branding 101, , effective facets of branding.

So go ahead and listen to those episodes and if you need more help with branding, you can look me up at juliaspero. me, that's J U L I A E S P E R O. Dot, that's a period, M E, JuliaEspero. me. Thank you, and I'll talk to you next week.