Navigating the World of Rebranding: Understanding the Importance of a Business Name in the Digital Age

Ever thought about how much a business name matters? Is it still relevant in the digital age? Join me, Carrie Saunders, as I shed light on a burning issue we're facing - rebranding. As the founder of a 21-year old business, BCS Engineering, I am wrestling with whether our name still embodies what we do and who we are. This episode will take you through our journey, illuminating the thought process behind our original name and the obstacles we are encountering as we contemplate a rebranding strategy. 

This is not your typical tech talk episode. Instead, we dive into the thorny issue of rebranding, particularly in the internet era. Is our domain name still crucial? What characteristics make a business name memorable and engaging? This episode is not just a reflection on our journey, but an open forum for you to share your insights and thoughts on rebranding. Let's peel back the layers of what a business name signifies, how it can evolve over time, and the balancing act between holding onto the past and embracing the future. Join us in this exploration and let's unravel the world of rebranding together.

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Transcript

Carrie: 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. We're going to be doing things a little bit differently today. So normally I come to you here talking about tech, breaking it down into individual bite-sized pieces, so it's much easier for you to understand. But this week I, as a business owner and struggling with something that I want to discuss with you, and that's rebranding. We have been around as of this recording for almost 21 years. The world was so much different 21 years ago when we started our main business, bcs Engineering. What does the name really mean and why would we have chose that and what should we choose now? So I hope you join us and follow us in this episode as you listen, behind the scenes really, as to some of my thought processes and what we're going through that maybe might help you in the future, or even now if you need to do your own rebranding.

Carrie: 1:01

Welcome to the Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the Ecommerce building industry and even more than that and web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned Ecommerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of Ecommerce together.

Carrie: 1:34

Welcome back to this week's episode of Ecommerce Made Easy. We generally are here talking about tech and breaking it down into bite-sized bits, but today I want to talk to you, as a business owner to business owner, about some struggles we're having right now in our own business, and a lot of that struggle is that our business name is something that we came up with 21 years ago. I didn't want to date myself and say how old I was, but let me tell you I was in my early 20s and back then a name of our business BCS Engineering was something we really didn't think a whole lot about or really decide whether it was a great name or not. It came about honestly is literally stands for Brandon and Carrie Saunders Engineering. Both my husband and I have master's degree in electrical engineering and we came up with a name because we didn't know what we were going to do with it. I just found that I wanted to help others and I wanted to help others with their online website technology and at the time it was the best name we could come up with Our initials in engineering because we were engineers. We weren't really looking at website technology from, say, a programmer perspective, because we like to take apart like the tech and really kind of design a program first before we even dive into the programming part. We both have a lot of training in computer science as well as electrical engineering and so we decided BCS Engineering. Just made a whole lot of sense and a lot of our clients over the years have just called us BCSE for short, so just the initials with the letter E at the end because it's BCS Engineering, so just shortened it to BCSE.

Carrie: 3:24

But now we're looking at 21 years later we've had this domain name and this name and a lot of our clients have been with us for so long, so so many years. So even if we do reband, I'm sure I'm going to keep the domain name BCS Engineering. I highly recommend never giving up a domain name, if you can, because it's it. I don't know, maybe it's a hoarder thing I'm not a hoarder, but we do kind of hoard domain names. But you know why not keep it. You know, as if some client down the road or some customer down the road remembers your old name, I might as well keep it right and at least redirect it to the new name you come up with. But what should we come up with? This is something I've been really struggling with and I would love to hear your feedback. So you're very welcome to email us a bcsengineering. com. I wanna hear what do you think we should call our rebranded name? So, if you aren't really familiar with us yet and some of you, I know, are the listeners of this podcast what we really do and what we really enjoy doing is really handling that hard tech behind a website, whether it's the programming of the e-commerce shopping cart software and customizations to it, whether it's the hard programming behind a WordPress site, whether it's hosting your website for you or helping you manage your hosting services somewhere else.

Carrie: 5:00

We love doing the hard tech stuff that most business owners don't want to do or they don't have the skill set to do it because they're good at other things and that's why they're the business owner of their business. They're just good at the things that they're good at. So what should we call ourselves? We are a solutions provider. We provide all kinds of tech solutions for people. We have taken shopping carts in over the years and, oh my goodness, you wouldn't even recognize the out of the box shopping cart we started with. We have turned shopping carts upside down and all around. We've taken one. Several years ago we took one and made it a real estate company website that helped people sell real estate divisions across the world.

Carrie: 5:52

I mean, we do such crazy things sometimes with websites for our customers and really make it do these unique things, but at the same time, I feel like our business name, bcs engineering, is super confusing. If you're new to us, what does that really mean? What do we engineer? I mean, in our minds we obviously engineer software, but does somebody new to us? They're probably like huh, what is this BCS engineering Like? I don't understand. What does that stand for? What does it even mean? Now, if they've gotten to us via referral and understand who we are and what we do based upon a friend or a colleague, then it may not be quite as big a deal. But to the brand new person out there, what is our name really telling people that we are?

Carrie: 6:46

Does the domain name really matter anymore in this modern day, where most people don't even type a domain name in Literally, could they go to Google and might type the domain name in there, if that most of the time, they're just searching in a search engine like Google or Bing or something like that? So, when you're thinking about your own name and your own brand, does the domain name really matter quite as much anymore? Now, obviously, there'll be some obvious ones where, yeah, it probably does matter, but for the majority of us, it probably doesn't matter. What we probably need to have is something that's memorable, something that's easy to say, something that's easy to spell, easy to type, and where we really need to be concentrating on is our content on our website, which we've talked about a lot on this podcast is our content and how important our content is. And if I were to be honest with you at this point in time, our website oh, my goodness it's.

