07/13/2016

Branding Case Study: Renaming Partnering for Success

By James Kwon

We love renaming businesses here at Figmints, partly because of the creative gamut we run a brand through in order to devise their nifty new name and partly because of the close collaboration that occurs with the client.

What in the world could be better than satisfying the creatives and clients simultaneously? Nothing, that’s what. And that’s precisely what renaming does.

So in this week’s branding case study, we’re going to walk through how we renamed Partnering for Success, a multi-faceted business adivisory service provider, to Advantage Insights.

As you can probably guess, the name Partnering for Success wasn’t pulling its weight from a brand differentiation standpoint.

Not only were there other companies with that exact name in ancillary industries, but the highly descriptive nature of the name resulted in a brand phenomenon called “wash-out”, where the usage of common industry terms causes brands to blend in with one another.

And blending in is a brand’s worst nightmare.

Which is why our primary focus from the get go was to discover what exactly made Partnering for Success so different from every other business advisory service out there. This allowed us to focus our renaming efforts on extracting that unique value and filtering the new brand through it.

Paul Kadri, the commander-in-chief of Partnering for Success, believes that his business model is inherently unique. And, after our entire staff spoke to him and caught a glimpse of his philosophy, we couldn’t have agreed more! Paul opines “that you can’t impart anything more important than the hunger to learn. The greatest things are outside of your current comfort zone and knowledge base. That’s what I wanted the new name to reflect.”

And that’s what led us to Advantage Insights. It’s charged with energy and marketing potential. It exudes an excitement to learn and discover. And it distances itself from trite words like “success” and “partnering”, carving out its own space in a crowded naming canopy.

But it wasn’t as easy as sticking two words together and calling it a day. Finding the right name requires a balanced approach of research, creativity, and stringent process.

Let’s rewind for a minute to parse out a section of our naming process to give you a quick glimpse. As you may have already gleaned from our last post on renaming your business, we start our process by asking a series of questions that invariably lead to the discovery of a brand’s core pillars (or the Pillars of Creation, as we like to call them).

These pillars are quintessential to our methodology because they set brand boundaries that we can work within. We can go as deep as we’d like from a discovery standpoint, so long as our creative efforts stay within the bounds of the brand pillars. Once the pillars are established, it’s common to have some fantastic ideas that we simply can’t pursue because they don’t align with the pillars correctly.

Quite simply, we live and die by the brand pillars. They serve as a litmus test for brand alignment and create a strong foundation for us to build on top of.

After devising new brand pillars for Partnering for Success (pictured above), we began the search for a name that fit within the pillar parameters using a highly iterative process. And then we iterated some more. 

After countless whiteboard sessions, tireless word-smithing, and pooling ideas from brains across our office, we landed on Advantage Insights.

The name works so well for Paul’s brand because it simultaneously describes what he does for his clients but also serves to evoke an immediate response of “I’m not entirely sure what this brand does, but I need to find out!” Most importantly, the name is laced with a spirit of learning, progress, and growth, all of which are at the top of Paul’s list of priorities.

“I try to pull in the best of what others are doing,” said Paul in one of our naming sessions, “as one of my clients, you get the best of what’s out there.”

While renaming a business can be extremely difficult from both creative and client buy-in standpoints, we were extremely lucky to get to work with Paul Kadri on this project. His pointed feedback and positive attitude throughout the project circle back to why his services are so potent, effective, and fun.

Stay tuned for a forthcoming case-study on the new Advantage Insights website and read another one of our branding case studies here. See you next time!