I used to teach mar­ket­ing and sell­ing at a local col­lege here in Ottawa. And one of the things I used to help teach with — I also use them all the time when I want to learn and remem­ber new things, too — was mnemonics.

Mnemon­ics are tools or devices that aid retention.

Do you remem­ber the lit­tle ditty to remem­ber all the plan­ets’ names, taught mostly in kinder­garten? It goes, “My very eager mother just served us nine piz­zas,” where the first let­ter of each word rep­re­sents the name of each planet in our solar sys­tem (i.e., Mer­cury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Sat­urn, Uranus, Nep­tune, and Pluto).

Songs, rhymes, for­mu­las, pic­tures, allit­er­a­tion, etc are often used as mnemonic devices. But my favorite form of mnemonic are acronyms. You’ve prob­a­bly seen a few of them on this blog. That’s because I often use acronyms to teach about copywriting.

I do this to help you remem­ber, appre­ci­ate, and under­stand the process I go through when I write copy. Here they are, with their mean­ing (plus, each mnemonic is linked to its respec­tive arti­cle on this blog, cov­er­ing the for­mula in more detail):

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Part of my job as a copy­writer includes, from time to time, cre­at­ing names for busi­nesses, prod­ucts, and ser­vices. Choos­ing a name may be the sin­gle, most impor­tant busi­ness deci­sion you will ever make.

We are con­stantly bom­barded with mar­ket­ing mes­sages. Lim­ited by people’s very short atten­tion span, your mar­ket­ing mes­sage has to be effec­tive to the degree that it must com­mu­ni­cate its essence and cre­ate top-​​of-​​mind aware­ness within an extremely short amount of time.

Names are often the best tools — and some­times the only ones — for accom­plish­ing this efficiently.

In the game of posi­tion­ing, your name has to stick firmly in the mind of the mar­ket­place and must do so instantly. While unique­ness is an impor­tant fac­tor, there are many other ele­ments that can help the anchor­ing process — ele­ments that help a name become mem­o­rable as well as cho­sen when a cus­tomer expe­ri­ences a spe­cific need or desire.

So, here are some sim­ple rules to fol­low when choos­ing a name for your com­pany or product.

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