Part of my job as a copy­writer is com­ing up with names. A while ago, I wrote a blog post on the power of names. I won’t repeat it here, except to reit­er­ate that brand­ing, albeit not a pri­or­ity for most, is still incred­i­bly important.

And it’s some­thing you mustn’t ignore.

Why? Because choos­ing a name for your busi­ness or prod­uct, even your domain name, is often the sin­gle, most impor­tant busi­ness deci­sion you’ll ever make.

To that end, let me share with you some nam­ing tips. In my expe­ri­ence, I have five char­ac­ter­is­tics of great brand names, which I call the five “S’s.” I encour­age you to fol­low when try­ing to come up with a solid, long-​​lasting, and highly prof­itable name.

For starters, let me point out that the best names are rel­a­tively short, easy to pro­nounce, and easy to remem­ber. They have con­sid­er­able mnemonic value.

And mnemonic value often trans­lates into finan­cial value.

A mnemonic is a device — such as a word, sym­bol, or sound — intended to assist in recall. If a name car­ries some mnemonic value, it will increase traf­fic, sales, and value to your busi­ness on its own. The more mnemonic a name is, the more valu­able it is.

There are var­i­ous rea­sons for this.

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My oper­at­ing assump­tion is when the broad­cast news media pikes any­thing as “the next big thing” then likely the ship has already sailed. And see­ing trag­i­cally unhip sen­a­tors like @clairecmc madly exer­cis­ing their thumbs dur­ing the Pres­i­den­tial Address to the Joint Ses­sion didn’t do any­thing to dis­pel that notion with regards to Twitter.

So when my copy of @JoelComm’s Twit­ter Power: How to Dom­i­nate Your Mar­ket One Tweet at a Time arrived in the mail, I fig­ured here was another case of early adopter Joel wav­ing from the deck to hap­less gang­plank standers by.

What could Joel have to say that I hadn’t already heard since actively join­ing Twit­ter late last year? And what can he say to any­one who hasn’t been tweet­ing at least that long to help them “dom­i­nate their market”?

Quite a bit, it turns out.

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After my recent push for Robert Plank’s Speed Copy Secrets copy­writ­ing spe­cial report on how to write copy in under an hour, I wanted to test a few other things from Robert, since he’s a gifted pro­gram­mer and offers some neat scripts.

(Actu­ally, I recently bought every­thing from Robert I could get my hands on, and so far I’m thor­oughly impressed. Specif­i­cally, his “Full-​​Blast PHP” and “Sales Page Tac­tics Vol­umes 1–3″ prod­ucts are fabulous.)

I’m test­ing just a cou­ple of Robert’s scripts on this blog, and early results are stun­ning. Let me share with you a few test results…

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A recently under­stood seg­ment of mar­ket­ing is the immense power behind the prod­uct cat­e­gory. Often, many busi­nesses build their entire mar­ket­ing strat­egy around a par­tic­u­lar brand and its bet­ter qual­i­ties within a cur­rently known prod­uct cat­e­gory, only to have it all go down the drain in the end.

Remem­ber the “New Coke”? In the 80’s, Pepsi con­ducted taste tests called “The Pepsi Chal­lenge.” Coke, on the side­lines, also heard from their own research that a newer, bet­ter tast­ing brand would beat Pepsi.

Only 77 days later, accord­ing to Coke’s for­mer mar­ket­ing vice-​​president Ser­gio Zyman in his book “The End of Mar­ket­ing As We Know It,” not only were they forced to rein­tro­duce the older ver­sion as “Clas­sic Coke” but they also had to even­tu­ally wipe the New Coke out. Bet­ter is not always bet­ter.

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So, if you’re fol­low­ing the com­mand­ments, you should now have a unique name, pos­si­bly a tagline, and estab­lished your­self as the first or leader in your unique cat­e­gory. What about the ser­vice or prod­uct you offer? Do you offer an extra­or­di­nary prod­uct or ser­vice, or do you offer an ordi­nary one?

Even if the ser­vice you pro­vide is cus­tom­ary, tra­di­tional, and prob­a­bly offered by your com­pe­ti­tion, you should make it appear unique just as well.

Remem­ber that per­cep­tion is more pow­er­ful than truth. You don’t need to empha­size that your prod­uct or ser­vice is unique, bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion, or even the best for that mat­ter. Doing so by declar­ing that it is can some­times be worse than not say­ing any­thing at all, and the rea­son for that is that it makes your self-​​serving claim appear sus­pect or exaggerated.

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