IncSpring: brands for sale, going cheap

For new businesses, it's no easy task to come up with a distinctive, meaningful and memorable brand.  It can be even harder to secure the branded URL. The recent, rampant (and potentially petering-out) spate of Web 2.0 mania has made the situation even worse, resulting in a bevy of gibberish names and dropped vowels.  Even if you enter the game with a killer business idea, a solid revenue model and an army of expert coders, you may still find yourself launching your enterprise-class secure document archival and retrieval service under the unlikely moniker dptelateli.tv.  (Sure, I made that one up, but is it much worse than some of the other recent web company launches?)

What's an aspiring entrepreneur to do?

Enter IncSpring, a marketplace for ready-made, professionally-designed branding packages.

Most packages include the name, the logo and a set of related graphic files.  Many listings indicate what types of businesses the brand may be best suited to and a few offer more detailed descriptions of how a budding entrepreneur might bring the business to life and attach a revenue model.

Take HotCocktail for instance. In addition to an evocative, easy to remember name and a couple of pretty decent logo treatments, the creator offers up this suggestion:

Start your own internet portal for cocktail enthusiasts! Users can post cocktail recipes; recipes could contain hot links to your e-commerce shop where you move alcohol and related products. Leverage crowd-sourcing: pay your users commissions on recipes that result in sales! – – – A classy brand combining a touch of web2.0 with a touch of urban nightclub. A touch of sensuality. It's about smooth drinks in rich surrounds. It's about the great times and the hot looks that go with the world's best cocktails. – – – A range of supporting material including bottles, shooter and collins glasses has also been developed.

Notably, some (including HotCocktail) even include the associated domain name, which as many entrepreneurs know can be harder to come by than a great name and a distinctive logo.

IncSpring launched in beta last month but already has hundreds of different brands in dozens of categories, and provides an opportunity for design firms and freelancers to join the community and add their own creations to the mix.

Members can rate, review and comment -- so any buyer can tap into the wisdom of crowds to get a sense as to what's hot, what's not and where there might be gotchas (for example, one recent commenter pointed out that a lot of these brands look good on paper but don't come complete with trademark checks and registrations.)

Are all the brands winners?  Definitely not.  You probably could have dreamt up Eknata yourself and a brand like Stephen Bradley is probably only of interest if your name happens to be Stephen Bradley.  And, speaking from the perspective of someone who has gotten tired of trying to explain that my company name is crayon not crayonville despite what our URL says, a brand name without a matching registered domain may as well not be a brand name at all.  But, like HotCocktail, there are definitely more than a few interesting, business-ready packages available right now.  For example: ForkWire (dining reviews, restaurant food delivery service, a recipe sharing community, or anything else food related), Ecodoc (paperless document solutions) PhotoBrowser, Podcast Film Fest (both pretty much what they sound like) and plenty of others.

Plus, most are priced under $10,000 (many significantly lower than that), putting professional brands well within the reach of start-up founders who can't necessarily afford the services of a big branding agency and might otherwise be forced to go it alone.

I'd love to hear from the designers and entrepreneurs out there. IncSpring seems to have landed on an interesting concept for crowdsourced branding and design. What do you think?