For my pitch presentation, I used a descriptive name for my project: Adult Autism Diagnostic Gateway. While this name would work for my project and does clearly describe what I intend my project to do, I still wanted to revisit my brand name and spend a bit more time to see if I could come up with something better.
To get started with naming my brand, I ideated a selection of words I wanted my brand to represent. I then placed these on a large sheet of paper and started writing around each one with other words that were connected to my initial word. I didn’t limit myself at this stage, and I made a conscious effort not to think about these words as a brand name. I wanted to put together a list of related words as a starting point. I added some of my initial brand values to this page as a guide for myself on the thoughts I want people to relate to my brand.
Here is the result:
None of these words immediately struck me as a brand name in themselves, so I moved on to another sheet of paper where I started to combine words and develop ideas which were more aligned with the needs of a brand name.
I added some words related to my brand values and what my brand should embody at the top of the page to help keep me on track as I explored several directions for my brand name.
While I had lots of words, none of them struck me immediately as brand names on their own. So I started to think about whether any of them could work as pairs if I linked them together. This is quite a common branding technique (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.). I tried some of them together, but again, nothing came out of this, so I decided to use the word “Neuro” as a starter word to be paired with the other words I had come up with. Neuro, with its link to brains and its use as part of the word neurodiversity, makes it a sensible but potentially common choice, so for the next stage, I decided to do online research to find out if and what brands already use the names I have in mind.
You can see the results of this research above. Using the word neuro is very common in brands, so all of the brand names I wanted to use had matches. This has been made worse by the explosion of AI start-ups that use the links between neuro and intelligence as a reason to include it within a lot of their brand names. So I decided to delve deeper into what these companies did and whether they were working in the same product space as my project and could therefore be considered genuine competitors.
NeuroInsight was my frontrunner as a name, and I found three existing brands using this name, although two do include a space between neuro and insight. I was able to discount two of the brands immediately as one was a marketing and analytics company, while another was a research project in data science with no link to neurodiversity at all, and these would be highly unlikely to clash with my product.
The brand involved with neurodiversity was a private clinic offering assessment services in Guernsey. While they were working in a similar space, they were not a large brand or well-known; they were also not registered on Companies House, as neither business registered there was involved in healthcare.
Therefore, the only issue they present is for me to acquire an appropriate domain name, as they have taken neuroinsight.co.uk, so I decided to see what domains were available and if they would be suitable.
As you can see above, there were several domains available to choose from that could be used by my product, and probably the best domain neuroinsight.com was also available, although it was a premium option on the domain search company I used to check (Ionos) and when I checked GoDaddy was offering it for $100k, it is clearly therefore being held to ransom by profiteers, so while it is available it would be out of reach to all but the most well-funded start-ups.