We all know how important a strong brand is in business. If you have a good brand, people can remember you and instantly identify the things you do. A good brand can also give a strong sense of a company’s values and personality, whether it is fun and quirky, exclusive and high end, exciting and innovative, or traditional and reliable.

There are many elements that form part of a strong brand. The most obvious is of course the logo, but everything you do can be in some way branded, from the tone of voice you use in your communications to the décor in your offices.

Company Names

A major feature of your brand is your company name, which of course is what you want people to remember and recognise when they see any other brand elements. These days, using unusual punctuation or spelling in a company name is a popular way to make that name feel more branded, in essence making every time the name is written, no matter what font is used, close to a logo. You can see countless examples of this, for example the way Apple uses the small ‘i‘ at the start of product names like iPhone and iMac, the way ‘eBay’ is always written with a capital ‘B’ and small ‘e’, but no hyphen, or the way companies like GoDaddy omit the spaces between words when their company names are written. Other companies use unusual spellings of words, for example Flickr and Tumblr.

The Downsides to Branding Your Company Name Like This

While writing your name as standard in an unusual way has a strong impact on branding, making the name standout in written text and giving the hook to the reader’s mind of it being somehow unusual, it can cause some problems. While you can enforce it that all of your team always write your name in the branded way, other writers talking about your product may not do the same, and people searching for you on Google almost certainly won’t. How often do you think a user types in ‘I phone unlocking service‘ when what they really want to find is someone to help them with their locked iPhone? Autocorrects will also become the bane of your life, doing everything they can to stop you making your intentional spelling or punctuation error every time.

What to Consider if You Do Decide on Unusual Spelling or Punctuation to Brand Your Company Name

If you do decide to go down the route of branding your name like this, make sure you are very strict about how your name is written in all copy you yourselves produce, including when it comes to things like Twitter hashtags. Additionally, consider common autocorrects or the ‘normal’ way of writing your name when you are looking into keyword strategies for SEO.

Branding the names of your company or products with quirky spelling or punctuation is a double edged sword: it looks cool and is easy to remember, but it will mean you’ll need to work a bit harder!