So, congratulations, you have decided to open your own business in the quest industry. Well, or, at the very least, you are looking at this niche and want to understand it better. Sooner or later you will be faced with a situation when you need to come up with and choose a good name for your quest project. Read this article to the end to find out exactly how a brand name is invented, what mistakes entrepreneurs most often make in branding and positioning their quest projects.
So, let's begin!
The name should be sonorous
Remember once and for all – the name should simplify your marketing. Not to complicate, but to simplify. Therefore, if you don’t rush and spend not 30 minutes choosing a name for your quest project, but at least a couple of days, then in the future you can save yourself a lot of money.
All other things being equal, if we take as an example 2 conditional quest projects, one of which is called “Questomania”, and the second “ALPA”, then the owner is 100% likely to spend less money on promoting the first project than on promoting second.
Because the potential consumer will immediately understand what exactly the company does. In the second case, everything will be very difficult.
The first thing that comes to mind with the name “ALPA” is the Alps, i.e. maybe the Alpine mountains? This means that the company probably sells mountaineering equipment, or, at worst, something for winter recreation, maybe?
What will be your surprise when you find out that this is what they called... a quest project? Such a name will be much more difficult to remember, because it is in no way associated with what the company offers.
Therefore, the recommendation here is simple: “Come up with meaningful names!” For example, the FixPrice chain of stores, the literal translation of which from English is fixed prices.
The store offers to buy most of the goods that are in their assortment at a single price (for example, 50 rubles). The name is so simple that even grandparents who are frequent visitors to such stores can easily remember it.
Yes, the owners of many billion-dollar companies did not look for easy ways and came up with names that are not even close to the product itself or the company’s line of business.
You know them for sure: Apple, Adidas, Nike. But this is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself. Who knows, maybe if the companies were named differently, they would have become even more popular and rich?
“Haunted Manor”, USA
In the Californian city of San Diego there is a real house of horrors, which was opened by Russ McKamey at the age of 55 with his beloved Carol. A visit to this attraction cannot be compared to any horror film or horror game.
Visitors here are tied up, put in cages infested with snakes and spiders, and doused with fake blood. The total duration of the quest is eight hours. But not a single person has yet been able to fully withstand all the tests! Even seasoned sailors ran out of the house in tears.
Russ and Carol don't limit their imagination. Every year they invent new scary elements for their quest. They are inspired by films such as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, “Psycho”, “House of Night Haunting” and other classics of the horror genre.
More than $500,000 has already been spent on creating the Phantom Manor, and it is truly a unique entertainment facility that has no analogues on the entire planet.
Inside there are four rooms, each of which contains the most hardcore “instruments of torture” for extreme sports enthusiasts. The emphasis is on interactivity so that everyone can test themselves - what they can do and what they cannot. In short, the owner characterizes his quest with the short phrase “It’s Indiana Jones on steroids.”
The entire adventure is recorded on camera, and then you can get photos and videos. In addition, there is an online broadcast, which anyone can watch from the outside.
If you wanted to test your strength, the news is disappointing - the queue for the Phantom Manor exceeds 24,000 people, taking into account the fact that only two are allowed in at a time. But entry is absolutely free.
True, there are some restrictions - firstly, you must be over 21 years old, and secondly, you have undergone a medical examination, the results of which did not reveal any mental or physical illnesses.
Ideal names for quest projects - examples
The company with the cool and sonorous name “Claustrophobia” was the first to enter the quest industry in Russia. She took, perhaps, the most intriguing, provocative and one of the most interesting names for her quest business.
Artem Kramin, an entrepreneur from Kazan, also took a very good name for his project. His quest network is called "Escape the Room". Simple, clear, easy to remember.
Moreover, things even reached such a slight absurdity that in 2015 he turned to our partner with a request to remove the heading from the quest project website, where leaving the room is mentioned as an entertainment format, and not as the name of his brand in quotation marks.
