What's in a Name? Your Company's Purpose and Identity Builds a Brand
Updated: 7 days ago
How to Build a Start-up, Part 5, Author: Simon Rasalingham, 2026 Most company names get decided in a pub.
My first permanent job after university was at Guinness, surrounded by some of the best brand people in the world, working on something older than the United States of America. Guinness was created in 1759 and is one of the oldest and most recognised brands in the world.
The purpose and identity of Guinness was drilled into every single employee, from the person installing the pumps in a pub to the chief executive; quality and consistency.
The glass tilted at forty-five degrees. Poured three-quarters full. Then left alone to settle, one hundred and nineteen and a half seconds, before the top-up that finishes the head. Rush the rest, skip the tilt, top up too soon, and the pint is wrong. Two hundred and sixty-seven years of heritage, and a bad pint of Guinness.
That is the lesson I have carried into every company since. A brand is not what you say. It is a promise kept so consistently, by everyone, that the customer understands what they are buying before they are paying for it.
Which brings us to the name or brand, it is a promise that is shaped into purpose.
A great name or brand can create value for your company without you even speaking.
Here are four names I have chosen or been close to, each describing a company's purpose and how it linked to it's identity.
Synbiotix names a fusion
Synbiotix was about bringing technology and the clinician together. The name says exactly that: syn, together, and biotic, life. A coined word, but built from parts a reader can decode without being taught.
We added the X to make it sound more techy. Not sophisticated, but it worked, a small phonetic decisions like that does more than founders expect.
You are not describing a product, you are naming a category you hope will exist. The cost is that a coined word means nothing until you put meaning into it, which takes years of purpose and money. The benefit is that it is unmistakably yours and almost always available to register with fusion concepts.
MEDICA sounds like an institution
With MEDICA, I was thinking about building an institution around medical radiological diagnosis. Basilica. Republica. The -ica reads as a place, something built and permanent and it reaches back to the knowledge and method handed down from the Greeks into modern Western medicine. It was also in capitals only; MEDICA.
That mattered more than it sounds. We were asking NHS trusts to send confidential patient data outside their own hospital, to a private company, to be reported by a doctor they did not know.
When your buyers are institutions, when the sale turns on trust rather than novelty and your looking to build something that will last. This naming strategy can resonated with your customers, even whilst MEDICA was just a start-up run from my dining room table, then my spare room then a flower shop.
It was originally called MEDICA GROUP, the GROUP name was for another purpose, but has now been dropped. That is a story for another chapter.
behold.ai names the feeling
behold.ai does the opposite. It is about the moment of seeing something you could not see before, not descriptive, evocative, it opened people minds to the opportunity.
That one wasn't mine. Peter and Jeet came up with it in 2015, it was about the potential of what we were building at the time. Genuinely inspirational, it predicted an AI future we are only now starting to live in, behold AI.
red dot borrows the customer's method
The fourth is a product name rather than a company one.
In British radiology departments there was a long-standing convention. A radiographer who saw something concerning, a patient pointing to where it hurt, would put a red dot on the film. The radiographer would then create a red dot pile of films, so the radiologist knew where to look for the most urgent cases, it saved time . The radiographer was right more often than not, they also learned how to read an x-ray.
The name carried a thought process and a method. It is what how we trained the algorithm, it placed the product inside an existing clinical practice rather than presenting it as a machine arriving to replace one.
That is the job most founders overlook. Before you invent a word, read the vocabulary your customers already use for what you do. The best names and methods are often sitting in their language.
With the digitisation of x-ray films in the early 2000s the technique itself largely disappeared (another chapter on AI and deskilling) but because you cannot stick a red dot on a digital image pointing to where it hurt, we could with AI.
The mission behind red dot was to build an algorithm together with reporting clinicians; the same partnership between early radiographers and radiologists; enhanced with red dot to deliver above expert reader performance. We proved that scientifically and won the highest accolades in life sciences for the work; the Prix Galien International 2024.
Four names, four different purposes. A fusion, an institution, a feeling, a method all creating different identities with a purpose.
Do the dull checks before you fall in love
The domain is the start, not the end. Search the trademark registers in every country you plan to operate in and search the relevant classes, a name can be free in one class and taken in another.
Check the company register and the social handles at the same time. Say it aloud on a bad phone line, spell it to a stranger, then ask them to repeat it back. Did they get it right? A name that needs repeating twice will cost you many unnecessary hours in the life of the company. Trust me, I know. My last name is Rasalingham and I have to spell it every time, it was one of the reasons my father named me Simon. Wise man.
Check what it means in the other languages of your target markets. One of my new ventures was started with that exactly in mind.
Everyone in the company is the person pouring the pint or checking the pipes
In the early years you do not build a brand through design. You build it through how your market interacts with you, with every person in the company building it with you.
Your first missed service level, the way you deal with customers and their problems, that is the brand being made or unmade. The logo only gives people somewhere to attach the feeling.
Synbiotix. MEDICA. behold.ai. red dot.
Decades on, all my four are still standing, my first company is reaching it's three hundredth year anniversary with trust compounding inside, based on word with a purpose.
A name chosen for the right job outlives the people who chose it. Sometimes it outlives the practice that inspired it.
Guinness has been pouring its promise since 1759 (there is separate chapter to be written on Guinness Africa's branding strategy, not the Irish Catholic priests legends).
No amount of brand work will save you from a bad pint and I have had enough good ones to know a bad one. PS: using your name is easy way out SRI Ventures Ltd stands for Simon Rasalingham Industry Ventures, SRI Venture Ltd for short. Borrowed that from whom I wonder!
Author: Simon Rasalingham, 2026 Disclaimer: red dot is registered trade mark as is referred to for the purpose of its published method How to Build a Start-up: the full series
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