Why we decided to do a full rebranding, one week before launching our product.
Record Bird alerts you about new an upcoming records from your favourite bands and musicians before they are released. We’re currently in closed beta and keep continuously adding users each day. Check in: recordbird.com
“In any case, you want to avoid a rebranding. More often than not, it kills a young company.” — (Lawyer #1)
I remember those words, as if I was given the advice yesterday. In fact, it’s been more than 12 months since one fearful lawyer shared his rather drastic view on startups and branding with me. And for a moment I thought he was right.
Given my background in advertising, he only stressed what I thought I already knew: Rebranding is expensive, drains your resources and — done successfully — will take months while presenting a high operational risk.
So, (almost) before anything else, we started our own trademark research and found that we didn’t get access to all databases, therefore asked ‘our lawyer’ to do so for us. We went through pages and pages of trademark documents, finally filed for protection of our own trademark, got it approved and paid too much cash for lawyers, bureaucratic institutions and their services in the process. But, we had protected our own trademark. Well, not globally — that was too expensive — but at least in our test market: Austria. We didn’t have a product to test yet, but hey: first things first. At least we’d be safe once we were ready.
6 Months Later…
…we were faced with yet another decision: whether we wanted to roll out our trademark internationally. Apparently, if you do so within 6 months after your initial filing, you benefit from priority ruling over later applicants in these markets. Fortunately, we had learned our lesson and scored some lawyer’s advice for free (“You should definitely file for an international trademark, protection is everything for something as vulnerable as a startup.”), which we happily ignored afterwards.
By that time, me and my co-founder were sharing more of a “f*** it” attitude. We realised that expenses would only keep rolling in, while we’d be unable to pay for a potential legal dispute anyway. We definitely weren’t planning on suing anybody (even if they’d use our brand name), and if someone filed a lawsuit against us, well, we’d have to comply anyhow, as we wouldn’t drain our funds from product development in the favour of lawsuits. If someone wanted to play John, we’d be their bitch. End of story.
Creating Brand ‘Value’
Over the next few months we’d keep promoting our brand. We exhibited at the biggest tech conferences, presented at various community events, participated in startup competitions, build email lists, social media presences...
What we didn’t foresee though, was that we had to make a strategic decision on the product side. We wanted to test our product/market assumptions as fast and economically as possible.
This led us to reconsider our mobile first approach and develop our product as a web application. Only once we knew, that we were onto something, we’d consider rolling out the service via mobile apps. While this was definitely the right choice to make, it changed everything on the branding side.
Naming The Baby
Like our product, the former brand name — PATIO — was particularly designed for the mobile app market. Here’s some of the reasoning that went into the naming process:
- Uniqueness: at the time of conception, there were no apps with identical names in major app stores.
- Generic: In case of a pivot, a generic brand name wouldn’t limit our venture to the domain of ‘future music releases’.
- Narrative: PATIO (Spanish: patio [ˈpatjo]; “courtyard”, “forecourt”, “yard”) stood for the garden area of my co-founder’s house, where we used to sit down once a week and discuss the latest records we were excited about — an experience which we planned to digitize.
- Legal: Last but not least, there was no trademark registered for a software company in our core markets.
New Game, New Rules
For a web product, the brand name PATIO turned out to be a full-on disaster:
- Domain: We were forced to settle on getpatio.net; while for an app landing page this seemed somewhat okay, the domain would be terrible for hosting the product itself. You don’t go to getgoogle.net, if you want to look something up. With the shift from mobile to web, the domain name evolved to become the major access point for our product, therefore it had to be straight forward and highly memorable. patio.com had already been taken by one of the US’ largest outdoor furniture retailers, while patio.net and pat.io were just as unavailable. Consequently we hoped for a prompt release of the new GTLDs, especially .app and .music, but as we learned their release could not be expected until Q3/2015, way after our planned launch.
- Search: As a web product, traffic would significantly depend on our search ranking. Yet, people look for ‘new lady gaga record’ or ‘new album by david bowie’ rather than ‘patio david bowie’. Even if they did, there was a good chance they’d find some outdoor furniture with David Bowie prints, rather than landing on our site.
- Descriptive: Similarly, even if our site would come up amongst the first couple of search results, would you rather click on the link to a descriptive site which was clearly related to music releases (your search intention) or on a generic one like PATIO?
- People: Finally — and we really had not anticipated this problem — people would have no idea how to spell and pronounce “PATIO” [ˈpatjo]. Interestingly, our practice of writing our brand name in capital letters was adopted by almost everyone, even by complete strangers in random conversations over email and social media.
Counterarguments
We realised that our chances of successfully launching our product would be directly handicapped by our current brand name. Quickly, it became clear though, that a potential rebranding was far from the worst-case scenario which everyone had anticipated:
Losing Value: Yes we had done some promotion work, but we were still pre-launch. If worst comes to worst, I’d single-handedly write everyone we have ever met a personal email, explaining our intentions behind the rebranding. Also, getting it over with now would be clearly favourable to a rebranding in the months to come.
Costs: The only costs would be the past legal fees and manpower which went into the making and protection of our current trademark and corporate identity, as well as an annual fee for our old domain provider. But, they’re all sunk costs. They have already occurred, they can not be recovered and therefore shouldn’t cloud any rational decision making.
So what was holding us back?
Emotions: We realized that the only thing stopping us from diving head-first into the rebranding process was our emotional binding with a visual identity which we dearly loved. (At the time, we didn’t know that our designer would come up with an identity which we’d love even more.) The moment we became aware of it though, also this last mental barrier had been taken down, as we knew that we’d never allow emotions to stand in the way of success. Not when it was about pride, nostalgia and a rebranding. Realisation did the trick. So, rebranding it was!
The brand is dead, long live the brand.
Rebirth
The new brand name — Record Bird — didn’t only come unexpectedly natural and effortless to us, it also fulfilled all criteria we had previously specified:
- Domain: We got recordbird.com — what more do you want?
- Descriptive: The brand name establishes a clear connection to our product and market. On top, it includes a relevant keyword (‘record’) from an SEO standpoint (‘new record by…’).
- Narrative: Record Bird provides you with a bird’s-eye view of the non-transparent landscape of future music releases. The narrative clearly works.
- Spelling & Pronunciation: Using everyday words like ‘record’ and ‘bird’ should help prevent misspellings and faulty pronunciations, even for ESL folks.
- Trademark: Didn’t check, don’t care. If this should ever become a problem, we’ll deal with it once it does.
Conclusion
Don’t be foolish enough to think that a great brand will lead you to success: it’s always the product and the team behind it. Having that said, certain branding decisions might make things easier along the way, while others could make it a lot harder.
Branding won’t win your war, but it will ideally give you an unfair competitive advantage. It will strengthen your troops in the one or the other battle. Small battles admittedly. But don’t let your emotions get in the way of these little wins. They’re still a win.
In case you have any further thoughts or feedback, please get in touch via Twitter (@mahringer_a). Also, I am happy to discuss your individual situations!
By the way, in case you’re interested, we have a trademark for sale! ☺
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