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News Equals Business becomes NewsBusiness
After much umming and ahhing I/we/the team @ News Equals Business have decided to change the name of the business. It’s not a big change. We’re just going to drop the ‘equals’ and call ourselves NewsBusiness.
We could have a marketing campaign along the lines of ‘NewsBusiness – no equals’ but unfortunately nobody would get it. A little like that car hire company that has the slogan ‘No birds’. I’ve still not worked out what that means.
I’m a little sorry to see the old name go, as it really did sum up what I thought at the time (and still do!) – that news really can equal business. But News Equals Business is such a mouthful – I’ve lost count of the number of people on the phone who say “Who?” or “Musical business?” that it’s just getting silly. So NewsBusiness it is from now on.
Thankfully the logo does not have to change and neither does the business web address – it’s always been newsbusiness.com.au. So the process of changing everything is laborious but not overwhelming or particularly expensive. About an hour changing everything over on the website and blog and about the same changing various listings on the web.
From a PR perspective, a name is very important – if you don’t think so just look at the hullabaloo here in Australia when Kraft wanted to launch their new Vegemite and cheese product with the name iSnack 2.0 (see this article from The Age). Personally I don’t think they ever really intended to call it that – call me cynical but I think it was a PR stunt – and if it was it certainly worked – Kraft got a huge amount of coverage for their new product, regardless of what it will actually be called.
I wouldn’t be surprised if their in-store marketing – when it does launch – has iSnack 2.0 crossed out with the new name next to it (you read it here first).
The name change for us is logical and straightforward – but this is certainly not the case for bigger or more established companies. In fact in many cases the sheer cost of a change of name and the dilution/eradication of the previous brand name has to be really worth it.
A (long) while back I worked for a subsidiary of one of the largest global publishing companies. Shortly before I joined, the business changed its name, in theory to reflect more accurately what it did. In practice it led to a huge amount of confusion and for many years – despite its best efforts – many of its customers still didn’t associate the old company with the new name. I’m convinced that the confusion did not help the brand and probably dented its profits as well.
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