So… We Realized Our Brand Sucks. Now What?
Customericare, CustomerIcare, Customer iCare?
Even we have no idea how to write our name and that’s probably the least of our problems.
Let me take you back 1 year and a half ago. It was January 2014 and we thought it was time to pick a name and build a real brand for our live video chat software.
Like a lot of startups, none of us had ever done that before so we read a few articles and kind of just winged it. We brainstormed. We listed some of our keywords. Customer, Care…
Customer, I care… Customericare?
Sounded good!
It was exactly what we wanted to get out there: We truly care about customers (unlike our competitors). It was true and it still is today. It just doesn’t change the fact that our brand name sucks!
So The Name Is Not Great, But There’s More To A Brand Than Just A Name, Right?
Of course!
Let’s stay on the surface and look at our logo.
“Oh you’re selling antivirus, that cool!”
“Uh, well no actually we sell a live chat solution.”
“Oh, ok…”
We wanted to have a caring vibe but we totally disregarded the industry iconography. (chat bubble anyone?)
We also wanted to be different. We were not just a chat software, we were a video chat software with way bigger ideas.
We did look at our competitors to get ideas of what the industry norm was.
Chat bubbles almost everywhere. Let’s maybe try something different.
And here’s what we sent to the designer for inspiration:
If you ignore my utter lack of design skills, I believe we didn’t do that bad. We even had some pretty good chat looking ideas.
We just forgot the chat side in the process and focused on the caring aspect of the brand. One thing led to another and we decided on a antivirus looking logo…
Logo… Name… these are details. A brand is way more than that!
True.
So let’s fast forward a few weeks and take a peek at our content marketing strategy.
We launched our blog on January, 21 2014 with this article: 10 Ways To Put A Smile On Your Customer’s Face
I have to say that the article did pretty good on LinkedIn. We even got some amazing feedback from people in Customer Service LinkedIn groups. It was a lot more than we expected for a first article and it encouraged us to write more!
We wrote few pieces on live chat and good customer service. We wanted to become the ultimate experts on good, caring customer service. And we were on the right track baby!
Until… We realized our traffic wasn’t converting. AT ALL!
We did get newsletter subscribers but no one was signing up to use our software.
Were we not targeting the right customers? Was our website that bad?
Now I can tell you that it was a lot of both. We basically built this caring customer service brand but none of our readers seemed to be interested in a live chat software.
We also discovered the customer service field was a little hard to crack so we switched our focus.
From Being A Customer Service Brand To Helping Small Businesses Increase Sales
Toward the end of 2014, a lot changed for us.
We started focusing a lot more on live chat and not only video chat. We rebuilt our website to improve conversions. We started being a lot more active in startup and small business communities…
And we slowly started to switch our focus from customer service to sales. Helping smaller business increase their sales just seemed like a more concrete and actionable offer than “Deliver awesome customer service” or “Show customers you care”.
Things started to slowly pick up and we gained our first customers. Between January and April 2015, our traffic doubled and we started getting our first paying customers. Good times!
We launched integrations and started publishing more live chat specific content on the website. Things were looking really good for awhile.
But we completely forgot to build a consistent brand! We got the “testing new things” part right but we had no long term vision whatsoever.
Woops, We Forgot Our Brand, Now What?
Which brings us to… May 2015.
We realized we would need consistency if we wanted to get one step closer to success. That’s when we started talking about changing our name and building a new brand.
We pushed the idea away for a while but it kept coming up during our meetings.
So, once again, 1 and a half year later, we had a brainstorming.
This time around, we wouldn’t be so naive. We wanted a name with the word “chat” a logo that would clearly show what we do and marketing strategy full of personality.
At the time I am writing this article, we have everything on paper and are getting ready to execute.
Since it is going to be a long process and we want people to engage with us this time around, we decided to share out branding journey on SlideShare.
We started 2 weeks ago by sharing our research on branding and got a really warm response from the community. (Bragging time: 15k views in a week, not bad eh).
Alright, I know you are dying to see the SlideShare so here you go:
Part 1: What Makes A Brand Memorable
Part 2: How To Create Brand Consistency
The rest of the story is going to be written in real time… If you’re curious to see what we have in store, you can sign up to follow our crazy branding journey here: Join The CustomerIcare Branding Journey
Wish us luck and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us!
