Branding is like most things in business: There are a million ways to succeed and only a few ways to fail. There’s no secret, then, that the way to branding success is to avoid the known ways to fail.
If you are starting up your own independent business, the best way to avoid a branding failure is to remember what your brand is and what it is not.
Your brand isn’t about your stationery, or your business cards, or the choice between a ficus and a potted palm in your office reception area.
In the end, you don’t have to make branding all about you.
It already is all about you and your business — what they both are and what they stand for.
There is a tendency to think about brands in terms of products, but that is not always so. Many successful businesses concentrate their branding efforts on their company name rather than on their product.
In the Pacific Northwest, one excellent example of this is the Les Schwab retail tire company.
It enjoys a reputation and customer loyalty level that few companies can match and yet it sells only unbranded (“no-name”) tires.
The company’s name and reputation is its brand.
For a startup company, creating a brand isn’t usually isn’t a make-or-break matter…unless you make an avoidable but all too common mistake: picking a company or product name that belongs to someone else.
This will almost inevitably lead to your having to change your name or the product’s name, which in a market already suspicious of newcomers sullies what little reputation you have built up. It is very definitely not a good thing.
The Internet is your friend in selecting company and product names as well as identifying competitors, but while it is a good friend it is also a very needy one in terms of your time.
There is no single site available to check whether some other business is using the business or product name that you have in mind.
You should start with browser searches — Google, Firefox, Bing, Internet Explorer, and others — and then move to the federal and state websites listing trademarks, patents, and registered corporate names.
A good starting place for product names is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office site at www.uspto.gov/trademarks/process/search/.
Corporate names, unfortunately, are registered by each state, so for a thorough investigation of the name they have to be searched the same way.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) maintains a large database of registered corporations but their regulatory interests generally do not include all corporations so it usually would not be inclusive enough for your particular kind of name search.
One highly recommended Internet search involves simply attempting to register a website in the name of your business or your product.
If someone else has already registered the name it isn’t the end of your dream but you will have some choices to make.
The first step is to see if the name is in active use, and if not, sometimes the owner will sell the registration to you.
The second is to consider how important the “dot com” suffix is to your business.
The proliferation of other suffixes and the rising use of hyperlinks instead of typed-in Internet addresses have somewhat diminished the operational importance of suffixes.
Whether using a less common suffix would be a wise or good fit for your business, though, is a question you should consider carefully.
Besides checking out the business and product names, if your business idea involves a new product or service you should search the Internet to see if anyone else is already offering the same thing. This kind of search can require some imagination because it may require describing your product or service in different ways.
It should also entail checking out advice sites, bulletin boards, and blogs that describe the problem your product or service is intended to fix and making note of what products or services others have used.
This will give you an idea of your competition and whether users were satisfied with the results.
While you can conduct most of this kind of research yourself, you can also get professional help.
There are individual lawyers and entire law firms that specialize in intellectual property issues involving product and company names and, if you do not feel comfortable or capable in this area, you should consider the assistance and advice they can offer.
The more homework you do yourself, though, the more value you will draw from their expertise and experience.
Establishing a brand for your company isn’t easy or risk free, but it is a very rewarding experience and worth every bit of effort put into it.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant. He can be reached at otisrep@aol.com.
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