Naming a business, and the checks that matter

Naming takes a week of agonising and then stops mattering, with one exception: the legal and practical checks, which people do last and occasionally not at all. A name you have to abandon after two years is expensive in a way that a slightly awkward name never is.

What a name has to do

• Be sayable out loud without spelling it. The test is a phone call and a noisy room.
• Be findable. A name that collides with a common word or a larger company means your customers cannot locate you even when they are looking.
• Survive being written down by somebody else. Deliberate misspellings and dropped vowels generate a lifetime of mistyped traffic.
• Not box you in. A name that names your first product becomes a problem when the second one arrives.
• Be available, legally and practically. This is the part with consequences.

Notice what is absent: meaning. Most strong names mean nothing in themselves and acquire meaning from the business. Choosing a name that explains what you do is useful early and constraining later, and it is the least important property on the list.

What a trade mark actually protects

This is where the real misunderstanding lives, so it is worth stating from the source. An EU trade mark does not protect a word in general. It protects the word for the specific goods and services you list in the application.

Those goods and services are sorted under the Nice Classification: goods in classes 1 to 34, services in classes 35 to 45. An application has to include an actual list, not just a class number, and without a list of goods or services no filing date is given at all. EUIPO also notes that some general class headings are not considered sufficiently clear and precise, so applicants listing only a heading are usually asked to be more specific.

Two practical consequences follow. The same name can be registered by different businesses in different classes, which is why you can find an identical name in another industry and it is not necessarily a problem. And your own registration only protects you where you asked for protection, so a careless list leaves gaps.

The checks, in the order that saves time

1. 01Say it out loud, and have somebody else write it down from hearing it. Most candidates die here, which is why it is first and free.
2. 02Search the plain web for the name plus your industry. If a larger business already owns the first page, you will be competing for your own name forever.
3. 03Search the trade mark register in your intended classes.
4. 04Check the domain, and check the social handles if you intend to use them. A name available everywhere is rare; decide in advance which compromises you can live with.
5. 05Check it in the other languages of the markets you intend to sell in, which is a check people remember only after the printing.
6. 06Then register the company and the domain, in that order, and not before the checks.

The domain question

An exact-match domain is nice and is not worth a worse name. Adding a word is normal and costs nothing in practice, while a misspelt name to secure a domain costs you every time somebody types it. Buying a domain from a holder is a commercial decision like any other; the price is not a signal of its value to you.

One thing worth doing properly: whatever you buy, that domain becomes your email address and every link anybody ever makes to you. Changing it later means redirects, re-registrations and a period where mail bounces. Treat it as a ten-year decision rather than a ten-euro one.

A note on scope: registering a company name and registering a trade mark are different things with different effects, and neither automatically gives you the other. If the name matters to the business, take advice in your own country before relying on either.

Getting to a shortlist without a month of agonising

The reason naming takes so long is that it is usually done as a search for the right answer, which does not exist. Treated as a filtering problem it takes an evening.

1. 01Write thirty candidates quickly and badly, without judging any of them. Volume first, because the good ones tend to arrive after the obvious ones are out of the way.
2. 02Cut anything you had to explain while writing it down.
3. 03Cut anything that names your current product or your current city, unless you are certain about both for ten years.
4. 04Run the remainder through the five checks above in order. Most will die at the search stage, which is fine and is the point.
5. 05From whatever survives, pick the one you mind saying least on a phone. Not the one you love. Nobody loves their business name after the fiftieth time and the test is tolerance, not enthusiasm.

One further thing worth knowing: the name matters less than almost anybody believes at the start and more than they believe at the point of changing it. That asymmetry is the argument for doing the checks properly and then stopping.