Abroad, his brand, however, has already been transformed into one Russian word written in Latin - “Komnata”. By the way, one of the global marketing studies announced interesting results: 11% of consumers basically do not buy anything from a company if they do not like its name. In our case, these 11 people out of 100 will not even be interested in your quests, no matter how good they are, so do not save time and effort in searching for the very name that will catch the minds and hearts of your future Clients.
In Saratov, by the way, we came up with the following name for our Client for the quest project: “Kvesterika”. The name is easy to remember, it is very creative and perfectly reflects not only the fact that the company is engaged in quests, but immediately makes it clear that these are probably also horror quests. Horror fans have already checked it out.
“Scary tale”
The quest is based on a variety of folklore elements. The gaming area is designed in such an unusual way that participants have a completely real feeling as if they were caught in a book binding.
Many locations, each with its own atmosphere. There are many mechanisms that come into play at the most unexpected moment. The tasks are distinguished by originality and subtle humor; each one comes with witty comments.
Light/sound effects are also not far behind. What’s remarkable is that even teenagers can take part in the quest; there are no cruel or bloody scenes here, only the mystical atmosphere of Russian folk tales.
The game is very suitable for a corporate party or birthday celebration with friends. In the same building there are locations for two more quests, so a large company can split up and then tell each other about their impressions.
If earlier those who liked to have their nerves tickled went on roller coasters, now they go in droves to interactive quests. It's fashionable, it's interesting, it's very scary. Try it too, and then share it in the comments.
Crossing words
Over 4 years of working in the quest market, we have discovered an effective rule for coming up with names for quest projects: crossing words. We are by no means claiming to be a genius, but time-tested techniques in such matters as naming, for example, often work very well. We take the word “quest” and cross it with different options.
Here's what can happen: “Questerika”, “Questomania”, “Monte Questo”, “Realquest”, “Questgrad”, “Questtime”, “Monsterquest”, “Questar”, “Greenquest”, etc. In a few hours of brainstorming, I'm sure you can come up with some cool free options for yourself.
Yes, this may seem a little banal, but who said that non-banal options will be remembered better and bring more benefits to your brand?
You can even name it after yourself
The only option when you may like the name, and perhaps not quite like the public, is if the brand is named after you, that is, by your last name.
Look at Oleg Tinkov, for example. Why is his bank called Tinkoff? Because personal responsibility gives a great bonus in sales.
If we simplify the logic, then everything works in the human brain something like this: “The person named the company after himself! This means he bears personal responsibility for the result. You can trust him." That is, there is a clear relationship between the personality of the owner and his business.
If a quest project named after the founder opened in my city, I would at least spend a little more time out of curiosity studying such a company than on some too banal “QuestQuest” (no offense to competitors). For me, this is a litmus test - a person will not name a quest that he is not sure about after himself. It will be a shame. Plus, this name makes the brand stand out from the crowd of competitors.
The most terrible quest in St. Petersburg - “The Butcher’s Shop”
Imagine that you decide to stop at the butcher on the way home and buy something for dinner. But the seller in the store is somehow suspicious - he asks strange questions that make your head spin. You want to get out of here, but it's not so easy...
This is the beginning of the St. Petersburg performance, one of the most terrible quests in the world. The playing space occupies two floors, more than ten rooms - a total of 350 sq.m.
There is contact with three characters and an unrivaled combination of horror and action - you will not only be scared, but also run away, hide, and scream. From the first to the last minute of the game you are haunted by fear and a tense atmosphere.
The game is based on the principle of “maximum emotions, minimum riddles.” Professional talented actors work here, and they are supported by realistic scenery, costumes and other props.
The script is distinguished by its thoughtfulness, and the special effects make it possible to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of horror that reigns in the butcher's shop. And you are the main characters in this interactive performance.
