I want to tell you something only a few people know. I’ve written some of the blog articles because I needed to rant about something.
This is one of those times. Get ready for a rant. Stay with me. I do have a point.
I’m not sure of the exact year – maybe around 2000 – Bell Atlantic merged with GTE and changed their name and logo to Verizon. Not sure why folks made up company name like “Verizon” but they did. It has no meaning. You can’t look up Verizon in the dictionary. It’s not an old family name either. It’s simply a cool sounding name that some folks got paid a lot of money to make up. It certainly does not have the ring (get it?) that says anything about what the company actually does. Nevertheless, they spent about a gazillion dollars pounding into our heads that the company is a communications company. They were very successful at it too.
Since that time, Verizon continued to spend a ton of money on marketing (probably something like a gazillion-zillion dollars); some folks call that “branding”. It now appears that Verizon recently changed their logo even though we all got comfy seeing the original logo and knowing what the company was all about. Bravo, now they’re going to have to spend about a gazillion-zillion-zillion dollars trying to convince us that the new logo means something significant to us.
Here’s why I’m ranting: all of my customers are considered small businesses. Changing your agency name or your logo is not a good idea. It can cost you big time. The concept of change is pretty tough on people so when you change your branding, you run the real risk of driving away customers and prospects. In order to change your branding, you’ll have to reinvest time, money and effort rebuilding the impressions and good will you worked so hard (and invested financially) to create. Unless, of course, you have the same resources as Verizon.
Rant over.
