You name it: "Sorry, what did you say your name was again?" That's the one question you don't want people asking about your business

Entrepreneur, Dec, 2001 by Jerry Fisher

WHO'S GOT THE SWEETEST business name in America? We at Entrepreneur believe it's Lisa Rothstein, founder and president of Brownie Points Inc., a fast-rising business in Columbus, Ohio, that sells fresh-baked gourmet brownies as corporate gifts. Roth-stein is the winner of the "Name to Fame" contest, co-sponsored by Entrepreneur magazine and Jane Applegate, president of Small Business Television Network Corp. (SBTV). Rothstein's entry beat out hundreds of other name-dropping entrepreneurs to win the top prize--a complimentary consultation with marketing expert and Entrepreneur contributing writer Kim T. Gordon as well as a library of business books and a free subscription to Entrepreneur.

Brownie Points has been in the news before, with appearances on CNN's Business Unusual and NBC's The Today Show. "[That exposure] opened doors like you can't imagine," Rothstein says. "We had to get 10 new phone lines." She hopes winning this contest will garner media attention yet again and help to further sweeten sales--which she existimates will exceed $1 million.

What's in a Name?

Whether it wins a contest or not, a winning company name is one that hits home with your prime prospects and launches you toward profitability. That's why developing a great company name is arguably the most important marketing decision you'll ever make.

There isn't really a tried-and-true formula for naming your business. Some might hit the exercise bike and pedal into a deep state of naming nirvana. Others brainstorm with friends or family. (Rothstein's award-winning name was divined with help from a college roommate in the mid-1980s. The name works well because giving decadent brownies as gifts truly can earn brownie points for the giver.) Other entrepreneurs choose to spend big bucks hiring a name consulting firm to juggle linguistic units such as morphemes and plosives and assemble a unique, coined name.

In truth, stirring a little bit of naming science in with some creative brainstorming can combine to give "you the best chance, say many experts. Morphemes, as explained by Ira Bachrach, one of the deans of the naming business and founder of NameLab in San Francisco, "are word parts that, when put together, form a name that offers the identity you want for your company." For example: "Acu," as in "Acura"--a NameLab original--means "precisely or with care." The suffix, "ra," transforms an abstraction into a physical thing. Bachrach, whose company also gave the world such names as Compaq, CompUSA, The Olive Garden and Web Van, says cobbling such word pieces together gives the name a meaningful distinction and, equally important, makes it more likely to sail through a lawsuit-averting trademark search for similar names.

Those willing to spend somewhere in the high five figures for that level of linguistic parsing just might end up with a unique and successful name. But what if you, like many entrepreneurs, don't have the budget? Luckily, there are some guerrilla forms of company naming available for all the do-it-yourselfers. We sought out a range of professional nameologists for a few answers as well as some caveats.

Naming Resources

One helpful Web source is www.namestormers.com, which offers an excellent online primer for the naming neophyte. It instructs you on how to think logically about the name you want, lay the groundwork, select the type of name right for you (such as a coined term, an acronym, a personalized name or even a place name), find helpful resources for "trigger words" that spark your imagination, and even assemble word parts like the naming pros.

For the new retailer, especially one starting off with a small marketing budget, there's an advantage to naming your business in such a way that it communicates where you're located. After all, potential customers often impulsively pick a merchant based on the street it's on, how close it is to them and how intuitively they know how to get there. So, for example, if you were opening a Laundromat near a university, you might want to call it College Avenue Wash 'N' Wait. A new health-food store? 74th Street Healthy-catessen. A bookstore? Titles on Tilden. Thus, with your name alone, you've immediately identified how convenient you are.

What about "out-of-the-box" names--does their catchiness aid success? Fuddruckers, a restaurant chain, would say yes. So would Banana Republic. A Hundred Monkeys, another naming firm and an obvious proponent of this approach, brazenly puts its moniker where its mouth is--and, indeed, among the dotcoms left standing are those with names such as Amazon.com, eBay, Monster. com and Yahoo!. Proponents insist that if you don't want to be just another tree in the forest, you've got to go for it. Those against the tactic wonder: Isn't it better to have a name that immediately implies what you do vs. one that requires frequent explanations?

Many of the best names adorning corporate letterheads are hatched in advertising agencies. There, copywriters favor puns and other wordplay when concocting memorable monikers with a marketing bent. But theirs are hardly the only fertile minds that can have a lightbulb moment. If your own conference room or kitchen table brainstorming sessions yield a name that plays on a familiar expression and -as a bonus-addresses a specific product benefit, well, you get lots of brownie points for that. In fact, many of the company names that gave the "Name to Fame" winner some extremely close competition were from this category.