Week 1 of our rebrand efforts are officially behind us. Our goal this week was to get a clear picture of the personality behind the brand we want to create, as well as get the ball rolling on some options for actually naming it. Matt and I have had a some pretty exciting conversations this past week, and feel like we’re definitely starting off on the right foot. However, we also realize that we have a lot of work ahead of us.

Disclaimer: First of all, I’m not going to do this very often, or else I’d be attaching a disclaimer to almost every post I do. In fact, I’ll probably only say this once, so pay attention. Our goal is to share as much as possible with you, unfiltered. This means you’ll see things that are rough, and unfinished. Some of it may not make sense. Some of it may be flat out wrong (Yes, we do get things wrong from time to time. We are also allowed to change our minds on occasion). With any luck, it won’t all just be noise and you’ll actually get something out of it. If you have something to say about it, please do so. That’s the whole idea.

I’m going to walk you through our thought processes, and show you some of the documents we’ve been using to push us forward.

Brand Platform Worksheet

A friend of ours at a traditional PR firm gave us a document they typically work through when coming up with a new brand. Most of it was a bit excessive for our needs, but there were a few questions we answered which really helped us get a clear picture of sort of personality we were after.

Here’s that document.

The document itself is pretty short, but the conversation behind it was heated and lengthy. We gave names to a couple concepts in there that are core to our company. Primarily those are “social content,” and “extreme transparency.” Each one is really its own post, so I’ll need to elaborate on those in the very near future. In the meantime, know that they’re there and just roll with it.

Brand Questionnaire

Bill Bonnefil, from digital telepathy gave us his own version of a brand questionnaire. This one was a little more relevant, and helped us elaborate on some of our initial ideas on concepts.

Here’s Bill’s questionnaire

At the end of all this, Matt and I felt we had a pretty good mental image of our new brand. To test that theory, we jointly came up with an answer to a pretty simple question: “What do you do?” More specifically, we wanted a 10-words-or-less response. Articulating this clearly and concisely was actually a lot more difficult than we thought it would be, but we think we have a pretty good answer for you:

We build websites that favor social content.

We felt pretty good about that, and decided we could move on to the actual name.

Namestorming

Over the past week, Matt and I had independently put together some word lists (those of you that follow @cabad @chrisabad or @mattsurfs probably know this already). This morning we combined our lists, and looked them over to see what we could pull out.

This is our namestorming document

For the most part, this is unorganized chicken-scratch. We worked on this document collaboratively, in real-time, using Google Docs. I considered cleaning it up so you could understand it better, but ultimately decided against it. Showing you the original document gives you a more “raw” view of our process. It’s also less work for me.

This document consists of words that describe the brand’s attitude, the actual services we will offer, and also some industry terminology mixed in for good measure. At the end of it all, here’s the list of potential candidates we had:

• ClearlyWeb
• ClearlyContent
• TransparentWeb
• FranklyVisible
• ClearFavor
• FavorClear
• OpenFavor
• FavorFrank
• NakedFavor
• FavorNaked
• FavorFrank
• FavorVisibility
• Transvisibility
• Clearly – Media / Group / etc
• Exposed Impressions
• Open Impressions
• FavorOpen
• Open Kimono
• Glasshouse Media
• Uppenbar
• Open Tag
• ContentClearly
• Vizable
• Open Ideas
• Open Concepts
• Clearly Media
• ClearlyVisible
• TagClearly
• ClearlyTech
• Visible Type
• Transparent Type
• ClearlyContext
• Clearly Styled
• VisibleNature
• ClearNature
• OpenNature
• ExposedNature
• ClearWire
• WireClearly
• ClearlyType
• TransparentType

Community and Peer Feedback

Our next step is to take these initial ideas and look for some feedback. We’ll be taking these documents to our peers directly to see what they think, but we also encourage all of you to send us feedback in the comments below (if you’re shy, you can send them directly to me at chris[at]integralimpressions[dot]com). We want to know if any of our ideas stand out for you, but we’re also open to brand new ideas not on our list. We believe that by involving a diverse group of people in the process, we’ll hear ideas that we never would have thought of… and that excites us!

We’ve received great feedback so far, as well as fantastic support from some awesome people. Please keep it coming.