It was Shakespeare who famously asked “What’s in a name?” and while it may be true that a rose would smell just as sweet regardless of what we might call it – Please for forgive the paraphrasing – in the world of public perception, things run a bit differently. Ironically, perhaps my favorite quote about how the world of marketing and PR really work is this one: “There’s nothing wrong with crabgrass. It just has a bad name, that’s all. Everyone would love it if it had a cute name like “Elf grass””.
Yes, I just countered a Shakespeare quote with another from Homer Simpson. But before you judge me for it, consider the case of the Chevy Nova. The Nova had pretty good sales in the US, but they were just plain awful in South America. Why? Even high school Spanish will teach you that “no va” means “no go”. Same car, same name, two different outcomes. What’s in a name? Apparently quite a lot – just ask the folks at Chevrolet.
So that brings me to MyDigitalDoorman. When we originally created our package tracking software, it was meant to be a part of another brand. We coined the name My Digital Doorman for its “New York” sounds and, to be honest, its alliteration (I am a sucker for that). Very quickly though, we began to get more and more clients from places outside of the industries we expected and slowly our name made less and less sense. After far too long, I took the time to personally call each and every one of our clients to check in. I asked why they chose us, what they felt we did well, where we needed work and, of course how they felt about our name.
As we expected, the old name was not working At best it was confusing, at worst it was off-putting. The good news is that our clients (as always) had a lot of great insight and many went out of their way to help us on our quest. Here is what they told us over and over again: “We signed up with you because your system makes package tracking and front desk management easy. The package management software is easy to use, easy to learn and easy to train our staff.”
When I asked if they liked the name “Traxify.com” they hated it. Which is actually good because I came very, very close to using that name and their candid feedback saved me a lot of time and energy. You may feel free to tease me about this, but I really did like that name. They were not too thrilled with a few other names they tested, but they did respond well to the name Easy Track It. At the time Easy Track It was not available, but we quickly adapted to and bought EZTrackIt, and began the massive task of re-branding. Since then we have acquired the name EasyTrackIt.com as well.
So what’s in a name? In the case of MyDigitalDoorman and EZTrackit, it represents hundreds of hours of work, new tons of artwork, dozens of new training videos, a new, easier interface and countless efforts by the whole team. Ultimately it was all worth it though. Thanks to our clients, we came up with a much better name for our “Easy Track It” package management system than Elf Grass.
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