What's in a Name?

Despite months of research and much appreciated input from some of Australia's leading brand development professionals, I'm less sure than ever that there is a hard and fast process to follow when climbing the re-branding Everest.

Having just completed our fourth re-branding marathon in the last 7 years (yes, the fourth -- and so help me the last), I hope this overview of the thought behind the processes we used to arrive at our new name -- Enotia -- will save you some of the pain we've experienced.

If you don't have the time (or motivation) to read this article in full, here's my brand development golden rule up front:

In a perfect world, your legal name (company/business name) is your trading name (what you say when you answer your telephone) is your primary brand name is your primary domain name.

For reference, Enotia ticks all these boxes.

Many businesses are owned by Companies (or Unit Trusts etc.) that have no correlation to their trading name. While there may be good reasons for this, if you have the choice, a Company name that is also your trading name is preferable for branding and other practical reasons.
Over the last 4 years we have inserted "TBEE Pty Ltd trading as IASP" and "Please make cheques payable to TBEE Pty Ltd" on all IASP invoices.
I'm really looking forward to avoiding the hassle of having to convince every new bank teller we deal with to "check the system as TBEE and IASP are the same organisation" when Enotia becomes both our legal and trading names in the near future.

Of course, some business models require multiple sub-brands, but don't confuse your products with your brands. I see many businesses trying to promote individual products under individual brands when a single master brand would have been a far more economical choice.
Remember that making any individual brand famous requires the two old chestnuts: time and money -- a single master brand will always be easier to "make famous" than a range of sub-brands.

The evolution of our brand name:

The origin of our business can be traced to 1998, when trading as an ACT-based Internet Service Provider -- ActWEB (a brand that actually worked well) -- we received a federal government grant for $66,000, to which we contributed a further $95,000, to fund development of version 1.0 of our software applications.

When ActWEB's ISP services (and the ActWEB brand name) were sold in 2001, we began targeting our evolving software as a portal-builer application to the registered club industry, so the brand name clubport seemed a perfect choice.

Of course, from day one we had an identity crisis as most of the club managers we communicated with thought we were selling alcohol (you know, Penfolds Club Port), and it wasn't long before we also realised there were many other potential target markets we could appeal to where the brand clubport would be totally inapproapriate.
By the end of 2001 we thought we had solved our branding headaches with the evolution from clubport to infoport (short for Information Portals), following the logic that we were portal software providers for a broad range of business types.

It wasn't until we commissioned market research and a full business and brand review in 2002 that we discovered the infoport brand was missing the wider market of corporate clients looking for interactive corporate website solutions. Portal builder software proved to be just too narrow a focus for our software...it was time to bring in the experts and IASP was born.

Because our software was then engineered in Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) framework, and we provided Internet related services, IASP seemed a great choice for our identity into the forseeable future.

We started realizing back in 2002, however, that we actually offered much more than just the underlying software technology we've invested so much into. While our business operations then, as now, are fundamentally based on the Application Service Provider (ASP) model, the name no longer defined the scope of what we were capable of doing.

Despite the fact it does tick a few of the brand essentials, 5 years down the track IASP has, in hindsight, proven to be a poor choice and it's time for a change!

Re-branding an existing business is typically a time-consuming, costly, and, overall, painful exercise. It's essential to get it as close to right (as possible) the first time.

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