Work

Contact

Left column

Services

Naming a company

Rebranding and renaming

Middle column

+31 (0)20 623 85 55

LinkedIn

General conditions

Privacy & cookies

Right column

About

Insights

You need to name - or rename - your company and don't know how to decide? The answer is: begin with your ambitions.

If you want it or not, in the end the name conveys a company’s perspective for the long term. While the name may stand for today’s products and services, it also carries the company’s character (brand personality) and the reason it exists. This means that the name should also work for future products and services, in future markets, and future countries.

Show your company's perspective

Projects

Nouryon

How can you fundamentally build on employee pride during a spin-off? Here’s how naming served as the key differentiator in a rebranding of AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals into Nouryon. For this rebranding we teamed up with Design Bridge (then VBAT) and VIM Group.

When it was announced at the end of March this year that the US-based Carlyle Group was going to acquire AkzoNobel’s Specialty Chemicals branch together with Singaporean investment fund GIC, a lot of preparation had of course been going on behind the scenes.AkzoNobel had announced in April 2017 that it wanted to sell its Specialty Chemicals branch, and preparations for this demerger were set in motion shortly afterwards. Because a spin-off of Specialty Chemicals meant a new name and a complete rebranding of the industry.

Rebrandings of this magnitude are often prepared in fairly small circles, sometimes even only at management and Board level. The management of AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals thought differently and wanted as many employees as possible to be involved in the process. Under the leadership of Vivi Hollertt, Chief Communications Officer and Jasper Jansen, Head of Communications Netherlands &amp; Germany, a careful process for this was worked out. VIM Group was called in to assist with agency selection, impact analysis and implementation of the corporate identity to be developed, Globrands was selected for positioning and naming and VBAT for the design and corporate identity of the new brand.After a thorough external analysis looking at the positioning of competing chemical companies and gathering input from employees, the basic ingredients of the new positioning were identified. Then, some 15 focus groups worldwide, formed from employees from all levels of the company, formulated a common purpose in several sessions. That purpose ‘Your partner in essential chemistry for a sustainable future’ would serve as a guideline for all communication throughout the rebranding process and was an important part of the naming briefing.

Involving employees in rebranding

Vivi Hollertt, Chief Sustainability & Communications Officer at Nouryon

At the first orientation workshop at the head office in Amsterdam, various possibilities for naming were discussed by exploring different directions using so-called Moodwords. On this basis, it became clear that for naming purposes, the company’s history was also one of the important routes to be further elaborated.

This meant the team had to delve well into the past, scrutinising past company names, brand names and key people associated with the companies. Given the global use of the brand name to be developed, native speaking creatives from different countries in the Globrands network were involved in the process.At Globrands, the search resulted in many hundreds of names and name concepts. Of these, after initial trademark screening in the more than 80 countries where the company operates, checks on the availability of ‘web domains in those countries and primary linguistic suitability, enough remained to be submitted to the project group with substantiated advice.From two such creation rounds and presentations, a longlist for further research was determined in consultation with the international project group.That longlist was then subjected to further trademark searches for comparative and potentially conflicting trademarks and trade names and linguistic checks in all relevant languages.In the end, a shortlist of names remained, from which, after careful consideration, the name Nouryon was chosen that met all communicative criteria, was globally available under trademark law and of which all urls were available. More importantly, it was a name that everyone involved was comfortable with.

Setting a direction for the future by referring to the past

Meanwhile, design agency VBAT had already started to investigate the development of the brand properly, including design and the identity the brand should stand for. As the new name had to be kept strictly secret while the trademark registration process was still ongoing, VBAT was initially given only a dummy name and the first letter N.VIM Group prepared the implementation of the Nouryon name and corporate identity across the various brand carriers, both digitally and offline, so that everything was ready to be implemented.On 9 October 2018, the time had come and Nouryon presented itself to the world and its employees for the first time. By the end, more than 200 people were involved behind the scenes preparing the name, brand, and new materials such as the website.Here, CEO Charles Shaver underlined the link of the new name with the old Noury &amp; van der Lande – the two entrepreneurs from Deventer in the 19th century who discovered how chemistry could contribute to better flour and bread and would become part of a multinational company operating in 80 countries in essential chemistry: Nouryon.

