The concept of "brand name development" is easily understood: You create a great new company or product, give it a name you love, then immediately, it is embraced by your target audience. 

In reality, however, creating, evaluating, selecting and registering an effective brand name is far more complex and difficult:

• A brand name's meaning must be carefully determined and agreed upon.
• It must inform the target audience and distinguish the company or product being named from its competitors. 
• Names must convey their intended meaning while appealing to the target audience's wants and needs, hopes and dreams. 
• Names under consideration must be properly evaluated, and decision-makers and influencers – who often have opposing agendas, opinions and tastes – must agree to a final name. 
• This name has to be unique enough to be successfully trademarked, usually the most difficult step of all!

Many managers underestimate the difficulty of successfully creating brand names.  Perhaps they try to create names themselves, assign the task to a "creative" person in the company or undertake an employee naming contest.  Here are just a few companies who named themselves, only to come later to my company, Idiom Brand Identity, to ask for a new name:

• Purple Yogi, a company that organizes unstructured data, renamed Stratify
  
• Gazooba, an online, word-of-mouth marketing technology renamed Qbiquity
  
• Gulf Coast Independent Organ Procurement Organization,  renamed LifeGift
  
• NetStart, an Internet career-advancement site, renamed CareerBuilder 

Self-naming almost never produces a successful result because those doing the naming lack the skills, tools, experience and time required.  Moreover, the names yielded are often so common they fail to pass difficult trademark challenges and cannot be registered or protected. 

If subsequent rounds of naming are undertaken, they come after significant expense incurred from lost time, legal costs, missed deadlines and delayed product introductions. A well-conceived brand-naming process using proven Best Practices can save time, money and frustration.