Striking the Naming Balance: Unique Enough to Stand Out, Simple Enough to Stick

Business coach and self-help guru Larry Winget famously said of branding, “Branding is discovering your uniqueness and learning to exploit it.” The first act of branding for most businesses is choosing your business name—the hinge on which your brand identity pivots.

Standing out is crucial in today’s crowded, noisy world, but standing out uniquely is something few brands achieve. The brands that do—from Apple to Google—have a powerful name that sets them apart from competitors.

Our research project, AtomRadar, has shown that a unique name is integral to strong customer connections. 80% of 18–24-year-olds say names should be unique, and 74% of consumers overall say business names are important when they’re choosing to engage with a brand. A unique name means every impression counts, reducing the cost of customer acquisition, maximizing revenue, and allowing you to better weather market instability.

However, uniqueness is just one quality a name must possess. In pursuit of creativity, brands will suffer if they sacrifice memorability or functionality. With thousands of businesses entering the market every day, ambitious founders need to know how to choose a unique brand name. Naming is an art and a science—the answer lies in leveraging linguistic and creative tips.

Put Clarity Above Cleverness

While your brand name has to help you stand out, it must also communicate effectively with your audience. That means that before you can name your business, you must understand it: how it solves customers’ problems, connects to their lifestyle, and aligns with their values.

Distill your business idea and brand identity into a few clear concepts. What are the big ideas and emotions that your brand is all about? What’s the tone you’ll take with your audience? These concepts will provide the parameters of your unique name, and ensure that whatever you choose, it will both stand out, stick in minds, and contribute to the bigger project of building a lasting relationship with your customers.

Slocum Studio’s Approach to Brand Identity Design Services

This is where working with a professional brand partner can make a real difference. At Slocum Studio, we specialize in brand identity design services that go beyond the name, crafting a cohesive visual and verbal brand system rooted in your values and business goals. Whether you’re starting from scratch or reimagining an existing brand, we help you create a lasting impression that resonates with your target audience.

With a clarified brand concept, you know what your name needs to communicate to your audience. Now you can employ linguistic tricks or pursue meaningful names to find something that stands out in and across your industry to be truly memorable: the foundation of a unique name.

How to Choose a Unique Brand Name

It’s hard enough to balance the many competing pressures of choosing your business name. Harder still, for most founders, the moment of truth comes early in the organization’s history—sometimes before you have a minimum viable product or even targeted market segments.

Yet it’s a decision that can’t be rushed. Your name can determine your brand’s trajectory: a uniquely memorable name means straight shooting into the hearts and minds of your audience, while an overly complex name will go straight over their heads.

Go Abstract

Abstract names — usually completely made-up new words — are by definition unique. You won’t find Monzo, Xerox and Kodak in the dictionary, yet these brands all managed to build powerful empires in their industries without pre-existing semantic associations. Any founder seeking a truly unique business name should consider making up a word, but within limits.

Abstract names must be based on linguistic principles. If customers’ tongues are tripping up, they’re hard to share, and if the phonoaesthetics, that is to say, the impact of the sound of your name, don’t line up with your brand identity, you’ll create a confusing overall impression.

For example, brands based on technology often rely on letters like Z (Zapier or Monzo) or X (Xerox) to convey a sense of the cutting-edge. Hard consonants, such as the ‘K’s in Kodak, reinforce memorability, while soft vowel sounds like those found in Olay imply luxury and care.

Pick a Metaphor

Metaphors use a single word to conjure multiple meanings, emphasizing many aspects of your brand and leading competitors to appear simple and superficial by comparison. The right metaphor, therefore, makes your brand unique in the minds of your audience.

Start with your identity: a metaphorical name must have the correct emotional resonance for your brand, whether that’s luxury, cutting-edge technology or the ubiquity of Amazon or Google (whose name is based on ‘googol’, 10¹⁰⁰ or a one followed by a hundred zeros). If it’s associated with visual imagery, like Red Bull,  you’ll create a lasting impression thanks to the well-documented impact of visualization on recall.

“If a picture is truly worth one thousand words, then what better way to convey your corporate brand than with a metaphor?” — Phil Davis, Tungsten Branding

There’s a lot of latitude in metaphorical names, and cheeky or counterintuitive names, such as Slack for a work communications tool or Robinhood for an investment platform, can elevate you above your competitors and carve out a truly unique brand identity.

