Choosing A Perfect Brand Name Has Become More Challenging Than Ever: Darpan Munjal, Squadhelp
Choosing the right name for your business or your brand is no longer a brainstorming session over cups of coffee. With millions of brands and companies being launched every year, naming brands and businesses have become a complicated exercise that now uses AI and machine learning tools. While the complexity of naming brands and businesses has become more challenging than ever, it has no doubt made the naming business a flourishing industry too.
Darpan Munjal, who launched Squadhelp in 2011 was one of the early movers in this sector. Based out of Illinois USA, Munjal’s company offers easy solutions for brands and businesses looking for names that align with their brand promise.
On his recent visit to India, Munjal, Founder of Squadhelp, spoke to BW Businessworld about the intricacies of the naming business and why a brand name could make or break a business.
We often say, what's in a name, and now naming has become an industry in itself. Tell us about the correlation between brand name and its success?
The name plays a huge role in the success of a brand or business. If the name does not align with the promise of the brand, it won't help the brand or the business. For example, Uber, if they were called ‘car-for-hire’, that would have been a very generic name. It would not have resonated with the mass appeal which ‘Uber’ as a brand name commands. The names align with a modern company that is disrupting the industry.
The name also plays a big role because it is the first thing that customers notice about your company. In my view, a name alone has the potential to make or break your business.
What is the differentiated value that Squadhelp brings to the table?
Squadhelp is a crowdsourcing platform and we have a community of over 200,000 people. It’s a very competitive platform that comes with the best options as far as the naming of the brand or company is concerned. We have built a lot of tools to make it a successful process and companies get access to a breadth of ideas and options when they use our services.
How do you use gamification and machine learning in your processes?
Our approach to recommending the right name is built like a game. And people, in general, are competitive, they like to be challenged and introducing the gaming aspect brings out the best in terms of creativity.
Like Spotify and Amazon that use AI recommendations, we have built something similar for names and we recommend names that are closer to what you are looking for.
What is the size of the opportunity for this industry globally?
Traditionally naming has been an inside-out thing. Now there are millions of trademarks getting registered every year and more than 300 million domain names are already taken. So it has become much harder now to come up with a great name.
More than 50 million start-ups launch every year across the globe and every company needs a name. Also beyond the startups, think about all the brands that are around us. Companies like Kellogs, Nestle and Pepsi use our services to name new brands. So it has become a fairly large market and the opportunity for us is huge and we want to build awareness that services like ours exist.
