Change Your Name to Reintroduce Yourself

A valued client called me this week to ask my advice about changing the name of her store. She’s ready to expand the range of merchandise she carries, and she’s concerned that the current store name might not adequately project the change to her past customers.
     She’s right. A new business name is often a good way to reintroduce yourself to your customers. At the same time, though, a dramatic change in name would risk wasting all the good will her brand has earned. The option we discussed most was crafting a new name using a variant of the current one.
     In her situation, you might decide to keep the same name. Or if the public had formed negative associations with a retail business you’ve purchased, you might change the name to a completely different moniker. Or if you decide to keep the identical business name, introduce your own name.
     According to The Record newspaper in Hackensack, New Jersey, that’s what historic A&P is doing. Now that the supermarket chain has emerged from bankruptcy and is a privately-held company, President and CEO Sam Martin is appearing in a series of ads. The tag line: “Shopping just got a whole lot better.”
     Here, the objective is to change the associations to your business’s name. I had to think through a related issue a couple of years ago: I received an email with a frightful warning: The writer said that the name I'd chosen for my blog—RIMtailing—was generally understood in his neck of the woods to refer to an obscene physical act. The writer advised that people were mighty unlikely to say the name aloud in mentioning my blog to colleagues.
     I promptly did online searches in three slang dictionaries. No mention there of rimtailing at all. Not even with its proper etymology as a mashup of the “Retailing In Motion” acronym and  “retailing.”
     I decided that if “RIMtailing” does have negative associations which make people hesitate saying the name, my mission is to restore a sterling reputation to the term. And as soon as I'm done with this, my next task is to see that consumers worldwide have only the most positive associations with the often misunderstood business name of one of my other clients. They install lawns. Great company. Deliver right to the customer's door. The business name is Sod To Me.
     …I’m kidding about that part.

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Make Your Business Name Easy to Say