How a Bad Business Name Can Hurt Your Event Planner Career

25 February 2020 By Sarah Cavanagh Leave a Comment

What’s in a name? Well, when it comes to your event and wedding planner career, your name often acts as the spokesperson of your entire business. When promoting yourself, it’s one of the first things out of your mouth to introduce yourself. Online, your business name is what others will either first see or look for on social media and search engines. It’s a direct part of your overall brand, setting a first impression of you, your vision, and your services to potential clients.

If well chosen, this name will add to the overall appeal of your business. But if you choose a bad business name, you may find that it actually hurts your event planner career – sometimes, to the point of no return. We know that’s NOT what you want, so before you go naming your new business, you may want to take the following into consideration…

Table of Contents

What makes a BAD business name?

When naming your event and wedding planner business, you’re best off avoiding anything that falls into the following categories:

1. It’s too long or difficult to remember

Unless it’s part of your overall game plan to intentionally give your business a clever (and relevant) acronym to shorten its lengthy name, you may just want to scrap the whole thing altogether. You want a name for your event and wedding planner business that’s catchy, unique, and to the point.

It should be able to embody the nature of what you do/offer, without a potential client having to struggle just to say it. If the name doesn’t have an easy flow or is difficult to pronounce, it’s going to leave a bad taste in their mouth.

Logically, business names that are too much of a struggle for customers to remember are going to be forgotten. How can you hope for your business and brand to have a lasting impression, if its very name can’t achieve that?

Fun fact: the longest company name on record belongs to a Japanese business, where employees need to go as far as to learn a song in order to remember the name of where they work. The entire business name is 137 characters long!

2. It’s insensitive and/or offensive

This is a no-brainer. If your business name is in poor taste, you run the risk of alienating yourself from your clientele. An offensive business name can kill your event planner career before it’s even started!

In today’s day and age, we completely understand that there’s an appeal to being risky in your naming process; maybe even a bit edgy. But there’s a major difference between being inventive and fun, and just being rude.

As a rule of thumb, stay away from adding any of these elements into your event planner business name (or branding, etc.):

Anything gender-specific
Anything racially or culturally specific (unless you are of that race/culture, and are specifically targeting that race/culture for your business in a positive way)
Anything considered derogatory, intolerant, and/or hate speech
Anything involving foul language
Anything evoking sexually explicit imagery and/or connotations (unless that’s your niche, and your business is specifically targeted towards an adult clientele)

Any kind of client in need of the types of services you offer should be able to see your business name and think to themselves, “They can help me with my big day.” You don’t want them to see your business name and immediately get the feeling that they’re somehow excluded from your services. In general, this would be a terrible business move.

3. It doesn’t tell your audience what your business actually does

If you’re just starting your wedding and event planner career, it’s probably safe to say that you’re not yet well known in the industry. If you already had a good amount of traction, and a sturdy clientele under your belt, then having a business name that’s just your actual name could be fine, and not hurt your business.

But when you’re still earning your stripes in this field, simply naming your business after yourself isn’t going to tell others anything about your services. Sure, it puts your name out there – but if people don’t know who you are, how much weight can that actually have? Rather, your business name may need some sort of keyword in it, too. This will help tell potential clients what it is you actually do: event and/or wedding planning.

Not to mention, by having a popular buzz word in your business name, it’ll have better results on search engines, such as Google. Think about it: if someone was looking for a wedding planner to help them organize their big day and decided to do a search for businesses in their local area, they’re most likely to literally search for the words: ‘wedding planner’. If your wedding planning business has no words in its name that match wedding planner keywords, your business probably won’t show up (or rank very high) in the search results.

Obviously, adding in some variation of the word ‘event’ or ‘wedding’ to your name will help your business speak for itself. But don’t feel limited to just those words! There are tons of other options you can utilize. It can be:

A pun or play on words
Related to another event planning services (e.g. catering, decorating, etc.)
Common words that comes to mind when thinking of an event/wedding, like ‘celebration’

If you want to see some great examples of different event and wedding planning words you can use in your business name, take a look at this list of 300+ potential ideas!

Why bad business names are chosen

We can think of plenty of reasons why you might unknowingly choose a bad name for your event planner business, but typically, it tends to be because of one (or more) of the following factors:

You’re trying too hard.

This isn’t necessary a bad thing, because if you’re trying that hard to come up with a good business name, it means you care. You WANT to stand out from the crowd, just as much as you want your event planner career to be successful. The downside is that you may become so focused on this that you lose sight of the bigger picture. In doing so, you may be more prone to committing some of the naming errors listed above. People who are willing to give you honest feedback (usually friends or family) can be your best defense in this case.

You’re overtired.

Maybe it’s the middle of the night and you’ve literally spent all day searching for available domain names. By that point, you’re so tired and fed up that bad name ideas start to look like good ones. That’s understandable. Still, when you feel like you’re at your wit’s end, that’s the WORST time to make such a big decision. Rather, get some rest, give yourself some space, and come back to it later when you have a clear head again. You’ll likely have a fresh perspective!

You still don’t know your own brand.

This is a HUGE factor! If you don’t yet know how you want your business to be seen and represented, it’s going to be tough to figure out a good name to describe it. But if you’ve taken the time to establish what you want your business to be about, and what you want your branding to be, it’ll be much easier to then create a business name around that.

Picking a GOOD business name

Now that you know what to avoid when it comes to name your business, you can focus on what needs to be done to pick the RIGHT one. Click here to read our breakdown on what makes a strong business name, as well as the legal steps you’ll need to take to get it registered!

With a good business name representing you and your brand, you’ll be setting yourself up for a long and successful wedding and event planner career!