The name game

One marketing executive at a private equity firm admitted that a full year after launching the firm’s new name, someone called the night answering service to discover the old name on the recording, like a ghost still wandering the halls. Such details are easy to fall through the cracks with the many strands of any branding campaign, let alone one seeking to step away from an old identity and forge a new one without losing the track record that comes with a veteran team.
The best rebranding efforts come with a fixed launch date, when all elements go live simultaneously. Most firms execute in six months to a year. LPs, intermediaries and portfolio company CEOs should be polled for ideas and impressions, as these are the firm’s chief constituents. Names should be vetted for trademark infringement, translations issues in foreign cultures, and the ability to secure web territory, so searching a firm’s name brings up the firm’s site, not that of, for example, an indie rock band.
Social events around the new-name launch date are a great way to address a firm’s network, but the long-term branding effort should be married with deal activity, so the brand is linked with exits and acquisitions – the only real way an image is substantiated in this business. Lastly, rebranding efforts should be evaluated with formal or informal polls to examine if the intended image is making a dent.
However, choosing the right image to launch is the central hurdle.
Plenty of firms have faced a tight timetable to do so (see page 22 for some high profile examples) as when the former parent company puts a cutoff date for using its name for the fund. For those firms with the luxury of an internal mandate to rebrand, most found six months to a year to be sufficient. Marketing directors felt that was enough time to tackle the details without allowing partners to dawdle on agreeing on a name or image. “Our tight timetable really pressed our partners to reach a consensus on the name quickly, which actually was quite healthy,” explains Nigel McConnell a managing partner with the pan-European firm Cognetas, which rebranded itself from Electra Partners Europe.

Pick a D-day
All the marketing executives tapped for this story agreed that any rebranding campaign should have a hard and fast launch date, when the new web site goes live, the press release hits the wires, and any hard copy mailers get shipped out. “A fixed launch date brings real discipline,” says Denise Marks, a partner and CFO of Bostonbased SV Life Sciences, which spun out from Schroder Ventures.
She explained that having a date to plan backwards from gives the intermediate deadlines real weight.
In the planning stages, marketing executives suggest naming at least one partner or executive of similar stature to be the point person for the rebrand effort in order to speed the approval process.
“Our managing partner Andrew Hartley took the lead, and then, along with myself and the branding firm, narrowed the list of possible names that were submitted to the rest of firm to vote on,” says Louise Ward of UK-based August Equity, which was formerly Kleinwort Capital. Ward explains that given the sheer volume of items to update, the individual tasks were spread across the entire firm. “Everyone at the firm was responsible for some specific part of the rebranding, whether that was shredding old letterhead or updating email signatures,” says Ward.

Enter the gurus
The question of whether to employ an outside branding consultant varies depending on the in-house experience. The founding partners of Blue Run Ventures, a Menlo Park-headquartered venture firm that was previously Nokia Ventures, never felt the need for outside experts. “Most of us had operational backgrounds and had created brands at one point or another, so we managed the process internally,” says John Malloy, a partner with the firm.
“For us, the quotes from the branding consultants seemed excessive for a firm like ourselves that always took a relatively understated approach to promoting ourselves,” says Marks. “We always wanted our good deals to do the talking for us.”
Should the firm feel outside expertise is warranted, several marketing executives stressed conducting some variety of informal market research with the three core constituents: limited partners, intermediaries and executives at current portfolio companies. “We could communicate one on one with our LPs to explain the brand,” says Mark Turner, a partner with UK-based ISIS Equity Partners, formerly Friends Ivory & Sime Private Equity. “The priority audience for the branding campaign was the management teams at target investments, and so we garnered feedback from our portfolio company CEOs on what would resonate with them.”
Marketing executives felt the value of these chats with LPs, investment banks and portfolio companies would illuminate current perceptions, and test assumptions the team may have about its image. One executive said that they felt the best branding effort shouldn’t rely solely on internal navel-gazing but a grip on what audiences want to hear, and what they may already assume about the team.

All names taken
After those first few meetings about the firm’s values and the image everyone would like to project, the real work of the campaign commences as the team hunts for a viable new name. “It’s almost impossible to come up with a name that’s not already in use by some hedge fund, i.e. you have to invent the name,” explains McConnell. “Our first choice was Cognita but that was actually used by another UK business so we modified the derivation of Cognitio to Cognetas.”
Many firms have strayed away from using the founders’ names with an eye towards the longevity of the brand. “We didn’t even want to use some abbreviation of the founders’ names because we didn’t want to be so hidebound to the past,” says Philip Buscombe, CEO of Lyceum Capital, formerly known as West Private Equity.
Most marketing executives stress the need for extensive legal due diligence once the firm has narrowed the list of possible names.
Frequently branding or design firms include such services in their contract, but it should be undertaken before the finalists are submitted for the firm to vote on. “Until you vet the registration issues, you have to have at least three options in your back pocket,” says McConnell.
Few firms can count on remaining tied to a single geography either for investors or deal opportunities, so names should be vetted for their ability to be translated favorably into other languages and cultures. “Since our founding, we bet big that globalization meant a great deal to the venture industry, so when we rebranded we wanted to make certain the name would work in tech hubs like Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Shanghai, with China being a key area for us,” says Malloy. “The Chinese are particular sensitive about numbers and colors, with some deals postponed until they land on lucky numbered day. Blue has a particularly favorable connotation for the Chinese and no downside in other cultures where we work.”
“It’s essential to own the web space for your name, as in, when someone plugs your name into Google, what comes up?” says Mohammed Chowdhury, the head of Financial Management for Bahrain-based Arcapita, formerly First Islamic Bank. “You’ve got to ensure that there’s a clear path for anyone searching the Internet for your firm.”
With a name that doesn’t mean “barbarian” in Mandarin and that all the partners can agree on, the next steps in rebranding are largely administrative: revisiting legal contracts, designing logos and web sites, and ordering new letterhead and business cards.
Outside of these traditional tools, many firms plan social and media events to help launch a rebranding effort.

Rebranding soirées
“On the day we launched Arcapita, we hosted an event in Bahrain, to which we invited employees and journalists to explain the reason for the new name, even having an academic discuss the rationales for a new name,” says Chowdhury.
Some firms don’t host a single event on their launch day, but commence several meetings with investors and intermediaries.
“We hosted a few events for intermediaries and LPs, to explain our value proposition, not just as investors, but as able stewards of the companies we invest in,” says Buscombe.
A recurring theme in the stories of how firms rebranded themselves was that the key hurdle wasn’t reaching LPs, most of who are known to the GPs personally, but altering the perception of CEOs and boards at target companies. “I’d say there’s plenty of top management teams in Europe that still don’t know Cognetas yet, though they’d know the name Electra,” says McConnell.
“Reaching that broader audience just takes time.”
Most marketing executives stress that the best rebranding opportunities are deal activities. “We were lucky in that we had a steady stream of deals and events in the six months after the rebranding,” says Buscombe. One marketing executive admitted that a change in name isn’t headline-grabbing news, but one high profile deal can work wonders to introduce the brand. Plenty of firms conduct studies to gauge just how effective their branding is. “We recently performed a perception study that sampled 80 of our intermediaries across the UK and that was quite informative,” says Ward of August Equity. Lyceum commissions a study every 18 months or so to gauge how the firm is perceived among its investors, CEOs and intermediaries. “It isn’t terribly scientific really, just a glimpse at our identity in the marketplace,” says
Buscombe. “Private equity brands, with few exceptions, aren’t like Gucci that possess some inherent value. Brands in this business are only as good as the deals you do.”