How to come up with a brand name your target audience will love

When someone tells their friends or family about your products, they use your brand name. When repeat customers talk to a sales representative or look for your products with an online search, they use your brand name. Your brand’s name is a powerful identifier and the driving force behind word-of-mouth marketing. It can make or break your business.

If you’re starting a new business or launching a new product, you probably want to know how customers will react to a potential brand name before you pick it. With brand name testing, you can gauge consumer sentiment and select the right name for your business or product.

What is a brand name? It’s the foundation of your brand identity. And what makes a brand name work isn’t that it’s fun to say or likeable - it needs to communicate something specific to your customers. 

A good brand name doesn’t come from a magic formula. It comes from these essential traits that ensure the name is easy for your business to use and your customers to remember. 

How do you come up with a brand name that works? By testing multiple potential options and choosing the one with the strongest results. 

Brand name testing presents your target audience with several brand name options and asks them to provide feedback on each. With brand name testing, you can compare metrics like appeal, ease of pronouncing, and relevance to identify the most effective brand name.

Let’s take a closer look at why testing potential brand names is important and review how to create a brand name by testing.

Your brand name is one of the stickier aspects of branding a business or product. While your ads, products, and product packaging might change over time, your name probably won’t. Get it right the first time by testing several potential brand names before you settle on one option.

By testing several options, you make it easier to choose the right brand name for 4 reasons:

Now that you know the importance of testing your brand names before settling on one, you’re ready to start working on your survey. Simply follow these 4 key steps for how to test a brand name:

Related: Why concept testing is important

Though you can test any brand name you’d like, you should pick stimuli that you’re somewhat confident in based on the reactions from people, like coworkers, who’ve already heard the options. Choose brand names in a similar stage of development. If you’re testing a name you’ve put a lot of thought into against a throw away, it isn’t a fair or useful contest.

To make the testing process easier for everyone involved, limit the number of stimuli in your survey. The total number to include in your test depends on whether you want to adopt a monadic survey design or a sequential monadic survey design.

A monadic survey design splits up your audience and presents each with a survey that asks for input on a single stimulus. After you’ve gotten enough feedback on each stimulus, you can pick a winning name by pooling the feedback from all your respondents.

Here’s an example of a brand name test with a monadic design.

Using this survey design, you can ask more questions on each stimulus. In addition, there’s a higher likelihood it results in a relatively short questionnaire, which benefits the quality of your feedback and your survey’s completion rate. However, by only displaying a single stimulus to respondent, you’ll have to survey a larger audience. This can be costly and difficult to carry out.

A sequential monadic survey design asks for feedback on multiple stimuli. Once you’ve gathered responses from enough respondents, you can choose a winning name by looking at the most common responses to each stimuli.

Here’s how a sequential monadic test for a brand name might look.

This design allows you to survey a smaller audience, making it more cost-effective to carry-out. However, if you’re looking to limit the length of your survey, you won’t be able to ask as many questions about each stimulus.

Read more about the reasons to use—and avoid—each design, and how you can set them up.

What makes for a good brand name? The metrics you choose to measure will help you decide.

The questions you ask in your brand name testing survey can be as general or specific as you’d like, depending on your goals for the test. If you want to know whether a certain name will catch people’s attention, for example, you might ask about appeal and uniqueness in specific. Here are some key metrics you might want to include in any brand name testing survey:

The relative value of each metric you measure depends on your goals for the brand name. If you want to find a name that’ll increase sales, purchase intent will be the most vital metric. But if your top goal is to differentiate your brand in a highly competitive market, the uniqueness of your name might be most important.

We suggest using the Likert scale to test your metrics. This scale is straightforward, provides consistent choices, and makes it easy for you to analyze the results of your test. If you choose this scale, your questions can use the formula, “How (metric) is the name?” with your answer options going from “Extremely (metric)” to “Not at all (metric).”

For instance, if one of your metrics is pronounceability, here’s how you can measure it:

How easy is it to pronounce the brand name?

Sometimes, your respondents’ answers won’t make it clear which name they like best. You can fix this issue by used a forced-answer question that asks respondents to choose their favorite option at the end of the survey. This question can also help you rank the value of each metric to the overall likeability of your name. If respondents consistently choose the most unique name as their favorite, for example, you can assume uniqueness is important to your target market.

Also, you can preface your survey with screener, category, or demographic questions. These questions help you learn more about your respondents and allow you to group them. Learn about demographic questions in our robust page on concept testing.

The only way to determine the real likeability of any potential brand names is to have your target audience evaluate them. Find your target profile of individuals and give them an opportunity to provide feedback in one of 2 ways:

Once you’ve collected responses, you’re ready to pick a winning brand name. To make your analysis easier, try using Top 2 Box scores. This scoring method combines positive responses to each question into a single percentage, which makes it easy to compare stimuli across metrics.

If your survey included open-ended questions, make sure you examine the results of these questions as well. To spot the key takeaways from each brand name option, use a word cloud.

We’ve only scratched the surface of concept testing with brand names. To better understand  each step, take a look at “The ultimate guide to concept testing.”

Your brand name testing survey should measure how your potential brand names stack up against different values. Branding surveys don’t need to be complicated - they should be as short and simple as possible while still maximizing the information you get from your respondents. 

Here are some sample brand name testing survey questions: 

Perform brand name testing during the development, growth, saturation, and decline stages of the product life cycle—when you’re either launching new brands or rebranding existing ones.

In the development and growth stages, you’ll probably be looking for broad feedback that’ll help you make overarching decisions about your business or products. This is your opportunity to ask respondents to choose between several very different brand names, for example. Because your brand is new in this stage, it’s the best time to field directional feedback on your brand name.

In the saturation and decline stages, you’ll probably be searching for more specific feedback on your brand name. This is the time to ask respondents focused questions about changes to the spelling, abbreviations, or theme of your name, for example. It’s also the time to think about sampling your loyal customer base to see if they’re on board with a rebranding.

By adhering to the best practices for brand name testing, you can improve the quality of your feedback and the and analysis. Here are 4 things to keep in mind as you test your brand name:

Related: How to trademark a name once you've picked the winning option.

The importance of a brand name can’t be overstated - it’s crucial to the success of your business. A task this vital shouldn’t be left to intuition or guesses, but tested thoroughly and carefully to determine exactly the right name for your company. 

Now that you have a good grasp on how to come up with a brand name via testing, you’re ready to get started on your brand name analysis.