I was asked this over at SavvySME and thought I’d share here:
I would say don't settle for the first thing you come up with - chances are someone else had the same thought.
I personally think making what you do into an adverb is quite lazy (i.e., you make rope? Ropely. Terrible.) but if you can be creative with it, then go for your life.
A brand has to represent something, even if your target audience doesn't realise it immediately:
Nike is named after the Roman god of victory. If you play sport, you want to win, right?
Pfizer, McDonalds, Disney etc. are all just the last names of founders.
Starbucks was chosen after an ad agency friend of the founders said words beginning with "St" are powerful (strong, strident, etc.)
Sunkist is a play on "sun kissed". Oranges must grow in warmer weather.
Google is a deliberate misspelling of "googol" derived from the "googolplex," a massive number, something that computers and the internet rely upon.
Microsoft is just a compound word representing MICROcomputer and SOFTware.
Jeff Bezos chose Amazon for his start-up because it was close to the top of the alphabet and sounded exotic. The Amazon river is also the longest river in the world and he had ambitions to make his bookshop the biggest in the world (looks like it worked!)
Coca-Cola was so named due to its main ingredient being cocaine. Pepsi was so named because it was marketed to relieve "dyspepsia"/an upset stomach.
Red Bull is named because it's a direct translation of the original Thai drink (Krating Daeng.) Unrelated but interesting: Its main ingredient is Taurine, derived from Taurus, the Greek word for Bull.
Choosing a word out of thin air can work, as long as you have some meaning behind it. But my advice is to narrow your parameters to a few areas such as:
The brand must sum up the value offering or service (I Sell Words)
Be consistent with other industries (Law firms are usually just named after founding partners.)
Tangentially represent something your product or service provides (i.e. naming your courier service Hermes, after the messenger of the Gods.)
Take a root adjective and play on that - if you seek to be Bold, use Bo words, or synonyms, etc. Make a mind-map.
What do you think?