Sunday, March 9, 2008

What's in a Name?

So, hopefully you’ve noticed the blog looks a little different. Court Square is launching our new branding this week and with it we’ve changed our name from Court Square Data Group to Court Square Group. Clever, eh? Those folks who went from Federal Express to FedEx have nothing on us.

But it’s more significant than it looks on first glance. We knew we wanted to modify the company name since we’ve always done more than data related projects. The company has grown from its base of infrastructure services to include application services, managed services, security and network services, complex project management offerings and a substantial line of services for the life sciences industry. We’ve got experts in everything from quality and compliance consulting to clinical. Now we get to find out why those commercials for asthma medicine list more side effects than relief. Forget A to Z, we can go from IQ to OQ to PQ. (I’d love to go for GQ but the HR manager won’t let me ask for an 8 x 10 glossy when I’m reviewing resumes for a new product manager.)

It was hard to decide how much to change the name because of the existing brand equity in our old name. So we decided to keep Court Square in the name. The company was born in the Court Square section of Springfield, MA and we’ll be moving our Headquarters back there in May. We’ve grown so much that we need a lot more space. Who says you can’t go home again? Well, besides Thomas Wolfe and that was 80 years ago. Maybe he couldn’t afford a car. Plus, he was from Asheville, North Carolina. Once you get that Vanderbilt dude building a little shack called The Biltmore, it’s hard to keep up with the Jones’.

Court Square Group also speaks to the fact that we are going to grow more large practices such as Financial Services or Manufacturing, so that these vertically focused practices could eventually be divisions within the Group.

Tag, you’re it.
So, we did some positioning work with a multi-site, cross functional team. (Which is just a fancy way of saying a group of people that I coerced into joining me on the project.) The tagline exercise was very long but kind of fun. No thin skin possible in that session, everyone had an idea ceremoniously massacred at one point. One colleague, who shall remain nameless, kept trying to find a way to use the word “clarity” in every suggestion. I’ll cut him some slack because at one point he tossed out “the business of science”. That got everyone’s attention. We moved to “driving the business of science” but that sounded too one sided so we settled on “Drive the business of science” which is much more collaborative sounding. Then we talked about how that might sound too focused on life sciences when we service many other industries, especially manufacturing and financial services. But technology is a science so it still fits.

Living La Vida Logo
So, the branding company, a group of crazy people called Hot Diggity Creative, took all this work done over two 3.5 hour sessions back to their cave in New Hampshire and did whatever it is that really creative people do. (I’m not sure I want to know exactly.) A few weeks later, my little multi-site, cross functional team, huddled together with the guys from HD Creates (that’s what they call themselves when they want to look grown up) including the creative director, one Argentinean hombre named Mario who is both madly talented and just a little madly insane. (Mario has since opened up his own company, called Salsa Creative and he has the best of HD with him.) He popped up the first storyboard and we sat up in our chairs. It was red, that’s the first thing we noticed. Rojo-and Bold. The new name was together with no spaces with a very crisp font and it had a symbol over it, what was that? A paper airplane? Ooookay. I liked it but I didn’t know why. All I knew was that whole worlds of marketing possibilities were already swimming around in my head.

The next two were very different but similarly themed. They were well done and a few liked it but nothing got the reaction that the first one did. The last choice was a safe one, with the same colors as our old logo.

The group was pretty unanimous on the first choice. We decided to take the temperature of the CEO (Keith, who you met here in December) , since he is also the owner of the company. A few of us braved his office and proudly showed him our first choice. (We figured if he liked it, our work was done. If not, well then my team figured their work was done and I had to figure out what to do next.) He didn’t exactly jump for joy but it was a big change so we gave him some space to chew on it. It’s a business choice and an emotional choice since he started this company from scratch in 1995. I mean I know how I would feel if someone walked up to me and said they were going to legally change my name and look to Angelina Jolie. On second thought….

Color Me Surprised
One concern he had was the color red. At first I was thinking, “the color? A guy is worried about color?” I guess back in the day, red on your computer screen was a bad thing. But since Oracle and Cisco don’t seem to mind, I worked with Super Mario who did some quick designs of other potential logos uses so that the vision we both had in our heads was something tangible for others to see. In a happy accident, one Senior VP drew the logo for another on a napkin or something and he inadvertently made the vapor trail of the airplane look more like a “C” for Court Square. That was a hit. I’m sending that napkin to the Smithsonian. But the biggest help of all was that Keith’s wife liked it. I think I’ll send her some flowers. What color do you think I should choose?

It’s all here
So, we were off and I worked with the different groups at Hot Diggity (now Salsa) to create an entirely new website, data sheets, pocket folder, tradeshow graphics..you name it. In a ridiculously short period of time. The most fun was the tradeshow booth graphic. Someone on our branding team said something about playing in a regulated sandbox of any kind when we talked about making sure people realized that our life sciences focus didn’t mean we still don’t excel in other industries. That put a silly idea in my head which I casually mentioned to the creative guys and the next thing I knew they were building a sandbox in their studio (complete with 10 bags of real sand) and setting up a photoshoot. It is going to get people’s attention at Interphex at the end of this month, that’s for sure.

So, the messaging is right. The color is red. The new website is exactly what we wanted, to show how good we are. (Hey, if you think that’s cocky one of the possible taglines was “born from experts.”) Now that this enormous project is over, I can get back to writing blogs about topics that are important. I’ll give my summary of Interphex, which is expanding its scope this year. In the meantime, check out the new website at www.courtsquaregroup.com.

And oh yeah, how about those RED Sox?


The Marketing Maven


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