CHAPTER 2

The 7 Deal Breakers

When you’re starting out with a blank slate, don’t weaken your name with any disadvantages. Cr8tiv spellings, unintelligible words, and unfamiliar expressions may make you unique, but more often than not these names can spell trouble.

If you need to help someone spell, pronounce, or understand your name, you are essentially apologizing for it. Making excuses for your name devalues your brand.

Here’s an easy way to remember the next acronym, SCRATCH: If it makes you scratch your head, scratch it off the list.

SCRATCH: The 7 Deal Breakers

Spelling challenged—looks like a typo

Copycat—resembles competitors’ names

Restrictive—limits future growth

Annoying—seems forced, frustrates customers

Tame—feels flat, descriptive, uninspired

Curse of knowledge—speaks only to insiders

Hard to pronounce—confuses and distances customers

If you want a strong name, make sure it doesn’t suffer from any of these weaknesses.

Spelling Challenged Looks Like a Typo

If your name isn’t spelled like it sounds, it’s a mistake. Spelling your brand name in a nonintuitive way isn’t clever; it’s a cop-out. Sure, it’s tempting to spell your name “yooneek.ly” so you can nab an available domain name. But spelling-challenged names will forever frustrate your customers, embarrass your employees, and annoy journalists, bloggers, and proofreaders.

Take, for example, a boot rack made by Boottique. The name is cute, but the awkward spelling is a major pain point. The company is suffering for its shortsightedness, always having to explain: “with two o’s and two t’s.” It should have given Boottique the boot.

Misspelled Hell

For many years, my firm bestowed a Head Scratcher of the Year prize to companies with extremely problematic names. One winner was the organic baby clothing company Speesees. Obviously, whoever came up with this name was never a spelling bee champion.

Imagine if you worked at Speesees. Making sales calls, 37 times a day you would say, “That’s Stacey with an e, S-T-A-C-E-Y at Speesees dot com. S-P-E-E-S-E-E-S. I know it’s a weird spelling, but that’s how babies would spell it if babies could spell.” That’s embarrassing and exasperating.

Beyond the babyish spelling, Speesees is a creepy name for anything related to human babies. Plus, Spee-sees broke what I thought was an obvious rule of naming: your business name should not rhyme with feces. Speesees is now out of business. Gone, baby, gone.

How Many Ways Can Your Name Be Spelled?

Say your name and imagine how many ways it can be spelled. Bawte is a tortured spelling of the word bought. When pronounced (correctly) it sounds like “bot,” a common word among tech companies, and it can be spelled bought, bot, or Bawte. Multiple spelling options require an explanation. “It’s Bawte, as in, ‘we bought the domain name for 99 cents,’ but you spell it B-A-W-T-E.” Bawte was apparently for naught. As with many startups with names that suck, the company bought the farm.

Don’t Get Cute with Numbers

It’s perfectly acceptable to have numbers in your name as long as you aren’t using them as a substitute for spelling out words. The names 23andMe (the genetic testing company), 21st Amendment Brewery, and 401Katie work because they are written as they are heard. But embedding numbers in a name as a shortcut looks amateurish. You don’t want your brand to look like a lazy text message. If you use numerals in place of words, like 4 for four, you will 4ever have 2 spell your name when you say it. For example, you would have to say love-2learn.com, “love numeral two learn.” Save your breath.

Test Siri’s Hearing

The true test to see if a name is spelling challenged is to see and hear how Siri and other voice recognition bots spell it. Is it garbled? Does autocorrect suggest an absurdly wrong word, as every spell-check program will forever do to you and your customers? Welcome to your world.

Other Spelling-Challenged Names

Chuze (fitness centers)

Zaarly (home service platform)

Svpply (social shopping site)

Kiip (mobile advertising)

Flckr (photo storage)

I’d like to buy a vowel, please.

Copycat Resembles Competitors’ Names

Strolling through San Diego’s charming Little Italy neighborhood, I spotted a sweet shop called iDessert. (Gee, I wonder if they sell Apple pie.)

