How to Name Your Awards

By: Irene Byvalkevych
Date: Jan 03, 2019
Comment: 0
Category: Awards Marketing

There are numerous reasons to come up with a name for your awards event. Mainly, you can’t have an event without a name, because a name is a brand; this is how the public will recognize it. Awarding people within the industry, and especially within a company, is incredibly important. So to name your awards also means you will attract your desired audience to the event. Let’s find out more about how to name awards.

Name requirements

Picking a name to encompass your entire event can be highly stressful, but if you come up with an outstanding one, your participants could be talking (and even tweeting) about it for a long time to come. And that’s what you really want.

Deciding on a name (branding) can be very difficult, so the easiest way is to brainstorm and note down award names ideas from your event planning staff and team members. This should encourage them to collaborate effectively on the name and work more proactively, and this is how event organisers usually move forward. However, even the greatest professionals can lack ideas sometimes.

In this case, it is a good idea to hire a keen copywriter or other marketing (branding) niche specialist. He or she will know how to define the event name requirements:

Short
Prominent
Meaningful
Unique
Reflecting your true activity

Remember, effective branding and the right name create immediate customer recognition and loyalty and make further marketing much easier or even unnecessary, especially with the help of social media.

How to name an awards ceremony

An event name must not be ordinary. Remember that it will represent you or your company both on the Internet and offline. It will be your face and business card. Here are some tips on how to name your awards step by step and how the best creative award names are designed.

Brainstorm

Since team members’ ideas are increasingly essential, they will begin discussing it and will need to know the story behind it and so on. Good names are often born out of a complete mess.

Think differently

It’s okay to appear as something unique, to observe what your rivals are doing and ensure that you think creatively. You don’t want to be seen as a cheap knock-off event, so that means concocting something different and unique—and being outlandish or strange can really profit when it comes to choosing a name. So go ahead—be different!

Reflect your concept

Often decisions regarding the decorations, consumables, and equipment rental are closely connected to the name of the event since the name is significant, and they allocate too much budget towards these items. However, this is the most obvious side of your event—exactly what guests will pay attention to and a true reflection of the name and concept. Therefore, before you decide on a name, make sure that your budget matches your expectations for the event.

Mind copyright laws

Before you choose a name, you should check that the name does not violate copyright laws. Otherwise, there is a risk of being sued by the owner of the brand (trademark for goods or services) or being required to remove the name or change it.

Mind online registration pitfalls

Even if you were able to choose a good and memorable name, the work does not stop there. If you can afford it, you should register similar names as competing companies may try to copy you. There may also be complications when registering the domain name for your event landing page and so on.

Use name generators

To avoid the issues mentioned in the previous two tips, you can use different names for different types of advertising and run them through name generators first. For example, Latin can be used for advertising on radio and TV (or just some international channels), and Chinese characters can be used for promotion on the Internet (or locally) and vice versa.

Vary

To choose a name for your event, you may want to start with the name of the company or its activities. If the name is composed of separate words, they could be written together as one word, or spaces could be replaced with a dash, images could be used to make the name unique, etc. If you have plenty of time, register multiple domain names. This will help to protect your ideas against competing firms on the Internet.

Use crowd sourcing

What’s crowd sourcing? It’s public support that enables you to get input from genuine individuals. Whether it is your family and friends or a focus group, you can pick up on things you wouldn’t have thought of and get an alternative perspective.

Recommendations from the public can motivate you to develop your thoughts and have a positive impact on the process of choosing an award ceremony name. It is also another way to check for awkward abbreviations or potential mistakes.

Use resources wisely

And finally, be wise when using the abovementioned tips and your own ideas. Remember that you are likely dealing with corporate award names ideas, which should be smart and solid. Bear in mind the marketing component of each brand (event) you create. Not only is a short and snappy name easier to spell, pronounce, and remember but it can make marketing, branding, and signage a lot easier to accommodate! Being disciplined with your budget is also good practice.

A good example of this is the use of “X” as a symbol for the SXSW event, which stands for South by Southwest. Another idea is to change the spelling to be unique but to convey some of the same meaning, for example, Oktoberfest.

Even if you use only some of these tips in the process of preparing your awards ceremony, you will already be on the right path to the ideal event.

In conclusion

Choosing a name and registering a domain for the website are the most important tasks when organising a professional event. It is not as simple as it may seem at first glance. The task should be approached with care since once a name is registered it cannot be changed. Event and awards planning organisers will benefit from brainstorming and crowd sourcing to come up with successful employee recognition award names ideas.

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