What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
When we presented the naming maps to our company, a colleague told me it was one of the most impressive conversations he’d had all year. That was a nice metric for the success of the work we’d done. We received feedback from executives about the positive and successful names we came up with.
We took a couple of names created by WANT and used them for brand-new products for the company. For example, the first time the company went into the security space in a big way, they used the name “Intelligent Home”, which came from WANT.
We sometimes tested WANT's names against others and theirs were always the top. The simple fact of keeping a naming agency on retainer for a few years if pretty rare. I would work with WANT again in a second.
How did WANT Branding perform from a project management standpoint?
One of our leaders was a bit quicker to change things around and wanted changes all the time. They responded quickly to that and adjusted timelines effectively. Within the same day or week, we would make changes, but they would handle it very well. We felt that things were well-organized and that WANT was a true partner.
They were very easy to work with and easy to talk to. If someone asked me for a naming agency or a brand identity expert, they would usually be on my shortest list.
What did you find most impressive about them?
The idea of the naming maps for looking at the company at large is what distinguished WANT in my mind. Instead of doing their work in a vacuum, they took the time to set up meetings with the right people, and they encouraged my participation. They were able to do the work in a thorough way, without a lot of back and forth.
Not having a huge staff helped keep the cost down. It allowed us to keep them on for as long as we did. It made us feel like we were getting a lot of value: we received a naming policy manual, naming advisory and development, and other things that added value to the actual name generation. It was unique for me at the time, and since. It helped me create advisory documents when communicating a new name to the company. These are extra, above-and-beyond things that come to my mind, and helped distinguish them from the general services we might have gotten from another provider.
The names themselves also felt as though they hadn’t just been generated by a computer. Many bigger agencies made us feel like the names were computer-generated. I felt that the work with WANT was much more strategic and thorough.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I’m sure that, at the time, I could have mentioned things to work on and improve. In hindsight, it was a great relationship, it was helpful to the organization at large, and we definitely felt that we got our value for money every month. For those reasons, I really can’t think of a negative right now.
Their deliverables were always excellent and of the highest quality, demonstrating their dedication and creativity. They offered a variety of options at all stages and created additional complimentary documents to facilitate the process.