as written by Boyke Januar, Creative Director and Krisno Wisnuadi, Web Manager, Creative Services

Positioning and Brand Name Seeking A long journey to be a Creative Design Agency Out of the thousands of names, icons, identifiers and graphic elements that we see every day, only a select few – like Apple - stay with me.

While such a name may appear to have no connection whatsoever to the company’s line of work, there is usually a story behind such a successful brand. So, how did this marriage of fruit and technology come to pass? Company founders thought the apple to be the perfect fruit and their technology the perfect computing solution.

Creative Services, as a part of developing Precision Group now, is starting the process to become an Agency. Yes, we will be a creative design agency which specialises in Marketing Collateral, Custom Publishing, Corporate ID/Branding, Web Design and Web Development.

Since we are just deciding on a business name or considering updating our identity, there are some key steps to designing a new brand that will serve as an effective communications tool.

1. Brainstorming Session

Successful brainstorming requires more than a bunch of people sitting in a room. We use a brainstorming technique to get the creative juices flowing so that even the most reticent participants feel free to contribute.

We include the creative services team to be a group of individuals to participate in the session. Our brainstorming sessions were informal, spontaneous and fun! We encourage everyone to participate and suggest ideas. No judgments were made about any suggestion, and all ideas, no matter how absurd or impractical they may seem at the time, are welcome.

“Let's have a brainstorming session" Amrit says, and before there are five to ten ideas out on the white board everyone is arguing about the merits of each, evaluating and judging every comment made. In addition to being the session leaders, Cynthia and Amrit freely contribute ideas to the session ensuring the group's creative synergy yields a rewarding number of plausible ideas.

It drives us mad! That's because there are fundamentally two different types of thinking:
The first is 'divergent', creative, imaginative, playful, fun, and great for generating ideas.
The second is 'convergent', analytical, judgmental, and a terrible basis for generating ideas (but good, of course, for evaluating ideas).

The point is that you can't do both at the same time. Brainstorming is about 'divergent' thinking. It is about being creative, playful and imaginative and having fun, while generating LOTS of ideas very quickly. After you have finished the brainstorming, and after you have 'cooled down' you can put your analytical hat on, and evaluate the ideas.

Back to our brainstorming sessions, the guys were contributing eagerly, and we got several unique, traditional, funny, inspiring names such as sembilan, keder (kejar order), plung, bunglon, lumaumagua, sinar jaya, hue R u, vibe, ideaworx, nueve, bold, purple lemon, bixel, yellow orange, think!, twelve, orange, and many others. Eventually, there were some good names we chose to be discussed at the next stage that will include some selective individuals.

2. Analysis and Discussion Session

In this stage only a few people were involved, Cynthia, Amrit, Krisno, and BJ. By the way, Ideaworx, nueve, purple lemon, yellow orange, think!, twelve, orange were among the selected names after our brainstorming session.

The topics of discussion were:

• Talk about the vision for the company.
• Our target market. Who are our clients today? Who will be our clients tomorrow?
• The image of our company projects.
• Pinpoint what makes our company different. What separates us from the competition?
• Identify how we want our company to be perceived, and how we want clients to feel.
• How this name fits into our overall branding strategy, as we need to make sure the name fits in with the other materials, services, communications and media we are using, and that it fits with the overall spirit of the company.
• Make sure we can use the name.

We carefully record all the answers to these questions. Go back and highlight the items and comments that seem cohesive, complementary and repetitive throughout. After all these questions are answered, we had a clearer idea of the brand name we needed to consider. Several rounds of analysis and evaluation have been done and we have concluded the “finalists” are : Yellow Orange, Twelve and Think!. The challenge is this session is not a final round yet, there will be a further discussion to follow, and it will be on our plate within incoming weeks.

Intuition

There’s no doubt that this whole branding name search is creating a different ambience in our work routine. There’s a spirit to achieve something greater, creative-wise and business-wise. This is a moment that we can’t lose - we have to embrace this newborn spirit and make it happen.

After having a brainstorming session followed by a more methodological approach, we just felt that the final option for the brand name is not good enough. Well it’s good, it just not good enough.

Somewhere in the analytical process we realised several points that might be a good start to coming up with a name. Several points that we missed when we threw our first brainstorming session. So now we try to trace back our journey and start from scratch. Not really from scratch, since we now have a better idea on the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’t’s’ when it comes to choosing a brand name, but, yes, we decided to give another shot to start finding new brand names.

Finding a brand name is never an easy issue, there are lots of considerations that come in. People throw in theories on how to pick a good brand name but, at the end, a brand name, by itself, can't stand for everything that a brand represents. Now we cannot expect to find a brand name that can explain the whole thing about our business itself. If there’s a word that is good enough to represent our business, most likely it’s already being used. So the best approach is to select a name that is memorable, ownable, and can stand out in a specific business category.

This is where the intuition kicks in. No matter how well-justified a brand name is, it won’t mean anything if we just don’t feel right about it. In life there is no such thing as ‘complete information’, and so too in business. We can’t say that a brand name would give us prosperity while the other will sink us down (that would be done by a Feng Shui expert), there just won’t be complete information to justify a brand name.

So the criteria would be memorable, ownable, can stand out in a specific business category, and the majority will feel good about it. Not a final criterion, just some point to think about.

Additional Web Developer

Until now we have still been really occupied with the incoming and ongoing projects and regular work. In fact we’re pinned down by the workload so hard that we cannot be proud of our work in terms of punctuality and quality. That is definitely not good for business.

While completing the work, the hiring process is still on-going. We extended our job advertisement since the last one didn’t seem to attract any more applicants. The result has been quite good. We managed to receive several good candidates.

The interviews, English test, and skill test were conducted, and two of the candidates performed well, but only one made it to the final presentation session. The good thing is that this sole candidate also performed well in the presentation, so I think we have our new team member.

This raises a new hope in our team to at least have some more resources to be able to conduct our jobs properly. There are many incoming and unfinished projects that we have to deal with. Although we are still looking for more resources, an additional team member would really make a huge impact.

Let’s just hope that nothing goes awry, and the new Web Developer will really join us on December 1st.

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