What’s in a name?

We’d like to share a little about creating our name… just for the sake of posterity.

lovemoney.com is here to help you build a better relationship with your money. Simple isn’t it? Or so it seems.

We like the name (obviously, that’s why we chose it!) but we didn’t have any any idea how tricky it was going to be to create our name when we set out to do so.

Right from the outset we had some criteria our name would need to meet. Some of this was what you’d expect – memorable, easy to say, easy to spell and so on. Obviously, there was a lot of detail to consider here regarding company values, and making sure these are represented correctly and with the right sentiment. But we also needed to be sure we chose a name and an identity we could grow with. We hope we have achieved these things, we certainly believe we have.

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s more to comment on how hard a process generating a name can be. The difficulty of being original is as good a place as any to illustrate what I mean. We tried concocted words, brains-storms, name generators (like this great one) acronyms, everything. We thought we were onto some good, if quirky ideas, until our focus groups revealed that our target audience preferred a more literal approach. It was ok to be original but only if it was immediately obvious from the name what the company actually did.

Another tricky aspect of naming that becomes rapidly apparent is that so many of the good names are gone. This is worsened when, like us, you need names that will be available as website domains.The lovemoney.com team had a fair few eureka moments only to find the would-be name already in use for a highly successful web business.

All in all, an activity not for the faint-hearted!

On a slightly separate note, the additions we mentioned to lovemoney.com in the previous post are on track. If you’ve visited lovemoney.com and like what you see there’ll be more coming in the New Year.

This brief interlude is now over (back to building a bigger, better lovemoney.com v2!)

Take care

The lovemoney.com team