Hey friends, welcome to this episode of the pool party.
Today we are talking about choosing a name
and that is a name for your product, business or service.
If you're an artist and you're trying to come up
with an artist's name, this is also extremely helpful.
A lot of artists come up with alternative personas
or what do you call it?
Alter egos in order to better embrace their art.
And there are a few things that I would suggest
you consider when you pick your name,
just for the sake of longevity
and then also fitting into this larger context of branding,
which ultimately I've described as a way
to easily communicate with your artists,
any people you might work with
and then also communicating your mission
and values to yourself.
Unifying and aligning all of these elements
are what I've found help good brands last
and also good elements of brands.
Of course you can always change them
but consistency is key
and the longer you can be consistent,
the better for you and your story.
All right, so let's go ahead and dive into choosing a name.
I'm going to give you a quick outline
of the components we will talk about today.
We wanna consider uniqueness, the length of the name,
if there's a.com or at handle available
and this is incredibly helpful
in the age of promoting yourself online.
Then we're going to discuss values and audience.
Towards the end, I'm also going to recommend
some ways that you can brainstorm for your name
and then a bit of an exercise
for seeing if your name sticks.
So there'll be a few questions for journaling at the end
but let's go ahead and dive into the first facet
of choosing a name.
And this section is going to be on considering uniqueness,
conciseness or length of the name
and then we'll go ahead and get into checking online domains
and handles to validate your name.
So first of all, when choosing a name,
you wanna make sure that it's unique.
And typically I would say that the most important aspect
of branding is making sure that it's specific and concise
and with your names, you wanna do the same
but there are so many different registered brands
out there these days, so many different artists
that sometimes you see people using similar names
and that ultimately can be not a great thing for you
when you're trying to stand out
or let's say someone is discussing your brand
and then it reminds them of something else
or it's really hard to really trigger people
that you're talking about your brand and not something else.
So with this, I would also recommend not choosing something
that's a little bit too weird.
I'm gonna make an example that I think can be easy.
If you are a peanut butter brand,
you probably wouldn't decide to name yourself Skippy or Jif
because there are already brands out there
that are named Skippy and Jif.
They have brand legacy, they've been around for years
and on top of the fact that you might just legally
not be able to take their name,
it would do you a huge disservice
to create a spinoff brand and name it Skippy or Jif
because if someone were to Google those brands,
your brand wouldn't come up.
You just don't have enough content online
and the two legacy brands with those names
would dominate the internet.
So you wanna choose a name that is unique
but with this, you also wanna make sure
that the name isn't too out there.
So if you were to tell your name to someone,
would they be able to spell it easily?
Is this like a name that is seen somewhere else?
So we wanna keep these names short still
and I would say aim for,
so we wanna keep our names short.
We don't wanna make them more than 10 letters long.
You can even have compound names
and that helps a lot these days
because you can't always pick a three letter name
and a lot of people love that
because short names are easy to Google,
they're easy to search up,
but that's just something to consider
before we start to brainstorm.
So that goes with being short and concise
and again, you can choose names
that are multiple words long.
Sometimes you might even take your nickname
and tack another word on there.
So if I'm thinking of artists,
one artist that comes to mind is Megan Thee Stallion.
So that is a unique name, but it's quite long.
This might be a little bit different for musicians.
I think a musician's stage name
sometimes have multiple letters, words,
they can be longer, but for example,
if you are a startup or a brand
that is creating new products,
you might wanna consider just really keeping it short
and rememberable and also make sure
that you're not overlapping too much
with other people in the same space as you.
I see this a lot with tech startups where people try,
they come up with names that already exist
or they heard it somewhere already
and that's also not great
because it does the same thing that I mentioned before
where it might sound cool, but if it already exists,
that other brands already has content out there,
they already have legacy on the name
and I would say that's not gonna be great for you or them
and it's gonna introduce unnecessary competition.
All right, so now that we've gotten to the space
of talking about other people
and the uniqueness and competitiveness of a name,
we wanna see if maybe there's a.com available
for your name.
So this is another way to consider
whether your brand name, your business name,
your artist name is going to be a great choice.
You can just type in your name.
We will use the same example again, meganthestalian.com
and I'm going to assume that meganthestalian.com
is already taken,
so you would not wanna name yourself that.
So you wanna make sure that you can at least get
like a.com, a.co, an org and these types of URL
and domain ends are going to be ranked higher in SEO.
I would say stay away from like.xyzs
or things that are different and unique as dots
because there's a lot of different like dot domains
these days and sometimes like the downside
to choosing the domain URLs is that your email,
if you were to create an email from this website
would get straight sent to spam
and then the other thing too is it, I don't know,
being a little bit too out there and unique with your domain
isn't going to be exactly helpful.
It introduces more uncertainty
and I would just say stick with the.coms, the.orgs,
especially if you're an organization or a company
and if you're an artist, yeah, stick to a.com, it's simple.
