{"id":1277,"date":"2010-03-15T07:46:28","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T07:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.questionpro.com\/?p=1277"},"modified":"2010-03-15T07:46:28","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T07:46:28","slug":"changing-your-company-name-a-real-life-no-cost-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.questionpro.com\/blog\/changing-your-company-name-a-real-life-no-cost-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing Your Company Name: A Real Life, No-Cost Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"image\"I first met Prasad Thammineni a couple of years ago.\u00a0 He asked me to write an article about his new company (then called Pixily).<\/p>\n

The Interactive Portion of the Article: (Grab a piece of paper)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before I tell you what kind of company Pixily is, why don\u2019t you take a few seconds and think about what kind of product or service a company named Pixily might provide?\u00a0 Write those down. When you\u2019re done reading the article, tell us what you thought that Pixily did and what you think of the new name.<\/p>\n

About Pixily<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prasad saw an opportunity for Pixily as soon as he got out of graduate school.\u00a0 He was saddled with all kinds of papers, documents and research \u2013 boxes and boxes of it \u2013 and simply didn\u2019t feel like carrying it around with him.\u00a0 He wanted the information digitized and that meant scanning.\u00a0 Purchasing a scanner wasn\u2019t expensive.\u00a0 But the mere thought of sitting there for hours scanning documents by hand wasn\u2019t really appealing.\u00a0 He could purchase a high-speed scanner.\u00a0 But that was expensive and when he was done \u2013 what would he do with it.<\/p>\n

And Pixily was born.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t be too hard for you to imagine the value of having a document scanning service \u2013 just like big companies do.\u00a0 Imagine no longer having to route through those moldy file boxes in your basement for valuable documents, health records or income tax records.\u00a0 What if you could ship those away in a recyclable safe container, have them scanned and secure online?\u00a0 Even better, what if you could search and have access to these documents on demand \u2013 no matter where you are?!<\/p>\n

That was Pixily.\u00a0 An online document scanning and storage service just for the small office and home office markets.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in a Name?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was only one problem.\u00a0 People liked the name Pixily \u2013 but they didn\u2019t associate it with the service.\u00a0 Pixily just didn\u2019t say small business or home office.\u00a0 Not only that, it didn\u2019t really explain what the company did.\u00a0 There were other companies that started with the prefix \u201cPixi\u201d and the poor Pixily people were getting lost in the shuffle.\u00a0 Potential customers kept thinking Pixily was a video editing company.\u00a0 This name just wasn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n

How We Said Goodbye to Pixily and Hello to OfficeDrop<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the nitty gritty details on the name changing process, I spoke with Healy Jones, OfficeDrop\u2019s head of marketing.\u00a0 \u201cPixily, as a company loved its name.\u00a0 There were quite a few Pixily customers that loved the name too.\u00a0 But we knew they had to make a change.\u201d He said, and this is how they did it.<\/p>\n

Healy gave me a virtual step-by-step of how Pixily became OfficeDrop.\u00a0 No expensive consultants were used to develop this new brand,\u00a0 just a lot of common sense brainstorming, crowdsourcing and customer contact.\u00a0 Here are my notes from our conversation.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Sit down and get everyone on the same page about what\u2019s wrong with the current name you have.\u00a0 \u201cIn our case, we intuitively knew that having people who love your name, misspell your name was a problem\u201d<\/li>\n
  2. Set goals around the attributes of the new name.\u00a0 \u201cWe wanted our name to be easy to spell and easy to remember.\u00a0 We wanted the name to reflect what we did, be between 10 and 12 letters and be easy to type on a keyboard.\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. We did some brainstorming internally.\u00a0 We created a list of 90 names, then we took that list and checked it against what domains were available using the WHOIS directory.\u00a0 After that process, we were left with about 30 names.<\/li>\n
  4. Next we created a survey on Google Docs.\u00a0 We created a survey that took the 30 names and created 3 groups of 10.\u00a0 Then we asked employees to force rank them. \u00a0Our goal was to get to a final group of 7 names.<\/li>\n
  5. We selected a group of trusted customers and talked to them about the short list of names we had come up with.\u00a0 You could call these in-depth-interviews.\u00a0 We simply had conversations with them.\u00a0 Showed them the names, asked them which they liked and why.\u00a0 We got some interesting feedback from those and were able to eliminate some from the short list just from that feedback.<\/li>\n
  6. Finally, it was time for our HUGE survey.\u00a0 We did an e-mail blast to our list of several thousand customers and got several hundred responses.\u00a0 Now we had something statistical.\u00a0 We asked people what they thought of each name and gave them a space to write down their responses.\u00a0 I grouped the responses in positive and negative groups. And finally, we had OfficeDrop that came out as the overall best name for us.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    You can see that this process was fairly straightforward and yielded good results for very little money.<\/p>\n

    Here is a summary of symptoms for a name change and some resource ideas if you\u2019re contemplating a name change.<\/p>\n

    Symptoms of a Pending Name Change<\/strong><\/p>\n