What's in a Name

One of my favourite organizations just re-branded. GAP Adventures became G Adventures on October 1st. They dropped the 'ap' (there's a joke there I'm certain) They modified their name for reasons I'm not clear on and I think as a consumer and avid follower of them, it's a bad idea. Here's why.

Sometimes when we see this type of change it's to reflect changes the company has gone gone through - two companies becoming one, or taking on whole new services. That is understandable and reflects to the audience that things have been modified. The consumer of their services should modify expectations as well. Examples are all around us and pop up daily. Other organizations re-brand but don't change their name, and one of the mildly more interesting things in the travel business is to see new livery on airplanes - the enormous expense of re-painting hundreds of airplanes and pieces of ground equipment as "the blue hue previously used didn't convey the global aspirations of our traveller", or some such spin. Laughable unless you're a shareholder.

So, the marketer in me understands and applauds a re-brand or refresh when appropriate, or when there's just a need to get some attention.

Name changes however are seismic in marketing terms - literally in a SEO sense, and figuratively in a recognition sense. What is a Google, an Oracle, or a Microsoft anyway. Think about the words themselves, rather than the organizations they've come to reflect. It's hard isn't it ? That's because we look beyond the words once the companies are established and just see the organizations. If you're truly established in a marketing sense and had some good foundational ideas on branding, your name becomes synonymous with your space - Ski-doo being my favourite example. That's aspirational for marketers in the brand role.

GAP Adventures is one of those companies that sets themselves apart from the background noise, and was changing perceptions of what 'gap' meant..not the beige chino's after-all, but the life altering experiential stuff. Making it "G Adventures" probably set them back a few years on that path as like learning a new skill, I and others like me need to now re-establish all I think of for GAP and try to re-align it with G. That's an uphill climb for their marketing team for years to come.