In October, we ran an article about the benefits and pitfalls of rebranding your business. We wanted to write an update about our ongoing rebranding efforts and what you can expect in the upcoming year from the refresh. We’re very excited about this new identity we’re creating!
Why Are We Rebranding?
Quite simply, times are changing for us. We’ve grown from a tiny company with a dream to one that has achieved a level of respect in our niche. So we felt it was time to evolve our look a little bit from “new startup” to “established company”. There was also some difficulty with the readability of our name in the logo. We’ll talk all about that down in the logo section and why we made the changes we did.
We’re also pivoting our services to focus more on tech and financial companies, two niches that often have difficulty doing content marketing because of their technical nature. There is also a site revamp in progress that will make both our website and our application faster than it currently is and we’re planning a major content update over 2020. With all of these changes, it was a good time to make small tweaks to our branding to signify the change.
Our Name
One of the big changes we’re making is to alter our name from CONCURED to Concured. The all-caps version does feel more “techy”, but it feels awkward when seen in a sentence. Moving to a standard capitalization for our company name felt like a better fit.
Furthermore, there aren’t many companies that use an all-caps name for their business unless they are an abbreviation. IBM is a good example. Few people probably call them International Business Machines anymore. They’re just IBM. But Concured is not an abbreviation or an acronym, so it doesn’t really work in all caps.
Additionally, as a company working on the bleeding edge of AI and marketing technology, using all-caps for the name gave us an old-fashioned feel. Many early computer systems and companies used an all-caps name, largely because of abbreviations like we said. We wanted to shed this old-fashioned feeling and gave our name a standard capitalization.
Things have been going well for us, so there was no need to change our name completely like some of the companies in our past article on rebranding did. We don’t want to lose the brand equity we’ve built up with our name!
Our New Logo
Our new logo is somewhat similar to our current logo. The old logo spells out CONCURED in capital sans-serif letters. The O of our company name is replaced with a magnifying glass with a thick handle. Three lines representing text are inside of the circular magnifying glass. All of the letters are the same size.
The new logo has our company name in lower case with a serif font. The line weights are similar between the logos, but the magnifying glass is different. The drawing for the magnifying glass uses the same weight and thickness as the letters in the name. Gone are the three lines of text inside and there is a small gap to the left of the handle on the O. We’ve also darkened the blue color just slightly compared to the old logo.
The magnifying glass with a gap is also going to serve as our main identifier for things like integrations, so be on the lookout for it! We wanted to keep the magnifying glass to continue showing the viewer that we help them search for things The lack of lines inside makes it easier to see that the name is Concured. With the lines, some people thought our name was C NCURED, which doesn’t make a lot of sense!
There is also a subtle trick in the logo. The O for the magnifying glass is just a touch bigger than the other letters. This draws attention to the glass, but it also gives a feeling of starting our name with a lowercase letter followed by a capital. Apple is well-known for doing that with their product names, like with the iPad and the iMac, and a lot of other companies have followed suit with similar naming schemes when it didn’t conflict with copyright.
We didn’t want to change the logo too much. We’re still a young company and didn’t want to create too much brand confusion by making a radical change. But it is enough to help make our name easier to read and show that we’re making a change.
We hope to have the new site up and running sometime in Q1 2020. Be on the lookout for the changes and thanks for coming with us on the journey!