For better or worse, branding is a necessary part of modern life. If you have a business you need a brand. Even if you don’t have a business, your social media profiles are effectively your personal brand. Even if you don’t use social media, the internet is a gigantic place, and it costs virtually nothing for someone to impersonate you through their branding.
At the end of the day, a brand is simply another way of describing your reputation. If you want to interact with the world, then you need to care about your brand.
Helpful Tools
Whenever I have an idea of something I might want to create, sooner or later, I do a search of my brand name idea on all the major places. URL domains1, social media user names, App Store apps2. But this process is tedious, time consuming, and it requires me to download and use social media apps that I can’t stand. Thankfully I’ve found a few tools that make this so much easier:
Footnotes
Footnotes
-
I’ve always been worried about “URL snipers”. Companies that wait for someone to attempt to open a particular URL domain. Once they do, they can see that there is demand for it. Then they buy it cheap, and resell it at astronomical prices. ↩
-
Even if your idea is not an app, you should still search the major app stores. If a similar brand is being used somewhere it could cause future headaches. ↩