Hijacking another company’s original idea isn’t good for your business reputation or for building trust with your customers. Copycat names are lazy, lack originality, and blatantly ride on a competitor’s coattails. Plus, because they could cause customer confusion, you open yourself up to trademark infringement.

Pinkberry is a successful chain of trendy frozen yogurt stores. While the name isn’t a showstopper, because of the popularity of the brand, a proliferation of copycats have tried to take a free ride on the highly distinctive Pinkberry name and its swirl logo. Here are a handful of the dozens of knockoff names I’ve come across. Several of these have faced trademark infringement and related claims.

Yoberry	Lemonberry	Snowberry
Peachberry	Blissberry	Sweetberry
Yogiberry	Myberry	Blushberry
Kiwiberry	Luvberry	Coolberry

Copycat Trends to Avoid

Stay away from any of these naming styles and words, which have all been played out and will instantly date your brand, such as eHarmony and iMotors. You want your name to be timeless, not trendy.

eAnything (hopelessly dated and looks grammatically incorrect written as a proper noun)

iAnything (unless you’re Apple, don’t do this)

uAnything (see eAnything)

________ly (additional point deducted for .ly domain names, especially verbs, which look and sound sil.ly)

Any fruit (Apple copycat)

Monkey

Rocket

Daddy

Zen

Bright

Belly

Also avoid names that are a combination of a random color plus a noun. While these contrived names work for some companies where the color is meaningful to their audiences, as in WhiteHat Security (“white hats” are the good guys), most names with colors in them, especially those of tech companies and wine brands, sound terribly dated. And good luck finding an available domain name of a color combined with a noun. The only one left is beigekumquat.com.

An Exception to the Copycat Rule

With only 26 letters in the English alphabet, it’s nearly impossible to find a “dictionary word” name that no one else has ever used before, especially if you want a name that’s intuitive to spell and pronounce. It’s usually not a problem for unrelated brands to share the same name when your audience is not likely to be confused about who is who. If a name appears in context on a product, you don’t associate it with the other brand. When you’re showering with a bar of Dove soap, you don’t think of a Dove ice cream bar any more than Magnum ice cream makes you think of Magnum condoms.

More Unrelated Brands with the Same Name

Columbia (sportswear, motion pictures)

Pandora (internet radio, jewelry)

Delta (faucets, airline, dental insurer)

Explorer (SUV, browser)

Luxor (casino, pens)

I don’t recommend using the same name as a brand that is so recognizable your name would smack of being a copycat. Rolls Royce, Apple, and Virgin are uniquely identified, and if you copied them you would hear from their legal counsel. Always check with a trademark attorney before using any name.

Restrictive Limits Future Growth

The average American visits a tire shop only a handful of times in their life. Yet in Canada, most adults shop at Canadian Tire once a week. Why? Canadian Tire sells much more than tires. You can find toasters, treadmills, tackle boxes, tool belts, trash cans, tents, tablecloths, toys, tropical plants, telescopes, trampolines, and a whole lot of other merchandise from A to Z unrelated to the wheels on a car. In the eighties, the company’s tagline was “There is a lot more to Canadian Tire than tires.” (The company should have just changed its name instead of wasting a tagline making excuses for it.)

With more than 1,700 retail locations in Canada, Canadian Tire is known by Canucks as a mass merchandiser. But what if the company wanted to expand into the United States? How would anyone know it sells everything from tennis balls to toilet seats? Hello, million-dollar ad campaign.

Look into your crystal ball and imagine what your company might grow into down the road. Plan ahead, and choose a name wide enough to cover you in the future. The name Amazon suggests “enormous.” Jeff Bezos chose the name because it conjures up images of one of the world’s largest rivers, and he envisioned his company being unfathomably large, even when he founded it in 1994. No matter what it sells or how Amazon evolves, the name will always fit. Can you imagine how stunted the company would be if it were named Book Barn?

