Company name changes full of challenges; good night, White Pajama.
Going through with a company name change is a huge decision considering the time and money put into establishing the original brand and that needs to be channeled into promoting the new one. Then there are the more mundane aspects of making the swap – redesigning business cards and signage, and making over Web sites. Not that all this has stopped many a network company from coming up with a new handle.
The name GRIC just had to go. “One of our enterprise partners said at a national sales conference in front of 500 people that the name reminded him of a Slavic warlord,” says Rob Fuggetta, who earlier this year led an effort at the remote-access service company to change its name to GoRemote. “Our name might have been memorable, but it wasn’t appealing.”
Hosted call-center company White Pajama hasn’t had it any easier.
“It was difficult to get through accounts payable with a name like that,” acknowledges Aaron Burcell, director of marketing for the colorfully named company. One potential customer said,” ‘OK, we’ll do this deal if you promise to change your name by the end of the year.’ They were only half-kidding.”
White Pajama plans to strip off its name by the end of this month.
Even given such good reasons, going through with a company name change is a huge decision considering the time and money put into establishing the original brand and that needs to be channeled into promoting the new one. Then there are the more mundane aspects of making the swap – redesigning business cards and signage, and making over Web sites.
Not that all this has stopped many a network company from coming up with a new handle.
MCI, for example, couldn’t wait to ditch the name WorldCom last year as part of its post-scandal comeback effort (“We wanted a new name that would make us proud,” Chairman Michael Capellas said at the time.) More recently, Network Associates readopted the name McAfee in an effort to focus squarely on the security market where McAfee’s name is well known.
In GoRemote’s case, the company is evolving from being a supplier of services mainly to ISPs to an enterprise network service provider. The company wanted to move to a clearer name, especially because the moniker GRIC was not all that familiar to its new target audience anyway, Fuggetta says. GRIC originally stood for Global Reach Internet Consortium, reflecting its initial focus.
GRIC, which officially changed its name in May, started the process back in 2002. The company, which actually was called AimNet back in the early 1990s, hired a branding firm and tested a set of names, but decided not to pull the trigger.
Fuggetta signed on as a consultant to the CEO in January 2003 and made the name change one of his recommendations as part of a broader marketing revamp at the company. GRIC hired Fuggetta as its senior vice president of worldwide marketing that summer, and the name-change project went into high gear in January.
At one point Fuggetta, who left the company earlier this year and now is back to serving as a consultant to GoRemote, got stuck on the notion of working the word “beyond” into the name. But that idea got dashed one day when his wife pointed out that she just received a sample of a new tampon in the mail that bore the name Beyond.
One thing Fuggetta knew was he wanted a name that clearly described what GoRemote did, not a made-up word like Avaya or Genuity (he was involved in the GTE Internetworking-to-Genuity transition in a past job). While GoRemote is a decent-sized company, at $50 million in annual revenue, he says the outfit isn’t so well-heeled that it can fund a branding campaign of the sort needed to make such a name stick in the minds of potential customers. Such names, he says, are the purview of companies like AT&T.
Deborah Wagner, who as the owner of StoryHat in Glen Ellen, Calif., helps companies change names and establish brands, calls company names that say what they mean “full vessels.” Those that don’t say much of anything about the company – Yahoo, for example – are called “empty vessels” and need a story built around them. Such names tend to be easier to trademark, she says.
InnoPath, the new name for mobile software maker DoOnGo that StoryHat conceived, is somewhere in between full and empty. “It’s mid-vessel,” she says.
GoRemote considered using an outside firm to pick its name, but wound up going solo. Fuggetta vividly recalls coming up with the name GoRemote shortly after retiring to his home office on a Saturday night after dinner and wine with his wife. He ran back into the family room jumping up and down, then proceeded to track down members of the management team by phone, even pulling one executive out of a theater seat.
“Sometimes when it comes to naming and branding, the most obvious and simplest is the best,” he says.
Importantly, the name also passed the URL test: No one had taken it yet. That, Fuggetta says, is among the toughest challenges.
“It’s nearly impossible to come up with something that hasn’t been taken,” he says. “It’s frustrating.”
Fuggetta declines to pinpoint how much the company spent on its renaming effort but says the company saved itself a bundle by not hiring a branding consultant to do it. That could have cost $10 million or more, he says. He pegs the cost of implementing the new name, such as in new brochures and on the Web site, at less than 1% of the company’s marketing budget for 2004.
Quantifying what impact the name change has on the company’s top and bottom lines also will be difficult, Fuggetta says. The company in August posted its first quarterly results since the name change and reported a 27% jump in revenue from the year-ago second quarter but also said it lost $3.8 million, about a 10-fold increase over its loss in the second quarter a year ago.
StoryHat’s Wagner, who gets most of her business from venture capitalists working with start-ups, says that while a name can help a company make a splash or improve its prospects, it’s not all about the name. “It’s the way a company is managed, the way it markets itself. And it depends on the market climate,” she says.
Wagner adds that customers increasingly are seeking help naming not just companies, but products. The key here is coming up with an “extensible” name, one that can evolve along with the product line. “That’s not easy to do with numeric names [such as via version numbers], so there is a move away from version numbers to give products more personality,” she says.
In either case, the important thing is coming up with a name that works long term.
“It’s like getting a tattoo,” Wagner says. “The process can be painful, so you better be able to live with it.”