You don't need to be a company to have a.com
but it'll definitely make sure
that you don't get sent to spam
if you ever create an email with a.com domain.
Okay, all right, so on top of this,
we also wanna see if the handle or the username
is available on websites like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok.
You might not be using these websites to promote right away
but if you ever wanted to, let's say,
get on these platforms, we wanna make sure
that your name isn't like another popular name
on one of these sites.
For example, if you're creating a TikTok,
you would not wanna call yourself MrBeast.
MrBeast already has the real estate on that name
and so it would be great, not great for you
to choose that as a name.
Again, that goes along with that topic of uniqueness
but I think you get where I'm going at here now.
We wanna make sure that in this overlap of being online
and of being able to talk about your brand,
not only is it easy to describe who you are
and if it ever came up in conversation,
people would know that you're talking about your company,
your brand and not someone else's
and then if you were to Google your brand online,
your brand would come up with these keywords
instead of someone else's who has already been creating
in this space for a really long time.
All right, so let's go back to the topic of values
and I want you to think about now
if your name reflects your values.
Ideally, when you choose a name for your product, service
or artist persona, it should give you some idea
of what you're trying to represent with what you do.
Megan the salient, for example, I think is a great name
because it suggests some sort of power, some strength,
some majestic quality to it.
Megan the salient, I remember her talking about
how she chose her name on a blog
and she also mentioned this because she's tall.
She is a bit taller and salients are very tall
and they have a presence to them.
So I think that works for her stage presence.
The same thing goes for you.
When you think about your name,
think about your values, what you represent
and if there are any qualities you refer to
or any values of that nature that you think about
when you create your work.
For me, my artist name is Jules Poole
and one of the reason why I chose that name
is because to me, thoughts pool
and I think when you think of the loanal space of thought
and meditation, it's nice to reflect next to a pool
and Jules Poole's also rhymes quite nicely.
So that's why I chose that as my artist name.
So those are some examples and ultimately want that name
to reflect back to some sort of value,
if anything to remind you of why you do what you do.
And then later on, you can tell that brand story
to your audience and then it'll just tie
into your brand story and your values that much further.
So now third question, does it connect with your audience?
So this name, we wanna make sure
that it sticks with your audience.
This is something we could have probably figured out sooner
rather than later if discussing your brands
seems to make sense to people.
You can tell usually if you're discussing your company,
your brands, your artist name with folks and if it sticks
and that is usually a good sign.
I wouldn't say choose your name solely on the reaction
of other people trying to get a certain reaction
but if it connects to others and you consider these people
to be like your soul art community
or people you wanna work with and that's a good sign.
All right, so that is the first section
of considering your name.
We wanna make sure that it's unique, short and concise
if we can use it for a.com or a handle on social media.
And then choosing your name should use some value,
brand values and if you wanna know more
about how to choose brand values,
you can listen to the podcast on how to select brand values
and ultimately if all of these things are aligned,
it should really connect back with your audience
but that's always a great question to ask in the end.
Does your name connect with your audience?
Next up, we wanna talk about ways to brainstorm your name.
So names, we're gonna talk about naming
in the context of English and whatever name
that you want to have, you could have it
in a different language as well but just with linguistics,
we can do a brain dump and create a word cloud of names
by writing them down and that's the other thing too.
I would suggest choosing a name
that you could actually pronounce and write out
in letters that you can type out.
I've seen some artists names out there
that are actually symbolic and are made
with symbols and emojis and while that is creative,
I think it makes this work really hard to search
and maybe that is the intention.
Maybe some of these names I've seen
that are created with emojis are actually
even more alternative personas of artists
but if you're trying to be recognizable and searchable,
I would suggest using plain letters
and a keyboard to write your name.
So with that, let's go ahead and do our brain dump.
Take a piece of paper and just write out different words
that symbolize or relate to whatever your brand is.
I'm going to go ahead and use the example
of that peanut butter again because it's pretty tangible
but peanut butter, some words that come up yummy,
sticky, gooey, smooth, soft, crunchy
and these are delving into different types
of peanut butter now so maybe we get even more specific.
If you're an artist, let's say that you are a guitarist,
maybe strings, we can get down to the materials,
guitars made out of wood and then if you think of wood,
what kind of wood, maybe it's,
I don't know what kind of wood that guitars are made of
but let's say for example, it's echinacea or eucalyptus
and I think these can be things that connect back to you
but don't think about that for now with your brain dump,
just get all the words on a piece of paper.
And then the next thing I want you to do
is take a art walk.
So go ahead and take a walk and look at the words
that you've written down and see if any of them connect
to you if you wanna combine any of the words together.
And the reason why I recommend walking while you do this
is because it puts you in your body
and you might even say the words out loud
just so that you can get a sense
for how they roll off your tongue if you like that
and you can start writing down different combinations
of these words together and from there,
you have a sense of different combinations
for names you wanna choose.