Lawn Love is a San Diego startup that’s growing faster than crabgrass. Its tagline is “Lawncare made easy.” (I’m not sure why its website shows a hunky guy holding a chainsaw; we use a lawnmower to cut our lawn.) Lawn Love offers weed whacking, fertilizing, seeding, and two new services: snow removal and Christmas lights installation. Lawn Love has already outgrown its name. How could it have avoided this? It could have branded the company with a name that would work for lawn care but not fence them into the yard. For instance, the name A Cut Above suggests cutting the lawn, evokes superior service, and would work for any outdoor home service it offered.

Your Name Shouldn’t Have an Age Limit

A name that made a nod to the past proved troublesome for a leading vertical farming company: See Jane Farm. Young people fail to understand why this name is so charming. It was inspired by the Dick and Jane school primers, which were prevalent during a simpler time when food was more nutritious. The company knew See Jane Farm would only become less meaningful in the years to come. It hired my firm to come up with a more relevant name that would never become dated and would work globally. We went through a rigorous exploratory process, cultivating hundreds of ideas. The chosen name was scalable and evoked the company’s mission to feed the world: Plenty. It especially grew on investors; the company raised more than $200M in venture funding. Plenty, indeed.

More Examples of Restrictive Names

99¢ Only Stores (now selling items for as much as $3.99)

24 Hour Fitness (not all locations are open 24 hours)

Diapers.com (all kinds of baby products)

Fast Signs (tagline: “More than Fast. More than signs.”)

Hotel Tonight (taking reservations up to 100 days out)

Annoying Seems Forced, Frustrates Customers

What is annoying of course is subjective, but think about your name from a customer’s point of view: you can avoid causing frustration if your name does not appear forced, nonsensical, or grammatically incorrect.

Clunky Coined Names

If you invent a new word for your name (e.g., Pinterest or Groupon), make sure it doesn’t sound too contrived or unnatural. Mashing two words together or mixing up a bunch of letters to form a new word is tricky and often sounds strained.

One of the most cringe-worthy coined names I’ve come across is a women’s networking organization, Femfessionals. Would you want it on your LinkedIn profile? Not if you’re a woman who wants to appear professional. (Apparently Femfessionals got the message and changed its name to Femcity, which also makes me cringe.)

Barely changing the last few letters of a word to make a new word will almost always land your brand in the lame-name hall of fame. Learnia, Washio, Innova, Natura, and Evolva each show a complete lack of effort and creativity.

Some natural foods brands try this tired technique with unintentional results: Activia and Enviga sound like they’re full of artificial ingredients. And as much as you wanna, don’t bastardize nirvana. It’s a beautiful word but rarely sounds pretty when combined with another word. Homevana, Teavana, Purvana, Grillvana, and Pervana are poorvana. (Additional points are knocked off for having perv in your name.)

It’s fine to lightly coin a word ending in an a if, like Nautica or Expedia, it truly sounds like a real word. While the latter works beautifully, the name of another travel website, Trivago, simply tries too hard. Trivago may be a botched attempt to make up a word by combining trip + vacation + go. You may be thinking, “But, Alexandra, Trivago is an awesome name!” No, it’s a name that’s recognized because the company has drilled it into your head by spending millions of dollars in TV advertising. What’s your TV ad budget?

Another naming style that tries way too hard is adding trendy suffixes to a word to make up a new word. Pieology, Teaosophy, and Perfumania are all awkward and clunky.

Overused Suffixes to Avoid

____-mania	____-osophy	____-ology
____-topia	____-vana	____-icious
___-zilla	____-ster	____-ly

Resist the Temptation to Be Mysterious

A lingerie company is named ThirdLove. What do you think that means? (The most common responses I get to this question are “a ménage a trois” and “a third nipple.”) In a blog post about the “somewhat mystifying” name, ThirdLove’s cofounder actually said, “We like that the meaning is ambiguous.” What?! Nothing about your business name should be intentionally unclear. Equally baffling is the chain of gyms called Orangetheory. How did they possibly squeeze the name of a gym out of something that sounds like a pretentious juice bar?