Moscow as a source of inspiration
In Moscow they know how to do cool marketing, so you can and should learn from Muscovites. For example, in Moscow there is a chain of cafes called “Three Rules”. Agree that the name is intriguing. What are these rules?
And their rules are as follows: “No chemicals, only natural products,” “Food like in a restaurant, but at a lower price,” “Guaranteed freshness, because what is prepared today will only be sold today.”
So easily and playfully, the guys not only came up with a good, meaningful and intriguing name, but also closely connected it with their key principles.
In Moscow, for example, there is a butcher shop with the unusual name “Man and Meat”. Simple and original. Moreover, this is not simple meat, but a premium level - for gourmet steaks.
"Adrenaline" from PrimeQuest
This is a quest that at one time changed people’s attitudes towards similar horror-style projects. For several years now, daredevils have been playing it with great pleasure. In Moscow, by and large, it was he who aroused mass interest in scary quests. Since the game involves actors, it creates even more horror.
During the passage, you need to solve the riddle of the professor who researched the properties and characteristics of adrenaline, and then disappeared without a trace. You'll instantly forget that you're in a game, and everything will seem real. Don't relax, everything is just beginning. You will have to make more than one difficult decision in order to get out of there alive.
What's there in the West?
By the way, a good way to find a name for an quest project is to look for the names of escape projects in the West. To do this, just go to foreign Yell or TripAdvisor in the “Escaperooms” section and see who is called what. You can also Google the following queries: “escaperoomsNY”, “escaperoomsChicago”, “escaperoomsBoston” and so on.
If your English is good, then I’m sure you can get a certain amount of inspiration. If you have it like me, then sometimes you will need to Google, armed, for example, with the Google Translate service or in the arms of any other online dictionary. In an hour or two of wandering you can find a lot of interesting options.
Don't forget about creativity
It will be great if the name for the quest project is creative. A person is greeted by his clothes, and a quest project is greeted by its name. A boring name may lead a potential player to think accordingly. If we abstract from quest rooms, I will give several striking examples of company names.
Imagine a chain of stores selling building materials and bricks called "Monkey Chi-Chi-Chi." Is it easy to remember? Yes. Is the name viral? Certainly. I am sure that at least every third visitor, and simply anyone who has seen the advertisement, will tell their acquaintances and friends about such a store with the aim of “laughing”.
But when the question arises about where to look for building materials, the image of the same monkey that sold bricks will immediately pop up in your head... It’s not necessary to hang a rope in the store, but you can play with such a cool trick.
And here’s another interesting name for a hookah bar that operates in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny – “Dut”. In youth slang, “to blow” means to smoke weed. However, this term eventually passed into the hookah industry, that is, when people suggest “blowing”, this also means “smoking a hookah.”
Okay, that's all great, but what about quests? Here are some interesting creative names that we found in different cities of Russia:
• “We were closed” (Cherepovets) • “What Quest?” (Rostov-on-Don) • “Mr. Quest” (Simferopol) • “Pseudologica” (Ufa) • “Mousetrap” (Tomsk)
But in pursuit of creativity, don’t go too far. Otherwise, you will end up making a mess later.
An example of such wood splitting is the brand name “Fekalof”. The company deals with autonomous sewage systems and “cleverly” plays on the word feces. Yes, it is quite possible that the brand has wonderful products, excellent service and truly competitive prices. But what's the point if a certain segment of the target audience does not want to interact with a brand whose name seems simply disgusting to them?
Remember the study where 11% of respondents do not buy anything from a brand if they do not like the company name... And with such a name, customers who will not want to cooperate with the company may be a little more than 11%.
"Whisper"
This quest opened recently; it is imbued with a mystical atmosphere and follows all the usual lines of horror quests, but at the same time has several fundamentally new features.
In the story, you decide to visit an upset neighbor whose husband recently tragically died. But literally from the threshold of their house you are sucked into a cycle of eerie bloody events.
