Adventures in Branding (or Rebranding) a Company

The other day I had lunch with a friend who runs a software company and he mentioned that due to a kerfuffle with investors, he’d recently had to rename a product. He told me the new product name and I said, “That was available?!?” My friend laughed and said, “Yes, believe it or not, the only previous trademark registration was by a skateboard company.” The product name was so simple, so good, I couldn’t believe it had not been snapped up years ago.

If you’ve ever founded a company, or tried to name a product, you know what I’m talking about. I’ve named a handful of companies I’ve founded, and on a few more occasions I’ve been hired by much, much larger companies to direct their rebranding.

Sounds fun, right? Bring in a tray of coffees and a box of donuts, sit down in a conference room with an exposed brick wall and a couple of white boards and brainstorm some cool new names. Then later, crack open a few beers and continue to throw names at the white boards until something sticks, Something like … “Google”! Or “Netflix”! But probably not “Accenture”.

The fun quotient in any renaming process is mostly dictated by two factors: one, how many people have a say in the final decision (the fewer the better) and two, whether or not the domain name is available.

Whenever I start a renaming process I joke to my colleagues that, “All the good domain names have been gone since 1998.”

Seriously.

In the mid-to-late 1990s domain squatters grabbed every interesting combination of nouns and verbs and adjectives in mostly English but other languages as well and almost without exception have been paying renewal fees ever since, in the hope that you’ll decide you absolutely need to own www.donutholedigger.com (actually, it’s available, go for it) and will be willing to pay thousands (or tens of thousands) for the privilege.

True, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) maintains an arbitration system allowing trademark holders to try to claim domains that have been registered or are being used “in bad faith” by parties that have no “legitimate interests” in the domain name, but even the arbitration system is relatively expensive and time-consuming, and in any event, you probably don’t yet have a trademark for the business you’re naming or renaming.

I’ll give you an example. A few years ago I led a renaming/rebranding process for a renewable energy company with headquarters in Singapore and operations all around Asia. As part of the sale purchase agreement, the new owners (who had paid $5 billion) were required to rename the company. The owners were an investment fund, so they weren’t going to suck the company into a conglomerate that had an existing brand; we had to come up with something new.

Leading the effort, I put together a small in-house team of creative brains, and we did the coffee and donuts and white boards thing for several weeks, pulling together a list of possibilities we would then present to the owners.

Our goal was to come up with a name that embodied the company’s business, communicating what it did and where it operated. In our case, the main parameters were “renewable energy” and “Asia-Pacific”.

We also wanted to find a name that did not mean “penis” in any language on earth, and especially not in any of the countries in which we had operations.

The first issue is one I have mentioned already: over 20 years ago domain squatters took pretty much every English-language combination of words. And the really low-hanging fruit (e.g. www.pacificenergy.com) are in use by real businesses (Pacific Energy is actually owned by the company that bought Pacific Energy Partners so the domain redirects to the parent company’s website).

Another issue we had when we thought about moving beyond English-language words was politics. As a regional company, realistically we could not use a Chinese or Japanese or Malay or Indonesian or Hindi or Thai word or words; that not only would have pigeonholed us as a company local to one particular country, but also very probably would have offended 80 percent of our employees and customers, thanks to all the geopolitical grudges that have been nursed in Asia for decades or centuries.

Latin was a language we could use, because no one speaks Latin anymore, and we ended up using a Latin word as part of the name that was finally selected. But the link between that word and the company’s business was extremely tenuous, and honestly, the name that was selected by the owners was not in my top 10.

That’s the thing, though. The guy who wrote the check for $5 billion had the deciding vote, and I never met or spoke with him. His input came via a laborious game of Chinese telephone that meant there were at least two people between him and our group of name generators (including, at one point, an expensive external consultant the owners hired in desperation, but whose suggested names were all rejected by them).

Also, Mr. Big was so busy managing tens of billions of investor dollars that I suspect he never had time for even the most rudimentary briefing about our process, and when at one point he came back to us with his suggestions, I laughed out loud. It’s been a few years and no longer have the email, but I’m pretty sure that “Pacific Energy” was one of his ideas. Er, yes, that occurred to me as well, but … what about the (unavailable) domain name? His other suggestions made it equally clear he had spent less than five minutes on the process.

That rebranding was frustrating for me because although I was leading the effort, I didn’t have agency. The guy who wrote the check for $5 billion had the only vote, and because he didn’t understand the process and its challenges, he probably thought we on the creative team were idiots, and at the same time we were unable to get a sense of what sort of name he was hoping for.

Was he happy with the name that was finally selected? I doubt it. I think he either got bored or decided his time would be better spent on his day job: managing those tens of billions of investor dollars.

Believe it or not, as a postscript to the process, several days after we announced the new name and began rebranding the company across eight Asia-Pacific markets, someone on the management team (who had not been a part of the creative process) circulated a shred of Internet minutiae suggesting that “vena” – which means “blood vessel” in Latin, and which we had used to suggest the distribution of energy, and energy as a life force for society (I told you it wasn’t in my top 10) – means “penis”. Yes, seriously.

It doesn’t, though, unless you’re an ultra-Freudian.