Is Your Brand Name Memorable?

The brand name is the very first thing your customer engages with your company or business. The brand name connects directly to the customer’s mind rather than your products and services. Your entire business journey is depending on the performance of your brand name. That is why you need to select a brand name that anyone can effortlessly remember.

Below you will find everything you need to know about how to get a memorable brand name.

Memory is a process that involves three main functions, encoding, storage, and retrieval. In a brand name, mainly two senses are involved: sight and hearing. Keeping that in mind, check whether these following characteristics are in your brand name or not.

A memorable brand name needs to be distinctive. Having a distinctive brand name helps you stand out from the competition and motivates the customer to engage with your business.

Nothing is more important for a business than having a potential customer base. Understanding your target audience is very important in creating a brand name that is easy to memorize for them. You can do market research in order to identify their mindset on brand names. In this way you can create a customer friendly brand name which is a smart way to create a memorable brand name.

Our brain is more inclined to remember words with meanings. So, it is good to have a meaning in your brand name that can grab the customer’s attention.

For example, the meaning of NIKE is the winged goddess of victory. Nike’s brand name reflects that their products can help you become victorious.

Why do we still remember the nursery rhymes? Because our mind is more sensitive to rhymes than other words. Rhymes can effortlessly hook up to the mind. So, try to select words that have a semantic flow or rhythm as your brand name.

For example, Coca-cola, Rolls Royce.

Having a lengthy brand name negatively affects all the qualities of your brand name. Such as memorability and simplicity. Keep your brand name short and sharp within 4-6 characters. Having a lengthy name also requires a bigger budget for marketing to help it reach customers.

Trends are always nice to follow in businesses. But, selecting a brand name that is unshakable with trends is important. It makes your brand name memorable for a long time. For example, Google has passed many years since its birth in 1997, but still the most visited website in the world.

This is very important when creating a memorable brand name. Some think selecting a complex brand name is the best way to get a distinctive brand name. This is not true. Complex brand names make pronunciation issues which make it difficult for the customers to remember it.

The more simple your brand name gets, the more it makes the customer remember your brand name.

Including numbers, special characters in a brand name makes it difficult to memorize. Unlike remembering a single word, remembering a combination of numbers, letters and special characters is harder. Avoid numbers and special characters if you want your customers to memorize your brand name easily.

Matching some colors with the brand name is one catchy step to make the brand name memorable. The human brain tends to memorize images rather than words. So you can come up with a combination. It is important to capture the soul of your brand and convert it into a logo or symbol.

Brand Awareness is about, to what extent the customer can recall and recognize your brand name.  Brand awareness is a very important turning point in the process of motivating the customer to purchase your product or service. Brand awareness makes the customer recognize your brand name over the other brand names, and make purchasing decisions.

There are two components of brand awareness,

1. Brand recognition
2. Brand recall

Brand recognition is the customer’s ability to confirm that they have seen or heard of your brand name before. In Brand recall, the customer chooses your brand name when they think of a product category. 

We are currently on the topic that “that a brand name must be memorable”. But you have to know why a memorable brand name is so important. Let’s see why.

• A brand name doesn’t have much value if no one can remember it.
• To make a memorable impression on consumers.
• To make your brand someone’s first choice when they are in need.
• If people can remember your name they can communicate it to others.
• Anyone can search for you easily anytime they want.

The original name of Yahoo was Jerry and David’s guide to the world wide web which is very long and hard to remember. Later in 1995, they moved to the brand name Yahoo, which is a great brand name and known by the world.

The world-famous sportswear company’s initial name was not Nike, it was Blue Ribbon Sports. The first name consists of more than four syllables and the distinctiveness of the brand name is less. So they moved to Nike: short, meaningful, and distinctive.

Subway is an American private restaurant that is famous for submarines, sandwiches, and salads. But their original name was a long one, Pete’s Super Submarines. The original name Pete’s Submarines confused the customers as they could not catch the name properly. So Deluca(the Owner) decided to change the brand name to a simpler one and now It is one of the fastest-growing franchises in the world.

Pepsi was originally named as Brad’s Drink followed by it’s founder’s name Caleb D. Bradham. But later as the name was too generic, less competitive and less memorable, he changed the name to Pepsi. The brand name “Pepsi” was inspired by a stomach enzyme called “Pepsin”.

When evaluating the memorization quality of a brand name, we highly consider the phonological loop value of the brand name.

The ability of the brain to memorize a brand name depends on the phonological loop value of the brand name. Phonological Loop(link) represents the audio buffering system of the human brain. Once a sound enters the chemical part of the brain, it will bounce around in an electrical memory for five seconds to figure out to stick into the mind or forget. If the sound sticks on the brain for more than five seconds, automatically the human brain will start to be familiar with the sound and like it.

Phonological Loop value shows how familiar will your brand name be after it enters into the human brain.

Let’s have a look at the phonological loop value of the famous brand names in the world.

Yahoo-90.2%
Ebay-88.7%
Amazon-85.6%
Google-84.8%

• In order to get a memorable brand name, your brand name should possess these qualities. Distinctiveness, meaning, include rhythmic sounds, short and sweetness, trend forwardness, and having a memorable logo are some important qualities of a memorable brand name.
• With a memorable brand name, the awareness of your brand name is higher.
• Brand names like Nike, Yahoo, Subway became successful after rebranding their original brand names to these present brand names as the old brand names were hard to memorize.
• Brinso highly considers the phonological loop value of a brand name, in order to recommend a particular brand name that has a good memorization quality.