When I was still living in England, dreaming of moving to Japan to start an eikaiwa English school with my wife, there was only one thing we had plenty of — questions.
Where would we move to in Japan? Where would we get our first students from? Why would anyone want to take lessons from us? How much should we charge people? Could we offer what people wanted?
And many other questions that were beyond our ability at that moment to answer. But there was one pressing question that we absolutely could answer: What were we going to call our English school? The sooner we had that nailed down, the sooner the whole project would become real.
What did we know in those distant, pre-social media days of 2007?
I would be the main teacher.
I was open to teaching anyone, adult or child, depending on what the market demanded.
I was a British ex-newspaper journalist with pretensions of doing something with written English.
Maybe I might do some re-writing or copy editing? Possibly even publishing books or something on the internet in the future?
Yeah, I was veering into the unknown again.
We talked to a friend who was a trained graphics designer and the only person we knew back then who was self-employed. We came up with “Tower English” as a not-bad working title for our school. “Tower” was easy to spell and easy to pronounce for Japanese, and to my ears at least, sounded a bit more British than American. “English” made it clear that language was a key part of what we did, but not necessarily exclusively teaching. And we asked the designer to come up with a logo that emphasised the British element — I suggested maybe a London taxi cab? Maybe a double-decker bus? And he came up with this:
Of course! Tower Bridge. I thought what a simple, yet elegant design, a fitting metaphor for the process of taking people on their journey to mastering English. We still use the name and logo for our sign, on our website and business cards today because it still fulfills all the requirements our name needs to convey, which I would argue are true for any good business name. So what makes a good name for an English school?
Pick a name that is easy to say, remember, and search for online. Should it be in Japanese or English? I would argue that if you choose common English words, there’s no need to write it in katakana. We went with the above design as our sign with three kanji for eikaiwa (英会話) underneath, satisfying my desire to suggest we use real English, and the kanji made it clear to potential customers that we were an English conversation school, not a cram school or a translation agency or anything else that the English name might conjure up in Japanese minds.
Don’t pick a name that means only something to you but evokes nothing in the target customers (Japanese students). So avoid naming your school after your favourite pet, your childhood nickname, or the street you grew up on — unless it also resonates in the minds of your target customer.
Simple is best. Don’t clutter your name with upper cases and lower cases, numbers, initials or punctuation. It’s your business, not your gmail password.
Avoid names that put you at the centre, like “Bob’s English School”. What happens if Bob’s not there? What if Bob wants to hire someone whose name is not Bob? What if Bob wants to retire and sell his business? What if Bob decides he’s happier as Roberta?
In fact, avoid any name that boxes you in. “Kansai Krazy Kids Klub” is maybe a fine, targeted name for that niche. But what happens if a hospital opens next door and you decide you want to teach expensive English classes to wealthy doctors? You might find your “ideal” name has cost you your future. What if you want to move or expand out of Kansai? What if you realise that actually you detest teaching kids? The point is: business conditions change easily, but your name doesn’t. And you don’t want to have to change your name and lose any good reputation you have spent years developing.
If you have already picked a name, or you just think I’m flat out wrong, please, you do you. You might criticise the name “Tower English” as being a bit dull, and I would agree with you, but it has served us well over the past 16 years to do lots of far-from-dull things: we’ve run playgroups, taught at kindergartens, taught business English lessons, run English day and Shakespeare-in-the-park camps, performed re-writing services for Japanese-to-English translators, run study tours to the UK, operated an online school and published textbooks, graded-readers and novels, all under the same name.
And it’s still working for us, with no need to rebrand. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s in a name.