Recently, Schifino Lee had the privilege of creating a new brand name for Network Liquidators, a multimillion-dollar technology equipment provider. Their new handle is Vology. When NL decided to expand from just buying and selling equipment into being a complete service provider, they realized their name would hold them back. That’s when they came to Slee for help.
Creating a new brand name is a very big challenge. The name is the label for the brand and needs to communicate in one highly concentrated package the entire brand experience.
The naming process began with building a brand profile. We looked at their customers, their competitors and the competitive space they were moving into. NL wanted to jump out the reseller pool and be considered on a par with tech OEMs, like Cisco Systems. That meant their new name had to have credibility, communicate assurance, quality and scope. To that we added the company’s values and attributes and its differentiators. The chief among these is speed. NL acts faster than anyone else at quoting prices and sending out product.
The aha moment we had was realizing that when a business wants to change or expand, its data system needs to support the growth. New equipment isn’t just a concern for the IT department, but for the entire operation. Vology supports the entire business and speed is essential because growing companies can’t wait to take advantage of opportunity.
Armed with our naming criteria and brand profile, we just started thinking. We looked for words that embody the brand promise of technology solutions delivered fast. Along with nouns, verbs and adjectives that mean speed we looked at things that embody speed such as racing, flight and grease through a goose. How about fast athletes, fleet historical figures and legends? Every thought goes down on paper. We produce pages and pages. After a few days of word mining we’d go over our sheets and cull the few rough gems. Then it’s back to mining. We looked at foreign words, root words and combinations of initials. We tried recombining syllables to coin neologisms—new words.
Promising ideas were Googled to eliminate names already in use in the category or in many categories. Those that made this cut got submitted to a trademark search. At this stage we tried creative spellings of a name we liked to make it unique. We also wanted to make sure we could get a good URL.
After 3 weeks of mining, checking and cutting we narrowed everyone’s work to a list of 10 strong recommendations. We voted and Vology came out on top. The origin of this made-up word is relatively simple: a mash up of velocity and technology with the e changed to an o because it looks and sounds cooler. ‘ology means “study of” and velocity is speed so this new name says fast technology and literally means “study of speed.”
