Working with many clients who are always trying to DIY as much as they can in marketing, I regularly run across people who obviously didn’t think through their branding, or the logic behind it, for long. Some relied on AI or Fiverr to generate their logo, company name, and tagline in one sitting. This post is going to focus on two of those pieces, your company name and your tagline, because they carry more weight than most business owners realize.

Company Names

I’ve encountered people who had a fondness for a certain word or phrase and decided to name their company after it, without checking whether that word means anything to the average person, whether they even knew the actual definition, or whether they could spell it themselves. Penultimate Properties, for example. Penultimate means “second to last.” Is that really the message you want to send to someone shopping for a house? Or Ephemeral Estates, which sounds elegant until you look up “ephemeral” and realize it means lasting only a short time. Also not the message you want when you’re selling real estate.

Then there’s Fastidious Flooring, for a company installing floors. Fastidious means overly picky about details, which might sound like a compliment until a customer looks it up mid-argument about a scuff mark. Loquacious Landscaping is another one, loquacious meaning excessively talkative, which has nothing to do with lawns. And Cacophony Consulting, run by someone who apparently didn’t notice that cacophony means a harsh, jarring mixture of sounds. Not exactly the calm, organized image a consulting firm wants to project.

If you can’t spell your own company name without pausing, that’s a problem. Think about being a guest on a podcast, on an elevator – can you easily say your company name without causing a headtilt of confusion?

Some go the opposite direction and pick a name so long the URL would wrap around a football jersey, pads and all.

Here’s the rule. Make sure anyone can spell your company name out loud, without seeing it written first. A flower shop I came across was named Petallica. Really. There’s also Koffee and Kombucha Kiosk. People will shorten any name you give them, and that’s a bad one to shorten. And Frying Nemo, for a fish and chips stand, sounds cute until you realize nobody can find you on a search bar because they spelled it “Frying Nemo” with a Y, or “Nemo’s Fryer,” or five other guesses.

Before you fall in love with a name, do the homework.

  • Check the US Patent and Trademark Office (uspto.gov) to see if your shortlist is already trademarked.
  • Check business license filings in your state too. Someone else may already be operating under that name locally, even if it’s not trademarked federally.
  • How will your company name look SMALL – on phones, and big – on signs, busses?

Domains

Some people choose names with double consonants, like ExquisiteEntity, which is asking for a typo every single time someone tries to type it.

Some pick a name knowing full well the .com is never going to be available, and settle for a .net, .tv, or .co without ever checking who owns the .com. What kind of company is sitting on it? I had a client bring me their domain once, and the .com version of their name was a porn site. Really. Slow down and check before you commit.

Here’s another one people miss. If you don’t capitalize your domain the way you intend it to be read, does it spell something else, or cause confusion? Nobody types a domain with capital letters, because browsers don’t care about case. So if your brand relies on internal capitalization to make sense, like “PenIsland” instead of “Pen Island,” you have a problem you won’t see until it’s too late. What is “pen is land”?

Does your company name tell people, immediately, what industry you’re in? Or is it so vague it could be selling literally anything? BestAdvice.com. ReliablePros.com. AvailableLakes.com. MomentumStarters. AuthenticityAgents.com. CatalystConnect. You get the idea. None of these tell a stranger what you actually do.

And people buy .org domains for for-profit businesses all the time. Unless you’re a registered 501c3, a foundation, or something similar, skip the .org. It signals something you’re not.

Your company name is the most critical element you will create in your entire business. It deserves more thought than a beer with a friend or a conversation at the kitchen table. You need opinions from people outside your immediate circle, people who have no emotional investment in the name you already like. Sometimes I get brought in to consult with clients just for this piece of business development, nothing else. You need someone whose job is to find the worst possible interpretation of your name, question whether it’s actually clear, and go look at what similar businesses in your space are already called.

Run a WhoIs lookup to see who owns the .com and its close variations before you fall in love with anything.

Taglines

Does your tagline sound like a placeholder you never got around to replacing? Things like “XXX XXX, Done Right.” Or “Integrity, Value, Reliability.” Or “Your Best Option for (Industry).” These aren’t taglines. They’re filler text that got left in.

Before you write a tagline, you need a mission statement. That’s the thing your whole team can align to and check back against when decisions get made. Once you have a real mission statement, your tagline gets derived from it, not invented separately. The purpose of a tagline isn’t to stand on its own. It’s to enhance and support the company name it’s attached to.

Before You Pull the Trigger

If you’re sitting on a shortlist of names, or you haven’t even gotten that far yet, don’t lock anything in alone. Get a second set of eyes that isn’t attached to your excitement about the name. Schedule time with me to review your shortlist, stress test it, run the trademark and domain checks, and brainstorm alternatives if none of them hold up. It’s a lot cheaper to fix this before you’ve printed business cards, built a website, and told everyone you know.