On the 30th of April, we changed our company name. MathMarketing is now known as align.me. Why? We wanted the name to better reflect the essence of what we do, and what we most want to be known for. Secondly, we wanted a shorter, more interesting name. Let me dig into that a little bit.
What’s MathMarketing known for now? A number things; planning, training, B2B, alignment, measurement – hits the math of MathMarketing. What of those do we most want to be known for? B2B, byer-centric, alignment. In fact I should have added to that first list, the Buyers’ Journey. It’s quite largely attributed to us. It is a term that I coined in 2003 in the Leaky Funnel. What do we most want to be known for? Again in short, B2B, byer-centric, and aligned. Meaning sales and marketing mostly, but sales and marketing channel finance aligned in their efforts to own customers.
How do we deliver that today? Really in three ways; process optimisation, which takes the form of Funnel Camp or it’s baby brother, the Funnel Mastery workshop, plus a little bit of consulting around measurement that we call Funnel Monkey, basically documenting their numbers and finding interesting data – a digital world that’s now Funnel Plan. Funnel Plan being a ‘do-it-yourself’ version of what people have traditionally paid us consulting dollars to do. That’s optimisation.
The second thing is skill. In skill it’s our own training that we call Funnel Academy around strategy, campaign design, measurements and tactics, or sales training products. That’s learnt skills. Then the third piece is around execution. In Australia we deliver that under our own brand and that’s around us rolling our sales and actually doing the marketing for smaller companies that don’t have their own marketing function. Around the world, we do that through our departments. Again three elements, prices optimization, skill or skill improvements, and execution.
Some of those we are now already delivering digitally, but in the name we’ve been known as a traditional consultant company. In the future, a lot of that will be delivered online, digitally. Again if our intent is to be known around B2B, byer-centric, and alignment, MathMarketing just doesn’t do it. After a long workshop, and a couple of team get-togethers, we arrived at the new name. Secured the website, which we bought back in November, 2015, and then we did what … of course you can imagine we did which is absolutely nothing, resettlement.
We had an all hands workshop around fitting the original planned, for some time we were sick with our own website, and had been so busy building other people’s websites amongst other things that we just weren’t giving attention to our own. All hands, ten people sitting around the boardroom table here in Melbourne, and we weren’t going to leave the office until we had the new website live. Given that we were going to do that anyway, we decided to use the new company name with the new website. It wasn’t any more complicated than that, without any of the normal planning that we’ll advise our clients to take.
We just launched the new name. We wanted a name that reflected what we do, and was shorter, more interesting, and more memorable. That was the essence of it, not much more than that. Now of course it worked out.
What I would say though is a view that I hold very strongly and whilst a lot of what we did was far from perfect, there was one thing we did that was absolutely deliberate. That is your brand and our brand isn’t what we say, and it isn’t what we show in pictures. The brand is what we actually deliver. The brand in its essence hasn’t changed, all that we’re changing is the name that we use and the visual manifestation of that. It’s not terribly important that we have the big announcement or we have the big execution build up. That’s our view anyway.
Long story short, that’s the new brand. We are now align.me. We love it, but what do you think? What do you think of the name? What do you think we should do to better reflect that name and the brand promise that I’ve just declared to you? Any suggestions would really be welcome. Whether you’re watching this on LinkedIn or on YouTube or our own align.me site, previously MathMarketing – wherever you’re watching it, there is the ability to make a comment.
I’d really, really appreciate it if you would comment. Do you love it, do you hate it? What do you think we should do to better live the promise that I just declared, B2B, byer-centric, aligned? What can we do better? All comments, good and bad, I’d really welcome.
That’s it for this week. I hope you got a little value out of our small insight into why we changed the company name. I look forward to chatting with you on a more normal chat next week.
