How do you name your company?

I work for a company called Homekoala. For the past year, we were known as Hutbitat. We are a big data real estate search engine for Australian properties.  See, after using the name Hutbitat for a year, we realised that this was a do or die moment for us and we had to change the name. Hence the name, Homekoala.

For the past year, we have had great difficulties conveying the name “Hutbitat” to people, be it over the phone or face to face. Often, we would have to repeat ourselves or spell it out for them.

We have also tried other ways to get people to remember it, such as associating it to the word “Habitat”. Alas, it did not really stick in people’s heads as much as we would like it to. We analysed what went wrong and here is what we think.

We gave this some thought and came up with 3 categories that names fall into.

1. Real words
2. Unique words
3. Wordplay

Hutbitat ended up in the category of wordplay — one that was, unfortunately, really bad.

1) Real words

This is a no brainer. Real words are easy to associate with and easy for people to remember. However, they can also be notoriously expensive to obtain as domain names and therefore, not viable for a small enterprise like ours.

Examples of companies using real words that easily spring to mind are — Uber, Apple, Shell, to name a few. Real words do not need to signify the company’s nature of business. They just need to be actual words. Apple does not sell apples and Shell definitely does not sell shells.

Going on further, you will find companies like Microsoft, New Balance or Facebook. Sure, these are not exactly real words and might even be unique. You will not find them in a conventional dictionary and the names themselves might not have an actual meaning to it.

However, they are a mixture of existing words, or compound words, and do not take much brain cells to retain as people have already come across these individual words at some point in their lives.

2) Unique words

A few companies that come to mind immediately are Adidas, Häagen-Dazs and Google. These words are not real and have little or no association to the product they are selling. However, it becomes easier for a consumer to link that particular word to that particular brand simply because it is not a derivation of an actual word.

Hence, there is little room for confusion. In our view, unique words should have little or no relation to an actual word. You might even have easier and cheaper access to domain names simply because of its uniqueness.

3) Wordplay

Our new name

In conclusion