Don’t Get Thrown in the Grammar Slammer

A grammatically challenged name is unprofessional, acts as a huge turnoff to customers, and sets a bad example for children. A few of these names should receive citations from the grammar police. Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, RetailMeNot, Be Relax, and Wee-R-Sweetz are all offenders. The ringleader, Toys “R” Us, violates nearly every rule of the English language in just seven short letters.

Backward Names: The Wrong Way to Go

Unless you were looking in your rearview mirror and spotted it on a license plate, how would you know the name neerg (lowercase intentional), was the word green in reverse? Names spelled backward, like Xobni, are annoyingly frustrating.

A backward name that does work well is Harpo, the name of Oprah’s production company. It’s a real word with memorable imagery (Harpo Marx) and makes us smile in either direction it’s written.

Tame Feels Flat, Descriptive, Uninspired

According to Nir Eyal, author of the bestseller Indis-tractable, people check their phones an average of 150 times per day. One-third of Americans say they’d rather give up sex than lose their phone. So your name will constantly be fighting for attention.

Unless you have a gazillion-dollar ad budget to have your name blared on TV and repeated in social media ad nauseam, you can’t afford to be boring with a tame name.

Overly descriptive names are weak because they don’t challenge, excite, or mentally stimulate us. They require little imagination. And they reveal nothing about the personality of your brand (other than exposing your lack of creativity).

When you draw from a limited pool of descriptive words, you sound like everyone else, making your name blend in with repetitive from competitors’ names. Here are a handful of some of the hundreds of names from the cloud crowd.

Cloud2b	Cloud Bus	Cloud Pad
Cloud 2.0	Cloud NET	CloudSET
Cloud 365	CloudNOW	Cloud Tek
Cloud 9	CloudOne	Cloud Web

Cloud 9 stands out because it’s a familiar term. All the others are indistinguishable.

Descriptive Names Don’t Have to Be Tame

Your name can describe your brand without being bland. Creative descriptive names include Range Rover, Gentle Dental, and True Measure. The latter is a B2B name I created for a company that provides a true measure of employee well-being.

Another brand that’s succeeded with a creatively descriptive name is the only manufacturer of springless trampolines. Trampolines are flippin’ fun, and the company knew a name like Springless Trampolines didn’t have enough bounce. How did they convey springless, but not fall flat? Springfree Trampolines. I love them, not just because Glenn gave me one for Christmas, but because the name Springfree says the trampolines are free of springs, and it has the imagery of springing free. Now that’s something worth jumping up and down about.

More Examples of Tame Names

LendingClub (peer-to-peer lending)

Instacart (grocery delivery)

DocuSign (electronic signatures)

AcuPoll (research)

Network Solutions (domain name)

Curse of Knowledge Speaks Only to Insiders

No one is more of an expert on the company or product you are naming than you are. But when you’re communicating with potential customers who are unfamiliar with your world, your insider knowledge can become a curse. We can’t unlearn what we know, so we find it extremely difficult to think as a newbie. We talk in acronyms, internal shorthand, code words, and industry jargon, all of which are foreign to outsiders. Don’t alienate your potential customers by cursing your name.

The curse of knowledge has been described as “a cognitive bias in which better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.” In other words, when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become bad communicators of our own ideas. Coined by economist Robin Hogarth, the term curse of knowledge got on my radar thanks to Made to Stick—Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Dan and Chip Heath, which I referred to earlier. Just as ideas with the curse of knowledge aren’t sticky, neither are names.

I once met a trio of entrepreneurs who had an idea to solve the problem of last-minute dentist appointment cancellations: offer those time slots to patients at discounted rates. The name they came up with was terrible: HealthSouk. Obviously, it said nothing about dentistry. The startup founders knew what a souk was. The majority of people in North America do not. (I knew from trips to Egypt and India where I’ve shopped at these colorful openair marketplaces, or as my friend Tim calls them, “dirty bazaars.” Great places to buy exotic spices and incense, yes. A sanitary place to get your teeth cleaned, not so much.) The three founders were so blinded by their knowledge of the word souk that they didn’t realize how foreign it was. Unfortunately, they rejected my idea for a name and tagline that worked for both dentists and patients: Gap Tooth. Tagline: “When you have time to fill.”

