14 important considerations when creating or changing your healthcare business name
“O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet” William Shakespeare
One of our clients recently asked us to assist them with renaming their company. This task always comes with an immense burden of responsibility. Changing your company brand can be hard, and it only gets harder the older or more successful you become.
As I was doing research into this assignment, I came across a US-based corporate naming specialist that has just published a free report on why companies change their names. I’ve found this report very useful, and thought it would be useful for anyone else considering a name change.
According to the report, most companies change their name due to mergers or acquisitions (34%), the need to reflect a change in business direction (29%), and a desire for “quick makeovers” (14%).
Strategic Name Development also publishes some timeless guidelines when considering a rebrand.
Laura Livesey and I have been fortunate enough to be involved in several corporate naming processes and have helped brand six companies including London Vision Clinic, Focus Clinics and St. James’s Laser Vision. Not one of these names are world-recognised brands like Amazon, Google or Apple, but all of them were the fruit of a comprehensive process that involves a thorough market positioning workshop and hours and hours of brainstorming and refinement. Fortunately, each brand has enjoyed remarkable staying power and memorability among their audiences.
Scott Trimble of Halfagain Marketing has written a very comprehensive article on the subject of choosing a company name which should also prove useful. Some of his tips include considering:
- domain availability
- focused brainstorming
- synonym searching
- word combining
- using name and word lists to get creative juices flowing
- punning and plays on words
- using groovy internet word tools
- meaningful names or not
- metaphorical naming
- mispellings
- industry lingo
- competition
- name rhyming
- not putting too much stock in your name
Visit the article, it’s interesting reading!
If I was a healthcare business, I’d avoid the rhyming and punning names as they show, in a world of serious business, a serious business outlook.
Just a personal opinion. I know there are companies out there that would do it just to be clever, but in my experience, that never works.