A strictly secret operation

Project

Asset

Assets

Retaining employee pride in the renaming of AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals

The best business names evoke the right expectations about the vision and qualities of the companies for which they stand. They do this not only in the outside world, but also among their employees. They inspire and form the basis for all further communications.

Getting to the right company name

Byondis

How can a verbal identity immediately show the why, how and what of a brand-new company working at the cutting edge of cancer breakthroughs?

In April 2020 a new globally active pharmaceutical company was launched, focusing on intractable cancers and autoimmune diseases.Based on proprietary technology, it creates new precision drugs with a broad development pipeline, including anti-HER2 ADC [vic-] trastuzumab duocarmazine (SYD985) for breast cancer.It is a spin-off from Synthon Pharmaceuticals, a multinational that focuses mainly on high-quality generic and hybrid medicines.

Together with Designbridge (then VBAT) we developed the verbal and visual identity. We did this by interweaving our processes, with us being responsible for positioning and brand story, brand essence, brand name and tagline, while Designbridge was responsible for the logo and visual identity.

Interwoven process

The founders, especially Jacques Lemmens, turned out to be remarkably good storytellers. We quickly experienced the rich corporate culture of parent company Synthon. Their wealth of inspiring stories always showed their deep commitment to outsmart cancer and autoimmune diseases.As a brand personality a passionate and daring explorer emerged, working in laboratories with extremely stringent quality and safety requirements. Yet he offers patients in a seemingly hopeless situation the prospect of a solution.Globrands formulated the brand essence expressed in the promise &#039;Make hope real&#039;.

Make hope real

The name Byondis was developed by the international Globrands network. It clearly expresses the character of the brand, while meeting all linguistic, trademark and domain name requirements. It was received very positively by both employees and investors.The name exudes the ambition and pioneering spirit so characteristic of this brand, as Byondis emphatically associates with &quot;beyond this&quot;.

The name

For a new brand like Byondis, it is important to make clear what the domain is. It was important to do this in a distinctive and progressive way, while still being serious, reliable and objective.This led to the tagline &#039;creating precision medicines&#039;.

The 'what'

A complete verbal identity for leading-edge cancer medicine

The trick is to formulate the message that the name should convey in language that can be owned. It is not possible to register a trademark if the name only literally describes what is offered. You cannot use a name that could be mistaken for the name of a company that provides similar products or services. On the following page you can read more about trademark law.

Own it legally

Tuum

The challenge: shift Modularbank from a descriptive category to a distinctive brand, reflecting their heartbeat. Technology at the heart of your business.

A new era had arrived for the Estonian fintech platform that was then called Modularbank. They had been the first to address the need for flexible fintech solutions. But sometimes, when a pioneering market suddenly booms, the leader&#039;s name is no longer seen as a brand name but a commonly used generic term for their new category. Exactly this had happened to Modularbank.

'Modularbank' had inadvertently become the name for the pioneer's category

It was time to create distinction again with a new identity, brand essence, design and brand name.Through several strategic sessions it became clear that Modularbank is operating at the customer&#039;s core. They are the heart of the organizations they work for, in order to make them stronger from the inside out for the outside world. The brand essence became: &#039;Technology at the heart of your business&#039;.What brand name would fit this essence? It had to be suitable for a fintech company, preferably with a link to the organization’s Estonian roots.Tuum is a real Estonian name, meaning ‘core’. Short, powerful and clever.

You're really naming your future

Show your company's perspective

Retaining employee pride in the renaming of AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals

Getting to the right company name

A complete verbal identity for leading-edge cancer medicine

Own it legally

Letting a cutting edge fintech stand out with a distinctive name

Want to discuss company naming? Let's talk!