Carrie: 7:50

We just we're so behind in updating our own website because we've just been so busy with our clients and I can't really say that as an excuse, because it's really not an excuse we should make time for our own website, but it's kind of been the matter of the day that passed, you know five, seven years or so, especially with the pandemic thrown in there and everybody trying to survive. So if you're in a situation like we are, where you're coming out of the pandemic the three year or so plus, however many years you wanna count it, the pandemic and you're thinking maybe I need to rebrand too, you know it might not be too bad of an idea to do that now. So I wanna hear your thoughts. I want to hear you know, find me on social media. You can just look up my name, or you can look up our business name that it is for now, bcs Engineering and find us and message us. I wanna hear what your thoughts are. Or you can also email us at podcast@bcsengineering. com.

Carrie: 8:50

But what are your thoughts around? Brand, and you can think of some of the popular brands out there, like Nike. That word in and of itself does not say we sell shoes. Right, we know that there are shoe companies because we know the brand, but Nike is not a word for shoes, as far as I'm aware, unless it's in a different language, and it means shoes. You know Coca-Cola, Pepsi, any of those words. Apple you know Apple is a fruit, but a lot of people think of Apple and they think of a phone or a computer, right?

Carrie: 9:29

So what should you really be naming your business? If you're rebranding it, I feel like it needs to be something memorable and easy, kind of catchy easy to remember and catchy. I feel like it kind of needs to exude some of your personality, especially when you're creating the logo. I mean, think about the Nike logo with the swoosh underneath it. You know, it kind of gives that movement feel to the logo. Coca-cola has a swoosh in theirs too. It kind of gives you movement and kind of the bubblies, the way it's all curly and stuff, kind of reminds you the bubblies of the Coke, of the Coca-Cola products with all the fizzes in it.

Carrie: 10:07

And so what do you really need to be thinking about when you're doing your branding? What kind of colors? And we can actually do a whole episode on colors. But there is psychology behind colors. One of the reasons actually and we were actually already on top of this over 20 years ago one of the reasons we picked green and blue is that it is a very calming colors. Green and blue are just common colors.

Carrie: 10:36

If you want to go a little bit into the color realm here, most fast food places are yellow and or red that evokes hunger in people. That's why most places like McDonald's you can think of, like Taco John's if that's local to you, it's local here to us. Burger King, you know these all have like red and yellow and orange components in it. That's just a hunger-inducing color. Purple exudes royalty.

Carrie: 11:06

I need to go look up the list to get all the things behind the color because I don't have them all in my brain. But what should we have for our brand? And then we need to look at the colors and logos behind it to make sure it shows others what our brand personality is. And nowadays I'm actually finding too that it's important to see the business owner a bit more on the website. We want a bit more personality now, especially where we aren't going in-person shopping quite as much as we used to be. We want to get that in-person connection via websites and via social media, and that's one of the reasons why I talk a lot in this podcast about doing blog posts and consistent new content for people is to help show the business's personality and give, you know, good, valuable content to people regularly. So how can we do that? With a rebrand and, you know, finding out what's what we're all about.

Carrie: 12:15

So I hope that you enjoy this really shorty episode. But I just kind of want to give you a little bit of behind the scenes of what we're trying to do right now. Bcs Engineering is really rebrand ourselves and make our name more accessible. I would have to say I feel like BCS Engineering's potentially off-putting to some people because they're just kind of maybe put up a glossy eyes and wall and well, what is that? I'm confused and I confused. Mine says no. So we need to make sure that our brand name is not confusing.

Carrie: 12:53

You know, 10, 20 years ago it didn't really matter. We were, you know, in the market. We were in a great space in the market and people kind of expected website stuff to be more techie named anyway back then. But I feel like now in 2023, when this is getting recorded, that that's not quite the case anymore. So don't be afraid. If you have this gut feeling for a while, don't be afraid to look at rebranding. That's kind of like my motto right now is just don't be afraid to look at potentially rebranding. Just because you've been a certain way for a long time doesn't mean a rebrand wouldn't be helpful or necessary. So I hopefully this shorty episode was helpful to you and really kind of just makes you really want to ponder and think about it.

Carrie: 13:45

I'm not saying rebranding is for everybody, that's for sure. I feel like a lot of brands make sense to stay the way they are. But if you're unsure, you know, start writing down the pros and cons of your brand name and of your brand. You know logo and colors and things like that. Do you need to rebrand? Are you reaching the customers you want to reach? So really give that some thought and I'd love to hear from you. So do please email us at podcast at BCS engineering. I will get that and I want to hear your thoughts. So if you haven't already, make sure that you subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening.

Carrie: 14:27

Give us some ratings reviews. We totally appreciate it and I'm honestly a bit shocked. We're an episode this is 18 and we are at number two in some of the charts for search engine optimization and I just I thank you guys so much for that. It's so wonderful to see that my work and my you know dedication to helping you via this podcast is is helping you and we're at number two for search engine optimization on good pods, which I for all time and I just I can't believe. You know this is our 18th episode and we're already number two. Did not expect that at all, and so I want to thank you so much for that. And you can always visit our show notes at ecommercemadeeasypodcast. com. While I realize that that is a mouthful, it is easy to remember and easy to say and easy to spell, so hopefully that's not a problem brand-wise for the podcast name. But yeah, please visit us at our show notes there and I will see you again next week.