Changing your business' name
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The phrase ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ is commonly used to describe a hopeless attempt to win new business with mere cosmetic or superficial changes, says Pauline Amphlett, intellectual property and naming director of Brand Guardians. Any name change, where your offering is either not good enough already is pointless. “Gone are the days of changing a name on a whim,” adds Amphlett. She also advises against Latinate abstract names that cause phonetic problems, don’t have elegance and may not make sense to the customer.
Any belief that you can erase the past is foolhardy. Brand experts say that it takes at least a decade, if not more, for an old legacy to be forgotten. If your company is perceived negatively, address it, counsels Interbrand’s Kavounis. He uses an example of a brand of headache pills from mainland Europe.
The pills were associated with a number of deaths in the 1980s. Not something you’d expect to come back from. But through crisis management it took full responsibility, accepted its mistakes and was seemingly forgiven or forgotten as it is now one of the most successful brands in this country again.
At least half of the process is about communicating the new name and its inherent values. Consignia didn’t take because it was not communicated, particularly internally where staff are brand guardians yet were told after it went public.
However, that doesn’t mean you involve staff deeply in the process. “Name and identity are so subjective. Keep it to a limited team. Make a judgement based on objective reasoning,” says Corporate Edge’s Peter Shaw. He adds that you should tell staff and customers what type of organisation you want to be seen as, what you’re doing to change the existing set-up and what the tangible differences are with what you have right now.
Despite the expense of the Consignia decision no good reason was given for the change, its role and what it stood for. Shaw says it tried to claim it had changed parts of the business, when it hadn’t.