Think Outside Your Bubble

After exhausting big-cat names, including Cheetah, Puma, and Leopard, Apple was wise to start naming their operating systems after places in California. But I believe it made a misstep with Mavericks. Mavericks is a legendary big-wave beach in Half Moon Bay, between San Francisco and Apple’s HQ in Cupertino. It’s not widely known outside the surfing community and coastal California. It’s an awkward word for a singular product. Even some of the savviest Apple users were known to mistakenly call the OS “Maverick.”

I suspect even some Apple aficionados may also mispronounce a subsequent OS version, Yosemite (yosem-it-tee, as opposed to yo-se-might). Happily, Warner Bros. fans not familiar with the national park may have learned how to pronounce Yosemite from Bugs Bunny.

Avoid Alphanumeric Brain Benders

Jumbled words and letters, especially in consumer electronics, may signify something to the employees at Best Buy, but for shoppers they are annoying and meaningless.

A few years back, Eat My Words renamed some products for the consumer audio company Altec Lansing. The alphabet soup of all the original names made my head spin. Here’s what the before-and-after transformations from the original alphanumeric names to the new consumer-friendly names looked like:

Product	Before	After
Bedroom iPod dock	M202	Moondance
Headphones	VS63	Backbeat
Stylish speakers	HX802	Expressionist

Make Sure Your Name Is Not Cursed in a Foreign Language

Speaking of cursing, of all the anxieties to have over a new name “What if it means something dirty in a foreign language?” has the highest fear factor and the lowest chance of actually happening. Sure, mistakes occasionally occur. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France named Cue, the same name as a notorious French porn magazine. But the legendary story you learned in business school about the Chevy Nova selling poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because its name translated as “doesn’t go”? Total bunk. The myth is clearly dispelled at Snopes.com.

If you are planning on having a global brand, have a professional linguistic study done by a firm specializing in this (not just your friend who speaks French). You can find some of these companies listed in the Resources section.

Check the Urban Dictionary Definition

Before you give your name the green light, google it for troublesome meanings and look it up in the Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com). Those simple steps could have prevented a large coffee chain from getting in hot water. Beaner’s grew to 70 locations before it woke up to the fact it was not okay to have the same name as a demeaning term for a person of Hispanic origin. The company now goes by the lukewarm name of Biggby Coffee after being forced to rebrand at the cost of nearly a million dollars. Feel the burn.

Beaner’s may have missed the memo about the Urban Dictionary, but a company that should have known better is Whole Foods. In 2018 the company partnered with a restaurant named Yellow Fever. Yep, the owners gave themselves the same name as a deadly mosquito-borne infection. The disease is called “yellow fever” because of the jaundice hemorrhage the virus produces.

Yellow fever is also “a racially charged term signifying a non-Asian person being attracted to someone of Asian descent, usually with the connotation of fetishism.”* According to the Washington Post, the restaurant owners knew of the negative meanings but turned a blind eye to them. The internet, however, did not. One particularly biting news headline read “Come for the Racism, Stay for the Disease.”

Speaking of diseases, a software company that should have changed its name is SARS. While the name was innocuous in 1995 when the company was founded, in 2003 SARS became the widely known name for severe acute respiratory syndrome, a viral illness that spread to more than two dozen countries and caused a media-fanned frenzy of mass hysteria.

Please reconsider if you are thinking of naming your brand Ebola or HPV.

WARNING: Steel yourself before you poke around in Urban Dictionary. While it has never been something to read aloud in church, it hasn’t always been overtly explicit, homophobic, misogynistic, moronic, and intentionally disgusting. This type of content seems to be generated mainly by hormonal teenage boys, who give perfectly good names perfectly bad alternative meanings. This has killed many good names for me, including Avalanche, Pearl Diver, and Salt Miner. (I’ll let you look up the definitions.)

