In July of 2014, Network Hardware Resale changed its name to Curvature. As an organization the decision was made to rebrand because the name that had defined us, quite literally, for well over a decade, no longer encompassed what our true services and offerings were. We knew that a rebrand was going to be challenging, especially in a space where we had dominated the market for so long. However we knew it was time to fully communicate our brand promise and signal a new direction in the IT landscape.
Here are a few lessons we learned along the way:
A company is about internal culture, as much as it is about customer messaging
Throughout the rebrand process we often came up against internal opposition, but what we quickly realized is that it was a lack of communication on our part. Concerns from departments ranged from, “How will they find us online?” to “Will this affect my Health Insurance plan?” How we ultimately combated this was by thoroughly communicating internally on what employees should expect. A core team defined every question an employee might have and answered it ahead of time. By communicating to our employees that this brand and name change was well thought out and executed, we effectively raised the morale internally. If your internal teams don’t embrace the change, your customers never will.
Select a core team to make preliminary decisions
More opinions don’t necessarily help in making better decisions. While it was challenging to leave certain people out of core decision making, we knew it was crucial to executing on this project. At one point in the process we were at a stalemate in deciding the new name, at that point we decided to expand our core group to help push through a final decision.
Expanding the core group only opened the door to further conflict and ultimately set us back several weeks, instead of moving forward. Understand that just because not everyone gets a vote, it doesn’t mean that they won’t embrace the decision.
A growing company requires a broader message
Our founding-family business was a key part to our success, particularly because we were a high-touch, customer-centric business. However, as we grew to offer more services, more locations, more products and expand our portfolio, Network Hardware Resale didn’t have the same meaning it once did. We chose the name Curvature because it signaled a deviation away from the norm, which is exactly what we are doing in the IT marketplace. It’s also the promise we continue to make to our customers every day. We will always give you a choice in direction.
This month marks one year as Curvature. A rebrand is much more than a simple name change. Changing our name was about changing our identity. While proud of our past, we were looking to Curvature to showcase our new portfolio of services and new position in the IT marketplace. This involved sales training, this touched every department, this impacted operations, delivery, finance and HR, and most of all this took time.
We did not become Curvature overnight. It has certainly been a process, and I would say we are still learning to live in our new name. But 1 year in, it is hard to imagine being anything but.
