Hi everyone,
My situation is that I am opening several stores for a range of different products, and I want to sell on eBay and Amazon as well, so I need an over-arching umbrella name for my business.
Now, this is not a name that I will brand too strongly, as the different store names have their own brand names and logos.
But my umbrella business name will appear on the credit card charges of customers, on PayPal receipts, and will probably appear as an eBay ID.
So while the branding is not so important, I still need it to look good and presentable.
For the descriptive element, I am set on "Online Emporium". I really like this one.
But I need a distinctive element in front, so "....... Online Emporium".
I'd like to have a nice Italian sounding word, like **Portico Online Emporium**.
But if the majority of my market will be average middle class Americans, would that appear weird or too foreign?
Would a more personable name be better?
Like:
**Jordan's Online Emporium**
**Jordano's Online Emporium** or
**JA Online Emporium**
I've had mixed opinions on whether the first (distinctive) word should be personable, like my first name, or more anonymous like "Portico" (or something else).
Your feedback would be really appreciated.
Thank you
Jordan
Hi Jordan,
As an umbrella business name, don't make the mistake of thinking it's not really that important. Even though you are branding each of your ventures individually, your umbrella name (whatever that may be) can be the most important brand you need to build.
What I would recommend to do is to use it across the board with all your ventures to tie everything in together. For example, if you called one of your ventures "AFTER DARK", then you could tie in all your other platforms by including the Portico Online Emporium in the branding. Something like, AFTER DARK, a division of Portico Online Emporium, and so on for all your other business names as well.
While individual branding is required, your umbrella brand will be your flagship name. That is the name you really want to have a strong brand built around and then all your individual ventures all feed back into that flagship brand. For example, even though your store's name might be AFTER DARK, you really want people to associate AFTER DARK with your umbrella name as well. You never want to isolate all of your ventures from each other, and using your umbrella name in all your branding will assist to tie a flagship brand together and give you good cross marketing opportunities.
So my advice, forget all the individual business names and branding for now, put them to one side. Work on a flagship brand, develop that first and that will give you a platform to develop individual brands from, that may well all be different, but will still have the common thread of the flagship brand running through each of them.
If you have ten individual business's, it's much easier for a customer to remember one name, than ten. If your flagship brand is strong, then that's the name you really want them to remember, because that will lead them to all of your ventures, not just one.
I would suggest that you build a website around your flagship brand (whatever you call it) and then you feature all of your individual stores from within that site. Your individual business's can have their own sites, but you want all of your net marketing linking to your flagship site, not to individual sites. Again, cross marketing, don't fracture your market, get them all in the same room as each other, no matter what they are all buying.
Good luck with it :)