A few months ago, a few of us went to a major trade show in London. Not the most exciting thing you may think, and you’d be right. Wandering around with our over-priced coffees, what struck us was the sheer amount of companies with invented or at best extremely abstract names. Names that bore no relation to what they did. Names that were, frankly, rubbish. This led to an amusing game of ‘guess what the company does’ based on a cursory glance at the stand. Let’s face it, when a company calls itself ‘Genistar’ with a tag line of ‘Unlock your customer’s potential’, what attracts you to that stand? What do they do?

Isn’t this Marketing 101? If you build a stand for a show and the whole purpose of that stand is to attract as many people as possible, shouldn’t that stand be able to explain what you do within a second’s glance? I believe it is called ‘advertising’.

When Eastman renamed his company ‘Kodak’, it was a stroke of genius. Invented words as company names were unheard of, it was not open to mis-pronunciation and was extremely memorable. He created a superb brand not by inventing a word but by bucking the trend.

Last month we were ‘APM Internet’. This has been a name of convenience for us for some time and has suited its purpose as we have slowly and consistently built the company up over the last few years. Recently, however, we’ve found ourselves falling fault of exactly the same problem the exhibitors have. If we had a stand at the show and plastered up ‘APM Internet’ everywhere, what good would it do? We realised that we needed to tell a story. We needed to explain, in one short sentence, what we did and the attitude with which we do it.

Today we are ‘The Very Good Email Company’.

We decided on this name for many reasons. Firstly, there’s no debate about what we do. Secondly, you can’t mis-spell or (hopefully) forget it. Most importantly, it gives you an idea of the type of team we are. This is not a cocky attitude or marketing ‘mist’, it’s a bar; a level of achievement we are setting for ourselves. It’s not about assuming the right to refer to ourselves as ‘very good’ but rather a title we intend to continuously earn from our customers.

We’re all excited about this new image for the company. We’ve got a lot of plans we’ll be sharing with you soon. This new website and name are just the start. In the meantime, please pardon our dust as the rebrand process gets underway. There’s lots to update and it’ll take some time to complete.

After all, we’ll want the results to be Very Good.

PJ

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 5:41 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.