Alright, I moved out of the big city and I'm more suburban now. All my private English classes I have are in the city and going there and moving from apartment to apartment has become a bit troublesome. I've managed to move all my lessons to Mondays and Fridays. This leaves me Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday to start taking on private lessons in my new neighborhood. I live in the largest (Tallest) apartment building in the area across from the sister apartment. In the other apartment there is a gentleman running his own English classes right out of his apartment. He's my competition. However, what we offer are a little different since he has students come to him and I actually go to the students houses.
Now that I got through all that, I'm wondering about a good name. I never really named my 'English School' anything. I got all my private lessons via word of mouth from happy mom's and dad's with the progress they saw with their students. Everyone just knows 'Jason' or 'The big foreigner'...anyways, I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with a good name. I want to work around a good theme, put up a website, photos, commercials (Self-produced) on the site. I'm targeting mostly kids in preschool and elementary school as students. The mother's are the people most likely to see and look into things, so it should appeal to them as well. I once worked with the name "Planet English" but it was a bit much when pronouncing it in Japanese Katakana.
I listed a bunch of names for my wife and most got rejected, the only one that she says is 'usable' is Power English. Working on that name I could go with a superhero theme of some sort. I thought I would ask the creative minds of DPC for some help. What haven't I thought of?
Think in Japanese. Does "power English" translate to superheroes in Japanese? What is the driving force behind learning English - and can that be somehow expressed in a school name? Consider a theme like "Transitions", maybe.
I know very little about Japan, excepting (maybe) Ryuichi Sakamoto.
The names that come to my mind for your school are : English Way, English Style or The english hour.
But having a look at this pdf with names of english schools in Japan, maybe going simple like Jason English School (JES) with some kind of logo could work, and as Jason is the name of a hero a link can me made.
I've found a list of English teachers in Japan with the names of the schools at eltnews.com, you maybe already know it.
I think that it's quite difficult to help you because most of us don't know the conventions or if something sounds bad in japanese or if the name has other meanings.
My thought would be to go with something that sounds traditionally Ye Olde English. I was teaching english out in Rome last year and all the schools out there seemed to be named after famous streets in London. I don't know to what extent this has already been done in Japan but I think it would be better to go with a word commonly associated with English in Japan - even if it doesn't make too much sense in everyday English.
Conceptual names are very very often lost on the majority of students and they'd probably prefer something that sounds posh and educational to put on their CV. Some suggestions from me;
Regent English
Shakespeare English
Oxford St / Cambridge (might want to check out copyrights on these!)
Windsor English
King's / Queen's English
Buckingham
I had a whole bunch listed and ran them by my students and their parents (Not sure why I didn't before). They all like J-kaiwa (Kaiwa means conversation and Japanese like shortening things up when it comes to company names). However, the parents said if they didn't know me they were most impressed with Power English and Aka Pen Sensei (Red Pen Teacher) which would most likely be shortened to Aka Pen after a while.
So, I went to work on trying to work around a theme that would sell...and who better to sell it than myself...Call me crazy (Or my wife)...but my wife likes the following idea: Everyone knows the Hancock movie poster with the beanie (Eagle on the front) and sunglasses (City in the reflection), well I could do that with a bit of a quirkier face, find myself a cute logo to stitch to a beanie, and photoshop the areas landscape into a pair of sunglasses I'd be wearing kind of like the photo below I did a while back.
Since I'd be looking at picking up students from January 2011, I could make that the date 'I premier'...in the meantime, since I'm always walking the neighborhood, doing shopping, hoping on the train, maybe people would recognize me and my beanie and glasses...The front would be me and the back would have all the basic lesson details. It would make for some fun stuff, if nothing else...
I'm not sure I see the focus of the brand with the Hancock theme. My big problem with movie themes are, unless its a timeless classic, they tend to get dated rather fast.
I would search stock sites and try to replicate an image that strikes you.
