At our “Team Tenato” meeting last  Friday, we were chatting about the amount of labour involved in re-branding our company’s name, and hence the entire corporate image.    Have you ever wondered whether you should seriously consider a re-brand?

At Tenato, there are a lot of reasons we chose to rebrand, and here are the main ones.  Consider whether these ring true when considering the re-branding your company:

1. Our previous name generally only attracted one kind of client:  Small businesses.  While we’ve enjoyed dealing with small businesses over the years, we’ve also run successful programs for large, national and multinational clients and were looking to really take our services to the next level.  However, people would often look at the name “Start Marketing” and interpret it as “Start-up Marketing,” thinking we only served start-up companies.

2. The name also had a certain impetuousness.  It implied we “jumped in immediately” and began marketing.  When the business was founded 1996, this was somewhat true.  Since we’ve evolved though, we’ve put a great deal of emphasis in carefully planning our clients’ strategies, and then in encouraging them to persist with them over the long run.  We discovered that success was more than “showing up”—it was about persistence, and staying power over the long run.  Hence, the word “tenacity” from which Tenato was derived.

3. By changing the name of the company, we were able to get a fresh opportunity to re-examine many of the ways we’d done things in the past, and market to clients with a new message.  People who knew the former company were excited to hear new things were developing in a new direction, and have been very curious to learn about the new way we are delivering our services.  It’s brought new clients, new associates, and a whole new level of energy and excitement into the company.

4. The “Marketing” handle was wrong.  The problem with the word “marketing” is that the general public has a limited understanding of what it entails.  It makes people assume we only offer advertising or promotional assistance.  In fact, our company has always been heavily involved in the strategic aspects such as developing a client’s service/products, pricing, positioning, and sales processes. Beyond this, we also got deeply into visioning and steering the overall growth direction of the company.  As a result, many prospects were assuming we were just another “marketing” agency, which was not at all the case.    What’s more, it caused us to be “lumped in” with businesses completely unlike ours.  When we re-branded to use the word “strategy” one of our most long-standing clients commented that it was blatantly obvious why we did it, and that it was right on the mark.  Who’d have thought a word as broad as “marketing” could be so limiting?

5. The biggest reason to re-brand is to better match the vision of the company you are working to become. If your existing brand is in conflict with where you wish to go, you have a choice:  a) let a new competitor come in with a better stronger, or more appealing image and take that spot from you or b) get rid of the old brand yourself, and BE that newer, stronger, better competitor.  The choice is entirely up to you.

For fun, have a look at our logos over the years, and we’re sure you’ll agree with our choice to re-brand!   And stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2:  How to Re-brand…