Choose effective names for your company, products and services.
Finding the right name for your company or offering can make a big difference. Backstory quickly generates and evaluates brand names and winnows them down to the most viable options. Is the name easy to say, spell and remember? Is it available in your classes of business?
Descriptive Names
Descriptive names, like Architectural Digest and The Weather Channel, quickly communicate what brands do but can be difficult to trademark if they're generic. It's usually better to reserve descriptive names for common noun (lower-case) category names, not proper noun (capitalized) brand names.
Suggestive Names
Suggestive names support your brand position by suggesting what you do or how you do it. They may require more education and explanation than descriptive names, but they're more expressive and memorable, too--ownable names that set you apart. Examples include Airbnb, Amazon, Tesla and Tide.
Arbitrary & Fanciful Names
Using regular words in an unexpected way, like Adobe and Apple, can seem arbitrary because they don't immediately imply a connection to what you do. And made-up or fanciful names like Kodak, Lexus and Xerox require time and resources to make them meaningful. However, they are very ownable.
Consider your classes of business, general use and domain availability.
It's easy to latch onto a name emotionally without considering its strategic implications. Before you start buying domains and dive into logo design, check the trademark availability of your name across all 45 classes of business on the USPTO website. Backstory analyzes the ownability of candidate names by running preliminary trademark and Google searches, along with domain availability. Your trademark attorney can take it from there.
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Meg Whitman