Don’t panic if your desired name has an untoward Urban Dictionary definition with a few thumbs-up votes among the site’s users. But if your name has a lot of unfortunate definitions and more than a handful of thumbs-up votes, you may want to reconsider if it’s already part of the sexual lexicon (or “sexicon”).

More Names with the Curse of Knowledge

Starbucks’s Tall (small-coffee size). When Starbucks started, Tall was a large.

Eukanuba (pet food). During the Jazz Age, it meant “the tops.”

Mzinga (software). From the Zulu word for “ring,” and the Swahili word for “beehive.”

SPQR (restaurant). Latin for “the Senate and the Roman People.”

Umpqua Bank. From the Umpqua River in Oregon.

Hard-to-Pronounce Confuses and Distances Customers

If you’re like me when faced with ordering a menu item you’re unsure how to pronounce, you sometimes chicken out. No one wants to bungle saying “millefeuille” in front of a date, a client, or a snobby French waiter. To avoid this, I will point to the item on the menu or simply not order it at all because I don’t want to appear stupide. Sound familiar? Think about your brand name the same way. You want it to be friendly and approachable, like a welcome sign by your front door.

Difficult = Disadvantage

Having a difficult-to-pronounce brand name can put a company at a disadvantage. According to Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychology professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, stocks with hard-to-pronounce names are less likely to be purchased, and politicians with difficult names are more likely to lag in polls. On the flipside, a catchy name can boost the visibility of a candidate. No one knows this better than the onetime mayor of Fort Wayne Indiana, Harry Baals.

Humans associate easy-to-process information—clear, simple language—with positive qualities such as confidence, intelligence, and capability. If someone struggles with the pronunciation of a company name, that could end up hurting the brand.

The Greek yogurt company FAGE had the first-to-market advantage in the United States for nine years before competitor Chobani came on the scene. Why did FAGE fail to become the category leader? Do you think the perplexing pronunciation has anything to do with it? The pronunciation is so mystifying the product packaging provides instructions on how to correctly pronounce its name, “fa-yeh.” I’ve written enough food-packaging copy to know that with such an itsy-bitsy amount of real estate devoted to describing the product, it’s absurd to have to devote any of it to explaining how to pronounce its name. Tip: Americans don’t want to learn Greek from the back of a yogurt container.

One name whose pronunciation I always struggle with is the sports helmet company Giro. I just looked it up for the umpteenth time and discovered a curious conversation in a cycling forum where someone posed the question “I’m wondering how I’m supposed to say ‘giro.’ I’ve heard a couple different ones. Is the correct pronunciation ‘jiro,’ ‘hero,’ or ‘giro,’ or something else?” The responses were all different: “Gee Row,” “GUY-RO,” “Gy Ro,” “Jeer-oh,” “Jee-ro,” and “Jie-Row.” Of course, the correct answer is “Who cares, as long as you can get it with tzatziki sauce.”

Many of us butcher the pronunciation of widely known brand names such as these:

Brand Name	Incorrect	Correct
Nutella	nuh-tell-uh	new-tell-uh
Miele	mee-ell	meal-uh
Porsche	porsh	por-sha
TAGHeuer	tag-hewiair	tag-haw-yer
Volkswagen	volks-wag-en	vo-ks-var-gen
Nike	nyke	ni-key
Adobe	ah-dobe	ah-dobe-bee
Saucony	saw-koh-knee	sock-a-knee
Sur La Table	sir-lah-table	sir-la-tob

Of course, in their countries of origin, foreign names are easy to pronounce. But many names derived from unfamiliar languages are unapproachable simply because most Americans (myself included) don’t know how to pronounce them and don’t want to make fools of themselves trying. (And, yes, people do pronounce Nike like it rhymes with “bike.” Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who works in a store that sells running shoes.)

Capital Punishment

Just because your brand identity is designed in all caps, that does not mean your name should be. READING WORDS IN ALL CAPS IS JARRING. THERE IS NO NEED TO SHOUT! YOU LEARNED THAT IN EMAIL 101!

