In her Name Tales newsletter, Marcia Yudkin shares a disheartening Las Vegas Sun article about what happens to a company that chooses a name that resembles another company’s name. The story shows that anything can happen with a company’s name that even if the company does nothing wrong. The safest thing to do is not fall in love with one name or brand, but to have a few options and then research to see if anything comes close.

These resources help you with your naming and branding effort with a couple of what not to dos.

Articles

1. 5 Obvious Rules for Naming Your Product (That We Wish We’d Followed)
2. 8 Mistakes to Avoid When Naming Your Business
3. 10 Tips for Naming Your Company, Product or Service
4. 11 Ways to Play the Name Game
5. 50 Worst Company Names (Requires registration)
6. The Basics of Branding
7. The Best (and Worst) Business Names
8. Branding Dilemma: When to Use Your Own Name
9. Business Name and Tagline Generator
10. Create a Unique Company Name
11. Day2Day Activities: How they named their companies
12. How 10 Famous Technology Products Got Their Names
13. How they named companies – fact or fiction?
14. How to Create a Great Business Name
15. How to Create Company Names
16. How to Name Your Business
17. How to Select a Company Name
18. Hunt is on for world’s worst rebranding
19. Microsoft’s Zune Raises Ruckus in Hebrew — the reason you should verify your brand name in another language before selling it in other countries. Chevy Nova (no go) wouldn’t go over well in Spanish-speaking countries.
20. The Name Game
21. Naming Your Company, Product or Services [pdf]
22. Put Your Business Name to the Test and more from About.com
23. Tech’s Product Name Guru: Meet the man who coined BlackBerry, Azure and More
24. Think Search Before You Name Your Next Product
25. Wikipedia company name etymologies

Resources

1. Brainstorming domain names.
2. Brand Name Generator
3. Brand Naming
4. Building the Perfect Beast: The Igor Naming Guide to Creating Product and Company Name
5. CatchWord Naming Blog
6. Community Mottos and Nicknames. City names can provide inspiration.
7. The Funny Name Server
8. Latin dictionary
9. Name Tales
10. Naming Online
11. POP! Stand out in Any Crowd book.
12. Free Tools and Sites for Writers: Check the resources section for references.
13. Snark Hunting: The Naming and Branding Blog
14. US Patent and Trademark Office
15. Web 2.0 Name Generator
16. Writer’s Digest Flip Dictionary book

Call me goofy, but I loved singing “The Name Game” as kid:

Meryl, Meryl, bo-beryl,

Banana-fana fo-feryl

Fee-fi-mo-meryl

Meryl!

Yeah, yeah… I know how some immature kids like to use names like Chuck and Mitch. I’m sure you’ve heard your share.

I’ve always been fascinated with names, how they came to be, and their origins. So it’s no surprise that I do naming projects. Coming up with names can become a brain consuming process. By that, I mean your brain goes on a roll and just keeps spitting out names, words, and ideas — good and not so good.

You have many options and resources to play the name game to find a perfect brand for a product, company, blog.

1. Make best friends with reference resources: Dictionaries (rhyming and specialty), thesauri, Flip Dictionary, word references, anagrams, etc.
2. Ask clients about themes. Some clients may already have a theme going or planning on one to help with branding.
3. Ask clients about their interests and favorite things.
4. Ask clients what names they like and dislike.
5. Use interests, themes, etc. and research them until you’re dizzy.
6. Make an initial list.
7. Mix and match words.
8. Create variations of words and phrases.
9. Subscribe to Marcia Yudkin’s Name Tales newsletter.
10. Have POP! Stand out in Any Crowd nearby for use.
11. Use a domain naming tool. I’ve heard how some of these tools use your search to grab domain names. But not all do that. Unbelievable. Blog entry: Brainstorming domain names.

Sometimes I go crazy in the process and my head won’t stop seeking names and playing with them. I’d be playing with my kids, hitting tennis balls, chauffeuring and my head would as play jigsaw puzzle with words and names. If something good comes to me, I quickly capture it in my TitaniumBerry (it ain’t black) so I’ll have it when I return to my desk.

So if I like names so much, why am I stuck with plain ol’ meryl.net? For the same reason web designers struggles to design their own web sites. Besides, I might as well as capitalize on my uncommon name and put a positive spin on it after has given me fits for years (I struggle with the “r” so I tell people “Meryl like Meryl Streep, two-syllables-not-one and rhymes with Cheryl.”

Oh, great… I have an old team song going in my head…

“Meryl’s my name and basketball’s my game. Blue is my color and …” I’ll stop there. Oh, now I have a Sesame Street song in my head… “We All Sing with the Same Voice.”

My hair is black and red
My hair is yellow
My eyes are brown and green and blue

My name is Jack and Fred
My name’s Amanda Sue
I’m called Kareem Abdul
My name is you

I live in southern France
I’m from a Texas ranch
I come from Mecca and Peru
I live across the street
In the mountains, on a beach
I come from everywhere
And my name is you

Stopping now before my brain becomes a jumble of names, words, and songs.

On occasion, I get an assignment from a specific client that includes brainstorming company names as well as finding potential matching domain names. Lifehack has a nice article on How To Brainstorm Domain Names. When I brainstorm names that need domain names, here are things I keep in mind:

* Avoid words where the end of one word is the same as the start of the next word. Car racing, for example. This would translate to carracing.com. When recalling a domain name, I debate whether it’s carracing.com or caracing.com.

* Put the domain name together and make sure the URL doesn’t look like an embarrassing URL. Bet you’ve seen a “forward this e-mail” that listed funny domain names like www.expertsexchange.com (Experts Exchange) and penisland.com (Pen Island). Innocent and good names, but not so good URLs!

* Skip dashes, if possible. URLs with dashes have received a bad name because of spam sites. However, many wonderful sites use dashes like www.digital-web.com. This site came out long before spammers got the idea to abuse the dash.

* Check the spelling. Is it hard to spell?

* Add another word, if you already have a company name where someone else already registered the domain name. If you’re ABC Painters, try adding a word such as “abcpaintersdallas” and “abcpaintersinc”. Obviously, a painting business would want to drive locals to its site, so adding a geographical name can help with search engines.

* Make the thesaurus your friend. Sometimes you discover a better word for something that represents your business. Coffee, java, and cafe are commonly used in coffee shops, so using a thesaurus to find something different might yield great results.

What URL naming dos and don’ts do you have?