Central Perk: Why Rebrand? Why Now?

vineri, 18 octombrie 2013

Why Rebrand? Why Now?

Posted: 17 Oct 2013 06:55 AM PDT

You may have noticed that we have recently rebranded from SEOptimise to White.net. If you haven’t, then you may be a little confused as to why the SEOptimise website is now branded White! Well now you know!

Since the rebrand on the 1st October 2013, there have been a lot of people asking why we've rebranded. So I wanted to take the opportunity to explain it all in a post. I’d be happy to answer any further questions that you feel haven’t been answered in the comments below.

So, why the rebrand?

SEOptimise was, and still is, a great name! It has done the business very well up to this point, and has built up an incredible authority within the industry. This has never been in doubt!

The issue with the name, and I am sure the majority of you will agree, is that it lends itself mainly to SEO. Although SEO was, and continues to be, a large part of the business, we offer many other services, including PPC, Analytics and Branded Content, that some potential customers were unaware of due to the previous brand name. As such, it had to change.

Moving away from the name SEOptimise wasn’t a decision that we took lightly and it was debated over for several months. Before it was decided to change, we asked a large number of stakeholders a range of questions to ensure that the new brand would be aligned to our existing customers, potential customers and readers of our blog.

Some of those questions included:
- What services do you think SEOptimise offers?
- What size do you think the company is?
- Would you buy from SEOptimise?

Although I can’t let you know the exact answers to these questions, they confirmed our initial thoughts, and made the decision to rebrand slightly easier.

How we did come up with the new brand?

We worked with a branding company, Accrue Faulton, to develop the new brand. We decided to do this as we thought it was too important to get wrong, so specialists were needed! The exercise started with a review of the market, looking at each competitor brand and how their brand image fitted into a relatively simple table based on our industry. We then did a similar exercise using some more advanced branding tools. After this had been completed, we started reviewing where we fitted into the market and the messaging we should be using moving forward.

We had a couple of names that we had been thinking of using, so the exercise started with these. After the initial exercise outlined above, it was clear that none of the names were suitable. There was a bit of panic as we realised we were going to need to find a new name, and quickly! Accrue helped us through this by developing a strategy for the new name based on some of their previous work. Unfortunately, none of the names that this exercise produced were suitable, but the exercise did show "white" as the colour in multiple names presented White stuck and we went about purchasing a domain.

The branding agency then went about creating the image and, as you can see, have done an amazing job of creating a really strong brand. The brand messaging was then developed, and we're really pleased with where we've ended up.

Why rebrand now?

Firstly, it has nothing to do with the changes in the industry.

As indicated above, this is something that the business had been thinking about for a while. We have been through a lengthy process to get to this stage, and it was something that needed to be done for the good of the company.

In reality, we have been thinking about change for at least the last 12 months, with things really starting to become more of a reality in the past 6 months. We had wanted to launch the new brand earlier than the 1st October, but things just didn’t fall into place. We had to be sure that we had everything ready to launch, and that takes a lot of organising.

Personally, I don’t feel there is ever a perfect time to rebrand, and there will always be some ups and downs. But we felt that it was right to do it now.

So what’s next?

Well, it’s business as usual. There will be constant changes to the website and it WILL evolve over time, as any website should.

The new brand has been well received based on feedback we’ve had at the recent Ecommerce Exhibition, peer reviews and emails from you all.

We are continuing to expand the technical team (we are hiring!), and we hope that within a short period of time we will start to expand our service offering beyond what currently exists. It is an exciting time to be a part of this new brand, and we believe that it will quickly progress within the digital space.

Hopefully that answers, in short, some of the questions you have on why SEOptimise has rebranded to White.net. What do you think of the rebrand? Do you prefer SEOptimise or White.net? We’d be interested to hear all of your thoughts in the comments below.

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