Another reason not to spell your name with all capital letters is because, whether it’s an acronym or you just do it to be trendy, people will be confused by the pronunciation.

All-Caps Names	Pronunciation Issues
ING (financial services)	Mistakenly pronounced “ing,” like it rhymes with “bling.”
OPI (nail polish)	Incorrectly pronounced “O-pee,” like Opie, the kid from The Andy Griffith Show.
SAP (software)	Can be pronounced “sap,” as in “sad and pathetic.” Employees of SAP’s chief competitor, Oracle, love using the “sap” pronunciation, dripping with sarcastic ooze.
THX (audio company)	Mistakenly pronounced “thanks” because it looks like the common abbreviation for that word.
TCHO (gourmet chocolate)	The uppercase letters of this name on its packaging make it look like an acronym, but it’s just a word no one can pronounce. Is it supposed to be short for “Techno” or is the T silent? We’ll never Tknow.

The Case against CamelCasing

CamelCasing is the term that describes a word that mashes two words together, forming a hump in the middle, such as WhiteHat. This trend started because domain names don’t have a space in them, so brand names started appearing the same way.

To make your name easier on the eyes, put a space in between the words. It will also give people’s brains a split second of breathing room to register two separate words instead of trying to untangle a mash-up. Your name will never look dated, trip up spell-check, or piss off proofreaders.

Another reason you should add a space between the words in your name is what will happen when your name is printed in ALL CAPS, as is often done in headlines in business journals and trendy publications. For instance, I thought SIRIUSXM was a new word describing a fetish for Siri, not the name SiriusXM. When I saw LIVERAIL, I thought it was the name of a hangover detox concoction, not the name LiveRail.

And don’t put capital letters randomly in your name. I recently came across the name prAna, which looked to me like it would be pronounced “PR Ana.” (I thought it was the PR firm of a woman named Ana.) My brain didn’t recognize it as Prana (pronounced “prah-nuh”), the yoga apparel brand. I hAve a feeling thAt the capitAl A in the middle is meAnt to look like a yogA pose. It may be clever for a logo, but for a formal company name, PrAna looks silly. Make your brand name a proper noun and no one will get bent out of shape.

Multiple Pronunciations Is Double Trouble

You want your brand to be known by only one name, so be sure it can be pronounced only one way. A user of the planet-friendly household brand ECOS may tell friends about “ek-oze,” which can sound like “echoes,” as opposed to the second pronunciation, “ee-koze.”

This next name wins the award for multiple personality disorder. Ouray, a Colorado sportswear company, once said this about its name: “We get asked every day, ‘How do you pronounce Ouray?’ We wish the answer was simple, but it’s not. The origin of the word comes from the great Ute Indian Chief, Ouray, which in his language is pronounced ‘Ooo-ray.’ The local townspeople of Ouray, Colorado, say it ‘you-RAY’ or ‘yer-AY,’ while here in the building we tend to pronounce it ‘your-AY.’” Hey, Ouray, you know what I say? Oy vey!

Diacritical Marks Are Not Güd

If your name needs an accent or diacritic mark to show how to pronounce it (e.g., BRöö, Qēt) or is the name of almost any piece of IKEA furniture, I suggest you say adiós. Even if people don’t struggle with the foreign pronunciation, trying to figure out how to create these special characters on a keyboard will drive them batty. These characters also can’t be used in your Twitter or Instagram name.

FYI, Acronyms Can Cause WTF Confusion

To build traction, you want your brand to be called only one name, not two. Let the acronym be something you use internally. For cumbersome names, your users may adopt the acronym, and you’ll forever be stuck with an awkward name like TCBY or VRBO.

Finally, don’t rely on different-colored letters to clue people in on how to pronounce your name especially if you have a name like UBREAKIFIX, which in one color looks like gobbledygook. Your name will appear in only one color in the text of news articles and search results. Tough break.

* Julie Pennell, “Whole Foods in Hot Water over Controversial Restaurant Name,” Today.com, April 30, 2018.