From this brain dump to then taking a walk,
I would probably select five to 10 combinations or names
and from there, you can run these names up against the tests
that we discussed earlier, being unique, short and concise.
And if the name is available through a domain address
or if the handle is available,
then next what you wanna do is sit on it.
Just sit on it for a week.
See if any one of them stands out to you
but give yourself time and space to digest
and see if it sticks with you in the long run.
And I would suggest giving it time
because if you decide to change the name,
everything that you've created
for your branding materials,
you're going to have to change it.
It creates way more work in the end
and again, that's just wasted time I think
and then wasted creative effort
that you could spend on actually creating your work.
This is just a name, right?
This is just a branding package.
It's not the work itself.
It's just one of those things that makes you feel confident.
So another thing you do is ask a trusted second party
what they think of the name
and usually I would suggest asking someone
who actually works in the space that you do.
You wouldn't ask a pianist for example,
what to name your peanut butter company.
It just doesn't really make sense
and they'll probably tell you what they like
based upon other values
rather than what they could see
being successful in the space.
Ask a trusted second party but don't involve everyone.
One thing I see people do sometimes
when they're trying to come up with a name
is they ask every single person
they come across what they think about the name
and ultimately what I think happens
is this leads to some sort of analysis paralysis in decision.
You involve everyone.
There's too many cooks in the kitchen
and what it shows to me is that you're not confident
about your choice.
Again, you need to make the decision yourself
and that decision needs to come from a place of confidence
that reflects back to values that you chose
and predetermined yourself.
And if you forego that choice,
the likelihood of you changing your name is quite high.
Again, thereby defeating the whole point of a brand.
So we don't need to get into why you shouldn't do that
but try to keep the process close to your chest.
Ask someone you trust
but ultimately make the decision yourself.
All right, now we're getting towards the end of our podcast.
There are two more questions I want you to ask yourself
as you choose a name and decide to nail it down.
This first question, how might your name be confusing?
I know we went through this creative process
of choosing a name and ways of brainstorming
but there are still a lot of ways
that sometimes names can be confusing
and you might wanna ask your trusted second party
if there are any ways this name might be confusing
just to brainstorm.
And then secondly, you wanna figure out
if there are any ways to easily eliminate this confusion.
Sometimes there are confusing elements
that come up in naming that could be solved
with visual elements.
For example, my name is Jules Pools
but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm a pool company, right?
But I do have visual elements on my Instagram
and also 10 years worth of a portfolio
to show that I'm an artist and that is on my website.
And I do a variety of things
that actually do not involve pools at all.
And so I find that this work and this body of work
outweighs any confusion there might be with my artist name.
And that is ultimately a decision I made early on
that I would just create work.
And when you looked at my portfolio or my Instagram
you would understand what work I do just by my output.
So I think that's another thing to consider too.
Don't let your name be the sole definer of what you do.
Let the output of what you do
also help bolster that name, okay?
So these things flow into each other.
And I do believe that sometimes people forget this
when they are on branding.
And I think that branding is something
that you should be able to nail down relatively quickly
through a branding process.
It needs to stick and resonate with you
but you should not be changing your branding every month
especially as a company or an artist.
Maybe think about your branding
in terms of changing it every two to three years.
And if you've been around for a long time, don't change it.
Change your body of work.
Find other ways to express yourself.
But if you're constantly changing the name
I think the likelihood of consistency and recognizability
will go down in the eyes of other people.
And honestly, that is important
because ultimately you should cater to your audience
and try to build a fan base.
So we wanna be less confusing to your fan base,
to your customers.
And the best way to do that is just to make some decisions.
All right, so this has been the episode
of the pool party, how to choose your name.
We talked about a few things today including uniqueness,
choosing a short and concise name
and ways to see if this name is available online.
We again talked about seeing if your name
reflects your values, if it connects with your audience
and then a few ways to brainstorm your name
by taking a walk, doing a brain dump
and then selecting a few pairs of names
in order to see if any of those stick.
Ultimately, I say give yourself time, but not too much time.
Take about a week, see if it sits.
Ask a trusted second party, but don't involve everyone.
We don't want too many cooks in the kitchen.
And then if there are ways that your name might be confusing,
don't let that stop you.
Just make work that defines who you are.
And a name is just a name.
Ultimately, you get to decide what you do just by doing it.
So make sure that you give yourself the opportunity
to do it by nailing down your brand name
and moving on, running with it, being confident.
All right, this has been a special episode
on branding and naming in the pool party.
If you like this episode, there are two other episodes
available on selecting brand values
and branding one-on-one, effective facets of branding.
So go ahead and listen to those episodes.
If you need more help with branding,
you can look me up at JuliaEspiro.me.
That's J-U-L-I-A-E-S-P-E-R-O dot.
That's a period, M-E, JuliaEspiro.me.
Thank you and I'll talk to you next week.