Consensio

…last part to this…and the most important!

Very often, people are skirmish about naming because it involves thinking out of their comfort zone and maybe saying something in front of people that gets culled down with cynicism. In recent years it has become very difficult to name a company and trademark it without a due diligence process.

The ‘obvious’ names are taken or unavailable as domains. Simply going through the dictionary is not enough. Resorting to fantasy names is not often a clever idea if it is too impossible to pronounce the names. I know there are people who seriously use name generators on the net, but they are the equivalent to buying instant coffee..or trusting Babelfish for business translations…

That’s when specialist naming companies are called in (like Consensio for example, hint, hint).

The tasks of the naming specialist are to facilitate the process and doing the due diligence on the name. It is a difficult process because we don’t only have to come up with something durable, exciting and suitable, but also something that holds up to legal and commercial aspects. Sometimes you fall in love with a name too early, only to find somebody else has had the same idea and protected it already.

We have to ask:

• Is it legal? Can we trademark the name in our market, in our industry, in our country, globally?

• Commercial? Can we get the URL that matches our name?

As a rule of thumb, generic words that are in the common language domain cannot be trademarked for your commercial interests- as they would disadvantage your competitors. For example, if you had the rights to the word ‘Engineering” a whole industry would be excluded from using the word. However, you could call yourself “Berti Beetle Engineering”, if there is no other Berti Beetle in the IP register trademark registered in your country.

Consensio, like many other naming companies, use a process, whereby we utilise a naming work sheet to involve clients in the naming brainstorm. With a point system we check it against the IP register, Domain availability and the name categories. After a thorough check, whereby as as many stakeholders as possible have contributed to the list and gave points to the variable selection, we are very clear what ‘cuts the mustard’ with the market and our client.

I love this part of brand positioning, because we witness the birth of a new identity. After all, good brand names go from good to great by being durable. (Read PART 1 here or PART 2)