My online business survived rebranding. Here are my 5 tips.

Photo credit: happydancing / 123RF Stock Photo.

After investing tons of effort and time into our online business, Whatz in a Name, we found that it wasn’t the smartest name for our venture after all. What an irony! Let me rewind a bit to let you understand why it wasn’t.

Somewhere along the way, we found that the name was too long. However, the good news for us was that it was a quote by Shakespeare from Romeo and Juliet; it’s hard to find something more popular. So where did things go wrong for us? Considering that rebranding is a gigantic endeavor, there had to be something really wrong with the name for us to go through the madness.

DYM syndrome

I had a chat with one of my old buddies Anuj Khurana, the founder of a very successful digital studio, and he happened to share his experience of a brand with a “z” instead of an “s” in their name; this applied to us. I wanted his advice on how to get rid of the “did you mean” (DYM) syndrome on Google search. Allow me to dig deeper into this.

Every time someone searches for our brand on Google, it automatically changes the “z” in whatz to an “s” due to the popularity of the Shakespearean quote. While we were still looking for a solution to the DYM problem, Anuj highlighted a bigger issue: on Google, users still get an option to “search instead for” with the original query. However, there is no such option in the App Store. So unless you are a really popular brand, your apps will never appear in the search.

When you add this to the DYM syndrome, it seemed Whatz in a Name might hold us back from reaching our goals.

Open to misinterpretation

While this was a major setback, there was something more. We had set up an exhibit for an event and had met a lot of people who loved our concept and gave us terrific positive feedback. A few of them even took my mobile number so I could help them with their product strategy. (I was more than happy to oblige them, it’s something I love.)

Now when they were saving my mobile number, nine out of ten got the brand name wrong. They wrote all sorts of variations in their contact books: whats my name, whats your name, whats a name, find a name, the name book, what name, children book, and personalized books.

Now when they were saving my mobile number, nine out of ten got the brand name wrong.

Over the next few days, some of my friends came back asking for the website link, as they couldn’t find the site. This immediately got our alarm bells ringing. Somewhere, we had a gut feeling that we had to change the name.

So we were back to the drawing board. It was the same problem but at a different stage in the product lifecycle. After a million cups of masala chai and help from virtually all our teams and the army of mothers who backed us, we finally zeroed in on the name Bookaboo.

To cut to the chase, here are five key learnings we had in this craziness that may save you tons of time and may help you accelerate your product launch if you have to rebrand.

Once bitten twice shy

Migrating and backing up existing systems

Payment gateways

Images and videos

Migrating customer accounts