How do I brand my product?

What I personally do whenever I look for a brand name is the following:

1- I list all keywords related to the product.

2- List similar products names.

3- Start working on combination options between keywords, either by combining different keywords, adding prefixes or suffexes or playing with the wording of the keywords depending on the product itself, (Goalzz, Kooora, and so on).

4- This is the most important step, I check if the name I have chosen available as a dot com domain. It happened many times that I changed a product name because it's dot com is not available.

**in your case you might not have to get the dot com of the products if each product line has many products and you don't care of having separate domain for each product.

I have written an article on my blog about Building an Affordable Brand you might find it useful.

فالبدايه قم بكتابة قائمة بالكلمات التي تصف منتجك من جميع النواحي او الخدمه التي يقدمها منتجك و ابتعد عن الكلمات العامه كخطوه اولى .

ثانيا قم بتنقيح هذه القائمه بإختيار الكلمات التي بها الصفات التاليه:

• سهلة الحفظ و التذكر
• سهلة القراءه سهلة الكتابه
• تصف المنتج او الخدمه
• بلغة الفئة المستهدفه
• تميز منتجك عن المنتجات المنافسه - لا تختر اسم قريب من منتج منافس حتى لا يخلط المستهلك بين منتجك و المنتج المنافس
• محفزه للمستهلك لتجربة المنتج

Dear SMN,

As Firas already pointed out you will have to do the basics - listing keywords, checking domains etc.. But before that you will have to decide if you're going for a generic, self-explaining name or a fantasy name. While generic names are an easy brand and speak for themselves fantasy names are harder to brand and harder to associate with your product. Take "eBay.com" for example - that's a fantasy name that needs to be explained whereas "AuctionWebsite" would be self-explanatory. Same goes for "Yahoo!" vs. "Metasearch" - the latter explains what the product is all about whereas the former had to build a brand around its name before people would associate a search engine (and now much more than that) with it.

If your product is cool it nowadays doesn't really matter if you come up with a fantasy name as people will easily get to know your product and what it's about. Such names tend to be unique and long-lasting while generic names tend to get boring quickly. There's no recipe on which way to go - you will have to decide on that yourself. Just be aware of the pros and cons of both approaches.

Rias

P.S.: @Firas: the C64 still rocks! :-)

لا أعطي للاسم أهمية كبيرة، فقيمة الاسم (العلامة التجارية) تأتي لاحقا من قيمة المنتج. من يعرف أن Yahoo اختصار لـ Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle، ومن يتذكر أن Google جاء من تهجئة خاطئة لـ googol. وكذلك اسم برنامج إدارة المحتويات Drupal الذي كان يفترض أن يسمى Dorp.

هناك أمور بديهية يجب الانتباه لها، مثل الابتعاد عن الأسماء المتشابهة والأسماء صعبة التذكر أو التهجئة. غير ذلك، اختيار الاسم لن يؤثر على العملية التسويقية للمنتج.

إذا كنت ستبتكر منتجا جديدا لا مثيل له، قد تجد بسهولة اسما يدل على المنتج نفسه. وإن لم تجد اسما له نفس دلالة المنتج فلا مشكلة. تذكر أنك يجب أن تركز على المنتج نفسه وليس العلامة التجارية.

Beside all above, think of brand as identity. What is the first thing you want your clients to believe when they see it. Branding is the art of delivering your message to your client, and putting an unconscious reaction and perception to it. For example what do you think when I say xerox or nike. It is effort to create this which counts more than the design. I agree with Mohammed that you need to focus on the product more and the effort to relay your message