A name launching Europe’s 5th charging network into independence

Work:
Verbal positioning, naming, legal screening and consumer research for a carve-out

With:
Mart Vonk, Fractional CMO, brand development and launch campaign
The Young, brand positioning and visual identity
De Merkplaats, in depth trademark identical and similarity research
DNZ, brand name consumer testing
Velian

Equans E-mobility had a problem most companies would envy. It was already a market leader. One of the first charging service providers in the market, with more than thirteen years of experience, it now operated over 31,000 charging points, most of them running on green electricity from local wind and solar.

What it did not have was a name of its own.

Equans planned to carve out the e-mobility division into a standalone company. That meant that the new name had to work as a main brand, completely distinct from Equans (current parent brand) and from ENGIE Services (the name before that). It had to carry the company into independence, attract new shareholders, and make a long-serving team feel proud to say where they work.

The new brand had to focus more on the personal, human and accessible character, compared to Equans’ strong reputation of technical excellence and reliability. The idea was to combine the experience and reliability of a large company with the agility and approachability of a scale-up.

It had to speak to three audiences at once: municipalities and provinces in the public domain, real estate and logistics clients in B2B, and, increasingly, the EV drivers who plug in every day. A name that won the boardroom but lost the driver would fail and so would the reverse.

Many companies go through a process like this only once, and tend to treat the naming decision like a creative gamble. Equans E-mobility went through a process with creative studio The Young and us, designed to result in naming that is future-ready, engaging and ownable.

We did not start with names. We started with the question of who this company is for, and why anyone should believe in it.

When The Young developed the brand positioning, an important distinction turned out to be its origin. Most competitors come from the energy and oil world, with a legacy in selling fuel. This company comes from sustainable engineering. It thoroughly understands the technology, which is why it delivers the reliability that the others promise. The Young sharpened that into a strong focus on sustainability and the human factor, supported by the reliable expertise of a major player with the flexibility of a scale-up. Three core values anchored it: connected, reliable, forward-thinking.

From there we mapped five naming territories, each a different way the brand could sound in the world: the calm of always-on reliability, the energy of drive and ambition, the authority of the technical expert, the warmth of human connection, and the long view of lasting impact.

A name does not have to clearly convey all that. It has to be able to carry whichever messaging the brand chooses to lead with, for years, even as the strategy shifts underneath it.

Brainstorms are cheap, but good ideas are rare. The real challenge is in the funnel. To reach a handful of names worth considering, the team generated and filtered through several stages:

• More than 500 names created in brainstorms and individual sessions

• Around 200 selected for trademark pre-screening

• Around 130 run through targeted desktop searches

• Around 30 sent for linguistic disaster checks across our international network, because a name that works in Dutch can stumble in another language

• A focused set of twenty-five carried into the workshops

We did not present those names to hold a vote, but to discuss. There is no love at first sight in naming, and the first job of a workshop is to teach a room how to look at strengths and weaknesses of a name, rather than merely reacting to it.

One of those considerations is context. We placed competitor names on the axes that mattered: conventional against innovative, descriptive against abstract. The discussion taught us more than any tally: more and more the team gravitated toward character over description, toward something human, and away from anything literally about "charging," anything too ‘American’ (usually meaning salesy), and anything that echoed the brands it was disconnecting from.

Most poorly designed naming projects fall apart in the end phase, because roughly nine in ten attractive names carry a legal or cultural problem hiding under the surface. So screening was not a final box to tick, but ran alongside creation the whole way. Working with trademark specialists at De Merkplaats, we checked identical and then similar marks across the Benelux, EU and international registers, in the goods and service classes that matter for charging, software, energy and technical services.

Early favorites fell here even before the client had seen them, let alone grown attached to them. A name they could not legally own is not an asset but a problem waiting to surface.

A shortlist that survives strategy and law still has resonate with real people. Together with research partner DNZ we ran a five-seconds test among 341 Dutch EV and plug-in hybrid drivers, evenly split by gender. Each respondent saw a name only briefly, on purpose. Five seconds is enough to capture a first, unfiltered impression and too little for analytical second-guessing. We measured spontaneous associations, what people assumed the company did, the personality they projected onto the name as if it were a person, fit with the three core values, and fit with the idea of sustainable charging once it was revealed.

The research did its job almost too well. It produced not one strong favorite, but all five researched names cleared the strategy and tested well with drivers. All could carry the brand as it was intended. This is where the project team let their own intuitive preferences prevail: two favorites were chosen.

Now the deciding factor became the one a name can never outrun: ownership. One of the two carried a more serious trademark risk than the other, which did not raise any serious objections from existing trademarks.

That name is Velian.

Velian was the name that filled the gap the strategy had found. Where the rest of the market sounded corporate or cold, with names like TotalEnergies, E.ON Drive and ChargePoint, drivers read Velian as soft, modern, approachable and quietly reliable. It was seen as the human, close-by personality no one else in the category had claimed. It carried the best fit of any candidate with the concept of sustainable charging, the strongest sense of being "connected and close," and high marks for "forward-thinking" and "trustworthy" alike.

Vel (velocity, velo) carries motion and speed, the agile character and forward momentum of mobility. The overall sound, with soft consonants and ending on ian feels human and friendly, suggesting connection and partnership in a market full of acronyms and machinery. It is abstract enough to be flexible and survive future positioning shifts, distinctive enough to be owned, warm enough to connect with users and credible enough to belong to a municipality.

Equans E-mobility went into this with great market strength, but no name to put on it. It comes out as Velian: a standalone brand with a strong strategy, a name screened against the law and tested against the market.

For the years ahead, the name will be the carrier of everything this company builds. The brand will develop while Velian can remain its strong foundation.