Choosing Your Brand Name

Naming your brand is a lot like naming a baby — you are the one who will have to say and read it every day, yet everyone else has an opinion.

Make sure you pick a name you can grow with.

Vizer was not the first name for our company. But as of our trademark registration, it officially became the last.

This story dates all the way back to 2015, where the idea for Vizer first ignited. I was studying abroad on Semester at Sea and participating in a social venture incubator. It was here that the original idea — that I could find motivation to exercise if my daily behavior helped someone else gain access to healthy food — sparked.

I recruited two of my friends to join the project and one of our first tasks was selecting a name. We chose BandTogether.

At this point in the ideation journey, we intended to build our own wearables. Soon realizing we didn’t have the capital or expertise required to launch a hardware and software company, we chose the integration route instead.

BandTogether was meant to represent the bands themselves, and us coming together in pursuit of the shared goal of making healthy living more accessible. We loved it.

Then we found out it was already taken.

Back to the drawing board.

The next name we settled on was OnePulse — and this one stuck throughout the duration of that competition. Again, we felt we had it. It was clean. It spoke to the technical nature of the solution we aimed to build. It represented two hearts, pulsing as one, en route to better health.

As I’m sure you can suspect — it was also taken.

Again, back to the drawing board.

I grew tired of compounding. Compounding is when you take two free morphemes and combine them together.

“We were inventing a new concept, so why try to communicate it with pre-existing phrases?” I reasoned.

I wanted to invent a new word.

I dabbled a bit in linguistics and etymology to see if there was a structural framework I could utilize. It became clear that finding the core or base of the word, which would convey the depth of its meaning, was the first step towards building our brand name.

I started looking up different words that I could borrow from or shorten to achieve my desired brand message — this is a process called clipping. I made a list of all of the words that seemed reminiscent of the product. There were over 100, but here were a few:

• Activity

• Giving

• Collaborative

• Incentive

I even started looking up words in Latin, in the event that might spark another direction. It didn’t.

I’ve always been a fan of Scrabble — and now the ever popular WORDLE — and in looking at my list, certain letters kept jumping out:

• Activity

• Giving

• Collaborative

• Incentive

As the recurring consonant in the mix, V became the first letter of our soon-to-be word. Then applying the principles of clipping, it was time to shorten some down and see how they felt.

• Viti

• Vini

• Vive

• Vivi

None of them did anything for me — so I set the activity down.

Pro Tip: When you’re working on something and hitting a wall. Go do something else. Inspiration usually strikes when you’re least expecting it.

A week or so later I was telling someone what the app was going to do: how it incentivizes people to reach their health and wellness goals by empowering them to turn their exercise into impact.

BAM. The sound felt good.

Vize

It was cool, it was chic, it flowed.

But going back to my original linguistics doc, I had already decided I wanted it to be 2 syllables and sound active. I had made these decisions from brand-spiration and seeing how companies I admired structured their names.

Easy, we would just add an R. Just like that — it was born!

Vizer

It is short for incentivize.

It is two syllables.

It sounds active.

It is now a noun.

It now represents a community.

I can’t imagine it being anything else.

Are You Choosing a Brand Name? Try These Three Activities to Get Started!

1. Think of your favorite words — what do they have in common? Are they nouns, verbs, etc.? How many syllables do they have? Do they follow a certain rhyme scheme?

2. Make a list of all of the words that align with your brand identity — list as many as you can think of.

3. Test your short list! Once you have a handful of names under consideration, ask trusted friends and advisors how the name rings in their ears and ask for any helpful feedback.

At the end of the day, you are the best judge of if a name feels authentic to your brand identity. Collect the opinions of others but always trust your intuition on what feels right to you!