Try a Creative Twist

While abstract names are fully made up, and metaphorical names tend to rely on their real-world interpretation, the middle road of a creative twist on an existing word can also lead to a unique brand name.

There are many ways to adapt existing English-language words to match your business idea, brand identity and customer expectations. A misspelling, such as in ride-sharing service Lyft, creates a new, trademarkable and brandable word with a clear connection to your brand, while suffixes are commonly used to create new words with relevance and meaning.

The -ly and -ify suffixes are now firmly established in the branding world, and this preexisting audience familiarity enhances memorability without watering down how you stand out. From Oatly to Shopify, these brands have taken the core of their brand and made it uniquely their own.

Why Work with a Studio for Brand Identity?

It’s one thing to come up with a metaphor—it’s another to make it resonate with your market. That’s where working with an experienced team like Slocum Studio can make all the difference. We specialize in translating clever brand names and metaphors into fully realized brand systems, helping clients define not just what they do—but who they are. Our brand identity design services are built to ensure your metaphor becomes a magnet for your ideal audience.

Balancing Unique With Memorable: Avoiding the Biggest Naming Blunders

Finding a unique name is a creative journey, and the road is potholed with potential mistakes. In our increasingly competitive world, where thousands of businesses are launched and named daily, there’s a dangerously fine line between a name being unique and usable, and overly complex, where memorability and meaning are harmed.

• It’s too quirky to spell or pronounce. Whether creating a new word or utilizing the metaphor of an existing word, your name must be easy to say, search, spell and share. Naming your brand “Kwiklee” or “Phloomb” and you’ll lose customers, and even real words with unclear pronunciation can harm your brand. Jeff Bezos famously turned to the powerful name Amazon after an early stakeholder misheard their first name — Cadabra — as “cadaver”. Every new brand needs to listen closely to initial reactions.

• It’s not memorable. Memorability is built on many factors — how your name sounds, what it means, and how well it connects to your brand identity. Never compromise how easily customers can remember your name for something unique, as many brands have failed from names that didn’t stick in customers’ minds. Early fintech brand Wesabe had a unique name, but it failed in part because its main competitor Mint achieved top-of-mind awareness through a memorable name.
  
• It’s too long: While you want your brand name on everyone’s lips, it must not be a mouthful. Ideally, keep your name to 2-3 syllables, across one or two words, and under fourteen characters to match it with a domain name that customers can easily access.
  
• It’s too generic: While a unique name is much less likely to sound generic, this is a common mistake for brands that focus on emphasizing their product or service over the emotional resonance of their brand. Nike’s first name, Blue Ribbon Sports, did nothing to stand out from the hundreds of sportswear brands they entered the market with. Similarly, generic names are harder to pair with exact match domains and often run into trademark issues. Whatever name you choose, it must be validated against the USPTO’s database. 

Being unique doesn’t just matter for your relationship with customers — it can also impact your legal status and right to use your name in certain regions and industries, laying the foundation for a powerful brand and future growth.

Unique Brands Build Unique Connections

In 2025, it’s easier than ever to start a business thanks to online infrastructure and AI tools. This landscape, with lower barriers of entry, is making every industry more competitive, and simultaneously, consumers are becoming more sophisticated when dealing with marketing materials.

It’s no longer enough to nail your niche. Businesses need to offer consumers the full package: a product that works, and a brand identity that stands out head and shoulders over competitors. This starts with understanding how to choose a unique brand name that generates real meaning for consumers.

Whether you’re going abstract, metaphorical, or adding a clever twist to an existing word, your name is more than a label. A truly unique name doesn’t just help you stand out, it invites people in. So aim for a name that’s not only ownable and original, but unforgettable. In the end, it’s not the loudest name that wins — it’s the one that sticks.

At the end of the day, your brand name is just the beginning. To turn that name into a fully realized brand that connects, converts, and lasts, partner with experts who understand the strategy behind great design. At Slocum Design Studio, we help businesses like yours build bold, memorable brands from the ground up with our brand identity design services. Let’s create something remarkable together.

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Author bio: Grant Polachek is Chief Growth Officer at Atom.com, a leading business naming and domain platform. With 15 years of naming and marketing experience, he’s worked on projects for Dell, Hilton, and Alibaba.