Marketing: Branding: Name

Why Branding
When you are creating a business (company and/or product), you need to market it. (I shall again emphasize here that the marketing should start before you start your product/service.) Marketing is nothing but is to create awareness of your business in the market. Basically, people should be able to relate to your business, remember it and feel so good about it that they become ready to pay for your offering.

What is Branding
Branding is nothing but identification of your business. A brand registered in people's mind, help a lot at the time of sales. Some of the important items related to branding are:
1. Name of company
2. Name of product
3. Logo
4. Tag line
5. Tag line Audio clip (not everyone has that)
6. Corporate color theme
...
... (many other things can be included here)

Human Psychology
As the branding has to be registered in people's mind, it has to do a lot with human psychology. Hence while deciding on branding, target audience has to be kept in mind. For example, name of a product that is going to be used by school students will be different from the name of a product (may be with similar features) used by senior business executives. This is even more applicable for tag line as tag line is a phrase that acts as a bridge between the person's feeling and the product.

Color to be used has also to do a lot with the psychology. You must have seen most of faminine products in pink, natural products in green etc.

Problem with Multiple Names
Human mind recalls similar things quickly. If you have no similarity amongst the names you are using for your business (in other words you have multiple brands), you need to put effort separately for popularizing each of them.
Unlike that, if you have same name everywhere, you can put all the money, time and effort just for one brand. This suggests that you choose a name such that it represents your business theme and can be given to everything associated (of course with a little variations) viz. company, products, website, services etc. Examples are www.iscaleup.com, iScaleUp Pvt Ltd, iScaleUp Tester, iScaleUp Diagnosticks, iScaleUp Practice, iScaleUp Speed etc. (I hope you realized that first name is web address, second is company name and rest are product/service offerings).

EDIT 30 Apr 2014:
Here are a few case studies highlighting the real issues happened because of having multiple names:

1. We started a company called 'Wibhu' (wireless-bhumi) and later changed the name to AirTight Networks. This is a wi-fi security company so name of company clearly tells what it does. Products of this company were SpectraGuard (for security), SpectraMon (for monitoring), SpectraPlan (for planning). 
As we have grown as a company and it came to marketing, the challenge in front of us was to promote so many names in the market while we had limited budget and resources.
The only thing we were able to do was to consolidate the product line into SpectraGuard product suite. BUT for so many years, the company struggled with 2 names AirTight and SpectraGuard because it was too late till we realized the issue and both the names are already in market.
Recently I came to know that finally the name SpectraGuard is also gone and the product is called AirTight Management Console.

2. GS Lab had a product called kPoint. They also faced the same issue of dealing with 2 names. Finally they have created a company named kPoint Technologies for the product.

3. We started 'ShopSocially' and decided to use just one name everywhere but to our bad we kept the URL as shopsocial.ly. People started going to shopsocially.com or calling the company 'shopsocial'. Finally, we had to move to shopsocially.com.

Finalizing a Name
Amongst all to whom you need to give a name, website is one where you have limited choices. You need to see if the domain name for your desired name is freely available. Mostly you will find that the domain name is not free. Actually some people do that business; they purchase domain names and resale them when you are in need of them. The price in that case depends on your need. If you are starting a business, you may not afford the price and you may want to go with something else that is available freely (not for free but in open market and for normal price).

In this case you may like to add a character to your desired name. You have option to put a dash (-) of underscore (_) in between words. Think again before you do that .... Why you wanted to have a short and sweet name .... just because one can communicate it verbally ..... Right? A dash or underscore make it hard to speak, understand and remember. So this option is ruled out. You can mis-spell, but again when someone speaks other one is going to go to the site with correct spelling. Do you really want to do publicity for someone else?

Using a letter as prefix to your desired name works mostly. The most sounding letter in this case (for software) is 'i' and next comes 'e'. For example, if you take 'talk' as an example of desired name, maximum acceptance will be for 'iTalk' and then for 'eTalk' as people will be able to relate to the name intuitively without reading much of the text. However, if some brand is already very popular, letter from the brand can be borrowed e.g. Google can have any name starting with 'G'.

What really works
All said and done, success of marketing greatly depends on the social behavior and uncertainty attached to all the laws of social sciences prevail. You never know what really clicks (or does not click) unless you try it and have actual results with you.
Confused ..... that's marketing ..... :)

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