Starting off with the right brand for your product or company can be crucial to a your business. “You should never underestimate how important it is to get it right at the very beginning,” says Olly Raeburn, managing partner of creative agency Liquid Communications.

“You are only new once, so you have got to think things through. What is at the core of the business and does your branding reflect that?”

Perry Haydn Taylor, founding partner of the brand experts Big Fish, agrees: “It is a priority to get branding right at the very beginning. If you have the best product in the world but you don’t have the best brand, then it is not helping your business. Branding is a way of getting people interested in to what you’re all about.”

The most important thing to spend on branding is time, he adds: “Entrepreneurs tend to rush in and make decisions quickly but prevention is definitely better than cure with branding. Get it right and it pays dividends — if not, it’s a lot of effort to change things halfway through.”

Will King knew exactly what he wanted to call his shaving oil: King of Shaves. It reflected his belief in the product and his own name. But he ran into all sorts of problems when he tried to register the name. Using the words “King of” was considered to be a laudatory, implying that his product was the best, and so was not allowed as a trademark by the Patent Office.

King refused to back down. He hired a patent attorney and took his case to the European Patent Court, where he won. “Branding is of paramount importance,” he says. “It’s all about the name, the appearance, the feeling, and it has got to make you want to buy a product. But it can’t do everything without the product itself. Your product has got to be the best product around.”

The first thing for start-ups to do is to get to the bottom of what the proposition is, says Haydn Taylor, who works with entrepreneurs including James Averdieck, the man behind Gu puddings. “Hone it down to what you are selling, what is the key thing about your company, and reflect that in the name. A cracking name can give you a massive leg-up.”

When Averdieck went to see Big Fish with his chocolate puddings, he had been intending to call the product the Belgian Chocolate Company. “We decided that didn’t say what was special about the product and sounded rather like something old ladies would buy,” says Haydn Taylor. “The name Gu is fantastic because it is all about the core part of the company, which is the fabulous chocolate.”

Before deciding on your name and brand, make sure you do your research, say the experts. Use the internet to check what trademarks have already been registered with the Patent Office (www.patent.gov.uk), look at the names of other businesses at the Companies House site (www.companieshouse.gov.uk ) and see what website domain names are available (www.whois.co.uk). Once you have chosen found your name, hang on to it by registering at all the above places.

Do you want to have a generic brand such as Egg or Orange, which may mean nothing in themselves but can be made to represent a whole brand ethos? Or do you want a brand that describes exactly what it does. Half Price Furniture, say, is simple to understand but may be hard to roll out across other products.

Mark Leatham, chairman of high-quality food suppliers Leathams, created the Merchant Gourmet brand from scratch. “We were importing many different types of niche food products, but the labels were from the artisan producers and didn’t really help the products. We needed to create a brand and our brand consultant came up with the name of Merchant Gourmet, which was perfect as that really summed up our passion for food,” he says.

“There was an intrinsic value for us in creating an umbrella brand because the specialists we were importing food from didn’t have a market brand of their own.”

It is important to future-proof your brand as much as possible. If you name it after yourself, what happens when you want to sell the company? Future-proofing also means considering what happens if your fledgling business is a huge success and you want to launch overseas.

Vauxhall famously encountered problems promoting its Nova model in Spanish-speaking countries ( no va means “doesn’t go” in Spanish), while Olly Raeburn used to work for a company called 141 — named after its street address. It ran into trouble when trying to open in China because 141 is considered an unlucky combination of numbers there, signifying death.

Building up what your brand stands for can be useful when you want to roll it out to other products, as customers loyal to you may be more predisposed to trust similarly branded products. But use it wisely.

After starting King of Shaves, King received offers from other companies to put his brand on other shaving products. However, he resisted: “We would have been silly to slap the King of Shaves brand on to a shaving foam. It would have made us more money in the short term but been the wrong thing to do in the long term.”

When it comes to rolling out the brand across other products, says Raeburn, businesses have to be careful: “The brand can be damaged if the new products don’t keep the core values. You have got to ask yourself, does your message still apply? Virgin works because all its brands are about the same thing: the credible alternative, the people’s choice and strong customer focus.”

While King had built up a very strong brand, one problem he faced was trying to realise its value. “Brands are an intangible asset,” he says, “but in a company like ours, where we don’t own any factories, for example, it is very hard to put a value on it.”

Last year King had an offer of £32 million for the company but the stated value of the King of Shaves brand is only what he has spent on registering it, which is about £75,000. “Even if the company is worth £32m, we can’t borrow against the trade brand until we sell it, when it becomes a realised asset,” he says.

“It’s a problem we have, because the brand is a hugely important part of the company.” King isn’t planning to sell but got round the problem by using a complex procedure by which the company works out an income based on projected sales and the value of the brand to those sales. “It took us a year and a half to

figure it out.”