Changing Your Company Name
I got a call from a friend of mine who had just joined a small company as Marketing Director. After auditing the firm’s marketing practices, he determined that the old company name had to go. The old name too closely resembled another firm’s moniker and it was causing confusion in the marketplace. With new ownership at the firm, a change seemed to make sense.He called me looking for some ideas for a new name and I gladly helped; in fact, we came up with a new company name that could be used as his URL with a dotcom suffix. All it took was 15 minutes. I was very pleased since it took me nearly six months to come up my new book’s name First, Best, or Different; it was agonizing.After we hung up I started to think about how a name change will impact his firm. I wrote a list of all the things, little or big, that a name change might impact. The list was frightening. It started with letting all the existing customers know about the change. And, that was the easy part.What about the website, the yellow pages, the trucks, the invoices, the letterhead, the signage, the business cards, the fax cover page, the voicemail message, the company uniforms, the brochures, the product packaging, the shipping boxes, and the product labels? It is easy to forget how much time and money it takes to build brand awareness for a company name. The cost of such a change is immense.Also, how about the old URL? Think of all the links that lead to that old URL. For most firms changing a name, keeping the old URL would be critical; in fact, you would probably want to keep it for years so that your old customers could find you. Often this is done with a “redirect” from the old URL to the new one.Additionally, don’t forget about the lawy