The plot can be called linear, but it has a couple of non-standard twists that make you look forward to the outcome of the story with great anticipation. It's reminiscent of a movie, especially when combined with lighting and music special effects.
The intensity of passions here is maintained evenly, there is no sharp main performance. One thing can be said with confidence – the creators of the quest did an excellent job with the atmosphere of the other world.
Abbreviations
When coming up with a brand, also keep in mind that people will try to simplify it. For example, the great computer game CounterStrike is popularly referred to as “KS” (ke-es), i.e. "Counter Strike". Also keep in mind that people will remember you not only by the brand name, but also by the name of the quests. If your brand is called, say, “Cool Quests,” and your arsenal includes the quests “Robbery of an Italian Bank” and “Horrors of a Psychiatric Hospital,” then when discussing the topic of quests, people will express themselves much more simply: “You were in a mental hospital ? or “Have you been to a robbery?” if these are unique topics in the city.
The brand name here will with a probability of 80-90% be secondary, and often not remembered by players.
Computer games
There are also quests in regular computer games. Their fans are growing more and more every year. So, let's present the best scary quests in the horror style:
- Resident Evil 1-3. In the first part of the game, the action begins to unfold after several brutal murders. Police crime reports stated that the murders were carried out in groups of about 10 people, and that the victims appeared to have been gnawed. After the collapse of the police, a special squad called “Bravo” is sent to investigate, with which contact was later lost. The Alpha team is sent to support them, and the action begins to develop. The second and third parts tell about the struggle of the surviving people against the Umbrella corporation, which carried out illegal experiments and created a deadly virus. The game is based on the movie "Resident Evil".
- Monstrum. The game takes place on an abandoned ship. Her goal is to survive and get out of it. Levels are always generated randomly, so any passage of the game will be unique. At the center of the events is an old ship, which has been docked for decades, from which one day the entire crew and captain disappeared. The main character decided to investigate all the secrets and mysteries of this ship.
- Phantasmagoria is the most terrible quest of the 20th century, which has not yet lost its relevance. The plot revolves around a young couple who bought a mansion. After a man found a secret room, and in it he discovered a box and opened it, his whole life turned into a waking nightmare.
Brainstorm
To come up with a cool name for your future quest project, you need high-quality brainstorming.
Here are a number of tips that will help you achieve maximum efficiency during collective brainstorming:
• During the first stage of brainstorming, it is important to get up to speed. To do this, you need to completely turn off criticism and write down absolutely all the ideas that come to mind. Even if they seem delusional, crazy, boring, provocative. Brilliant ideas sometimes come at the intersection of something. Here you need to tune in to the wave of generation and write down, relatively speaking, 100 ideas for the name of your brand.
• Appoint a moderator who will record all ideas expressed. He should write down every idea proposed by the brainstormers, no matter where. On a piece of paper, on a phone, on a computer, the main thing is to capture ideas.
• To be on the safe side, the entire brainstorming session can also be recorded on a voice recorder. This decision will absolutely not be superfluous, because sometimes it happens that one said something without remembering, and the moderator simply did not hear this idea or forgot to write it down.
• Remember to turn off all electronic devices and other devices. Sometimes one or two calls can interrupt a very effective flow of thoughts. Therefore, it is better to disconnect from the outside world and focus solely on generating ideas.
• Criticism is included only at the next stage. When the moderator has written down from 30 to 100+ ideas, we begin meaningful filtering. Here we are already removing certain ideas, arguing why this particular name is not suitable for a quest project.
• Controversial options that are liked by some, but not liked by other brainstorming participants, are best recorded separately and returned to them later (for example, the next day).
• We recommend showing the top five or three to your friends and acquaintances. To do this, you can create a general chat on VKontakte or WhatsApp, and ask your friends to vote for their favorite name option.
The collective wisdom at this final stage, as a rule, helps to choose a really good name, and not one that 2-3 founders of the project just liked.
