A. What is Branding?

• An image created in someone’s mind
• It’s both tangible and intangible characteristics of a product or service that make it unique
• Products that are branded are often chosen over similar products because they somehow have a perceived value of being ‘better’

B. Why Create Corporate Brand?

Creating a corporate brand is one of the most important things for success of a business. A powerful, emotional and inspirational corporate brand name can really give your business a great competitive edge.

Even though brand name is only a part of the corporate branding, a powerful brand name can trigger an emotion or even can fire an imagination. Hence choosing a brand name that reflects the mission, vision and the attitude of the company is the first step to build a good corporate brand image. A good tag line that has a fair bit of punch can really do wonders to your corporate brand. Some of the most important things that nay organization has to consider while trying to go for a branding campaign are:

• Be clear with the message.
• Never go for a single advertising channel
• Go ahead in a very structured process through all those selected advertising channels.
• Study the results of various channels using various marketing mix principles.

If you follow this procedure then it is certain that your brand will get a great corporate branding image, which reflects, in the bottom line of your company.

C. Ways to Come up with the New Corporate Brand Name

Every corporate name has a unique thought process that goes into the making of the name. The corporate name is often the brainchild of the corporate owner or creator and can be any name that the creator finds interesting and thinks is appropriate for the corporate. Here are some of the ways that people have used to come up with their brand name.

Unique Words
There are several brand names which are unique words that are not necessarily related directly to the business arena or the profession.
Common Examples: Adobe, Apple, Amazon

Keywords
Some brand names make use of words which directly give an idea about the business.
Common Examples: Pizza Hut, Burger King

Owner’s Name
Several popular Businessmen have used their own name or in general any other names for their business.
Common Examples: Mercedes, Boeing, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Ferrari, Kawasaki, Kroger, Akai, Black and Decker, Tommy Hilfiger, Nestle

Acronyms
Some brand names make use of acronyms or short forms of one or several words.Common Examples: BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network), FCUK (French Connection United Kingdom.), FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino)

Compound Words
Some people like to combine two related words to form a unique company name, which may not be necessarily a valid word.
Common Examples: Microsoft, Compaq, ebay, FedEx, Finnair, Hotmail, Intel,Manugistics , PetroBras, Qualcomm, Skype

Non-English Words
Many business names have their origin in varied languages like Chinese, Spanish, Sanskrit and so on.
Common Examples: Daewoo ( Means ‘great universe’ in Korean), Eidos (means ‘species’ in Greek) Nike (Greek Goddess of Victory), Sanyo (Means ‘three oceans’ in Japanese), Sony (From the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound), Volvo (Means ‘I roll’ in Latin), Volkswagen (Means people’s car in German)

Wrong Spellings
There are some business names that are words which have been intentionally mis-spelled to make the names sound more interesting and catchy.
Common Examples: Flickr, Google, Topix, Zooomr

In general a business name should be catchy, simple to spell and easy to pronounce. It is always good to keep things clean and simple.