How To Come Up With A Brand Name

How To Come Up With A Brand Name How To Come Up With A Brand Name How To Come Up With A Brand Name By Mark Nichol The art of creating names of companies, services, and products is also an industry and a lucrative one. Brand agencies charge dearly for a list of suggestions for brand identities, but it’s simple to do it yourself. Note that I didn’t use the word easy; the process is fairly straightforward, but it takes a lot of time and effort. But perhaps you’d like to try it on your own. Here are a couple of issues to consider: Evocation Is the word distinctive? Does it encapsulate the essence of the company, service, or product? Does it evoke a positive response? What is the pertinent business or industry? What is the brand’s identity or personality? What is its demographic market? What sets this brand apart from competitors’ brands? Is the brand name already in use in the pertinent business or industry, or in another area? Is it an existing word, or is it similar to an existing word, already in generic usage, and if so, what are the associations with the word? Does it consist of or resemble a foreign term, and if so, what are that term’s associations? What impact will such associations have on use of the brand name? Can it be trademarked, and is it available as a domain name (www.widgets.com) or as the equivalent of a telephone number (1-800-WIDGETS)? Word Formation Various treatments of words are available for producing brand names: A brand may consist of an acronym, a new word or the mimicking of an existing one formed by using the first letter of each word in a phrase (though the first two letters from one or more words may be employed, or a minor word may be passed over, to improve the word’s appearance of make it match an existing word). One example is Saab, from the initials for the Swedish company name Svenska Aeroplan AktieBolage). The brand name might be a compound, a phrase formed from two existing words, as in the case of Band-Aid, or it might be devised (or revised) by clipping, or truncating one or more words, as with FedEx. It could also be a neologism, such as Kodak. A brand name might be a play on words, like a Mexican restaurant called Sir Vesa’s (a homophone of cerveza, the Mexican word for â€Å"beer†). It could be a deliberate misspelling of a known word, such as Tru. Various forms of wordplay are used to coin new words, including alliteration (Burt’s Bees), rhyme (Slim Jims), and reduplication (Ding Dongs). A company may choose a character, like Aunt Jemima or Mr. Clean, to evoke a certain image, or may employ foreign or classical words or syllables that represent a product’s value proposition: Lux, for example, the Latin word for â€Å"light† but also a part of luxury, suggests both illumination and refinement. The Decision If you’re going to create a brand name yourself, refrain from getting carried away by all these possibilities right away. Focus first on the qualities your brand name should convey: Sober, or sassy? Literal, or lyrical? Practical, or personified? Then brainstorm, whittle the list down to a handful of finalists, and test on colleagues, friends, and family and in a focus group. When you make a final decision, let it sit for a while, and then decide whether it will have lasting appeal for you, your business associates, and your clients or customers. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the General category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Inquire vs Enquire26 Feel-Good Words"To Tide You Over"

Examples of Gapping in English Grammar

Examples of Gapping in English Grammar A construction in which part of a sentence is omitted rather than repeated. The missing grammatical unit is called a gap. The term gapping was coined by linguist John R. Ross in his dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax (1967), and discussed in his article Gapping and the Order of Constituents, in Progress in Linguistics, edited by M. Bierwisch and K. E. Heidolph (Mouton, 1970). Examples and Observations: The cars were old-fashioned; the buses, too.(Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Broadway Books, 2006)Arnaud was his closest friend; Peter, his oldest.(James Salter, Light Years. Random House, 1975)Forwards and BackwardsGapping ... describe[s] a transformation which creates gaps in a sentence after a conjunction by deleting a verb which would otherwise reappear, e.g. Caroline plays the flute and Louise (plays) the piano. Gapping can work forwards, as above, or backwards as in the deletion of the first mention of the word. According to Ross the direction of the gapping depends on the constituent branching in the deep structure, and provides insight into the underlying word order of a language.(Hadumod Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Taylor Francis, 1996)Verb DeletionConsider the pattern in (154):a. John likes coffee and Susan likes tea.b. John likes coffee and Susan -   tea.(154) illustrates a pattern known as gapping. Gapping is an o peration which deletes a constituent in one sentence under identity with a constituent of the same type in a preceding sentence. More particularly, gapping in (154b) deletes the second verb of two co-ordinated clauses; this is possible because the deleted verb is identical to the verb of the first sentence. In (154b) the verb is gapped but, crucially, its NP [Noun Phrase] complement is left behind.(Liliane M. V. Haegeman and Jacqueline Guà ©ron, English Grammar: A Generative Perspective. Wiley-Blackwell, 1999) Gapping in Written EnglishCertainly, some constructions are overwhelmingly found in written language. An example is the English Gapping construction, as in John ate an apple and Mary a peach, where an implicit ate is omitted from the second clause, understood as Mary ate a peach. Tao and Meyer (2006) found, after an extensive search of corpora, that gapping is confined to writing rather than speech. In the Elia Kazan movie The Last Tycoon, a powerful film director rejects a scene in which a French actress is given the line Nor I you, on the grounds that this is unnatural speech. But his colleague, with earthier instincts, comments on this line with Those foreign women really have class. This rings true. The gapping construction is classy, and restricted to quite elevated registers, though it is not lacking entirely from spoken English.(James R. Hurford, The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution. Oxford University Press, 2012)