How to choose a good company name in Japan
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Entrepreneurs know the difficulty of choosing a “good” company name. Should it include your name? Your activity? Is it too long? Too short? Too obvious, not obvious enough?
Another aspect comes into play when the business has an international scope: which language to choose? Should you focus on English? Should you focus on the language of your target clientele?
A head-scratcher
We’ve asked ourselves all these questions for months. We’ve read many articles for entrepreneurs explaining how to name a company well. We’ve had many ideas that we liked a lot, others less so, or some that we liked a lot but not our surroundings, and others that our surroundings liked but didn’t inspire us…
Back to basics
And one day, in the midst of a brainstorming session, we went back to the basics of Tokimeki:
Why did we decide to embark on the adventure of setting up a company providing operational support for professionals on the other side of the world?
So that they have an unforgettable experience, so they continue to be excited for years afterwards just by thinking about it, in short, so that the stay we accompany gives them ‘tokimeki’; a heart pounding with excitement.
Before diving in..
Once we had that moment of realization, we needed to conduct a search for registered companies with that name in Japan, to see if it was already taken, firstly, and in which field of activity it was taken afterward.
“If there were no companies registered with the name ‘tokimeki’ in the Latin alphabet, several were listed in hiragana (Japanese phonetic alphabet). So far, so good. But a quick look on social media, and things took a turn: there were plenty of ‘tokimeki’ accounts. Therefore, we needed to differentiate ourselves, and that’s how ‘tokimeki by a&m’ was born because it’s a ‘tokimeki’ experience provided by Alice & Mathilde, hence the ‘byam’ you find in our domain name and social media handles.
There you have it, now you know the little story behind the “but what’s this ‘byam’?”
Stay tuned for future posts for more behind-the-scenes of Tokimeki and tips for working effectively with Japanese counterparts.