The most terrible quest in Moscow - “Pet”
This is an incredibly atmospheric performance, where even before the actors appear, the audience is overcome with a feeling of horror - largely thanks to a well-thought-out eerie legend.
A former Soviet veterinarian opened his own clinic, but soon his wife Vera was brutally raped and killed by a stranger. While the police were inactive, the doctor himself found the criminal.
Having tied him up and brought him to his clinic, he began a monstrous experiment of turning a man into a monster, designed to protect his daughter, Lisa. Many years have passed, Lisa has already grown old and died, and tours of the abandoned clinic are held for those who like to tickle their nerves...
The visitors' task is not to become lunch for the Pet, who wanders alone through the gloomy corridors in search of a victim. The organizers thought of absolutely everything - the sounds, the surroundings, the acting, their costumes - all this causes shivers and goosebumps.
As a rule, contact quests evoke so many emotions, but “Pet” is not one of them. You want to speak only in a whisper so that the monster doesn’t hear you.
The quest has fairly logical tasks; in difficult cases, hints are given. The game is dynamic. And one more thing - here you won’t get dirty with anything, your clothes will remain clean. But you will have to run a lot.
Checking if a name is occupied
Be sure to check if the name you came up with for your brand is available in your city. Let me clarify: there is nothing wrong if in some city someone has already come up with a name that was born in your head and opened their own quest project there. Unless, of course, they have filed for official trademark registration.
Then yes, in six months or a year you may be asked to change your name or offered to buy the rights for an amount from 300 thousand to several million rubles. But the realities in Russia and other CIS countries are such that probably about 2% of companies in the quest industry reach official registration. Others don't bother so much. But if you are serious about the quest business, then it’s still worth submitting documents - it doesn’t cost that much. Depending on the city, a full set of registration services can cost from 20,000 to 60,000 rubles.
Don't forget to check domains too. It’s ideal when, for example, the name of your quest project is “Kvesterika”. Translated into transliteration, the brand name will already be written as “Kvesterika”.
Accordingly, the following addresses should be free: • Kvesterika.ru • Vk.com/kvesterika • Instagram.com/kvesterika And so on. This is convenient for searching, remembering, and easy to use in website design, printed materials, etc.
However, often entrepreneurs do nonsense and register completely different addresses. In our example, it could be something like this: • Kvesterika-kvest.ru • Vk.com/questerika • Instagram.com/kvesterika116
Under no circumstances should you do this. Because, firstly, it looks very frivolous. Secondly, you greatly reduce the effectiveness of promoting your website and your communities on social networks. And plus, as practice shows, sooner or later entrepreneurs still come to their senses and try to bring everything into a uniform form. So why wait if you can do everything right away?
That is why, at the stage of selecting a name, it is better to immediately check such things.
Check the names very carefully
In our city in 2021, at approximately the same time, 2 quest projects with the same names opened. Then the pun began.
Both quest projects are located on the same street, approximately 2 minutes by car from each other. Both quest projects are located in the hotel.
Both quest projects are located in the hotel basements. Both quest projects were called, as mentioned earlier, the same (something like “Trap Quest”).
Both quest projects had scary quests in their arsenal. Now imagine how many times teams did not get to the quest where they booked the game, simply because the addresses were mixed up because of the names.
Believe me, such incidents happen very often, so you need to check the names of quest projects very carefully. You must be different from your competitors in everything: name, logo, corporate identity, location, etc. The more differences there are, the easier it will be to remember you.
The first computer quest
Video games have been very popular since their inception. The Mystery House project was a particularly big breakthrough for the industry. The game was released in 1980 and was the first to use vector graphics. It sold 25 thousand copies (impressive figures for that time). The program is still popular today, as it became the founder of a whole new direction in video games.
By the way, this project can be considered the first in the “scary quests” subgenre. After all, according to the plot, the player must look for a criminal in a mysterious house. The creators were inspired by the novel “10 Little Indians” by Agatha Christie.
