The rebrand diaries

There comes a time where a company decides that they want to rebrand. They want to update the way they present themselves to the world and create a new look and feel to take them into the years ahead. For some, it might just be a fresh coat of paint, a new website or a logo update – while for others it’s a complete overhaul of everything, including the name.

As a content and marketing agency, we’re no stranger to rebrands and have helped a number of clients at all levels of the identity refresh or change. But, this time we’re going to rebrand ourselves – from top to bottom.

We thought it would be fun to take you with us on our journey through a series of diaries that show our process, and just what it means for an agency on the cusp of change.

The name game

So, where to begin. Well, we agreed that a rebrand was a good idea, so that’s that. The very first thing we decided that we wanted more than a new logo or look – we wanted a new name too.

But, how do you go about finding a new brand name? One that’s memorable, meaningful and captures your entire brand’s DNA in just a few letters. Well, it ain’t easy.
To start nailing down ourselves as an agency, we sat down together and had a creative workshop to start figuring out what we wanted to be called. Did we want something flashy? Something friendly? Something weird or some strange mixture of them all?

Who the hell are we?

One thing was for sure: we wanted our name to continue carrying the torch off our overall approach to everything: friendly, agile, down to earth and smart. So, we had these tenets. Time for a brainstorm.

Names are words (duh), so a good place to start was for all of us to write down as many words as we can think of that describe our attitude and ways of working. Those words were to be categorized into various different buckets, such as animals, colours, feelings, textures, shapes and so on.

The idea here was that by seeing ourselves spread in so many different ways, we might be able to start piecing together a name. For instance, how about ‘Space Monkey’. No, too whacky. Right, well how about ‘Spotlight Shephard’. Hm, well maybe there’s something there. ‘Creative Vision’ – bleh.

With all these words, we could look at combining them in cool ways, or at least they might spark some creative thinking.

So, did we come up with something yet?

Well, no. Not yet. Coming up with a name is incredibly hard because everyone has subjective associations with different words, so even if we had some good ideas, someone would pop up and say ‘oh, that makes me thing of this bad thing’, so to be safe we go back to the drawing board.

At the time of writing this article, our rebrand has had a bit of a slow start. It’s difficult to find the time to work on yourself when you’re already working on multiple client’s communications at the same time. But, that’s not an excuse: it’s a realization that is we’re gonna do this, we need to do it properly. We need to treat ourselves as a client and hold ourselves to the same deadlines and discipline we would have for any other client.

We will

So, stay tuned. We do have some ideas cooking in the pot. We just need to let them marinate a little longer. And then, the rest follows: new logo, new website, new everything.

It’s going to be a long road, but it’s already kinda fun.