Why did we rebrand to TOMD?

In February 2019 we rebranded to TOMD. To help provide some insight about some of the many things to think about if you’re rebranding, we’ve written two blogs. This one explains our reasons for rebranding and the other entitled, ‘Why bother with a brand-new brand?’ provides wider guidance.

In the past we’ve helped numerous firms launch new brands and rebrand. So, we – more than most – know how much work is involved, consequently we thought long and hard about it. As a business, we’ve changed the logo three or four times in 20 years. This time the change was more radical, we changed the name too. The company name is still The Outsourced Marketing Department, but we’ve adopted TOMD as our trading style and it’s what we now call ourselves.

But why change the name?

There were multiple reasons. The name and the logo were, of course, inextricably linked. In our view the logo had become a little dated. Whilst we could have just changed the logo, we felt that the word ‘outsourced’ was not necessarily viewed in a positive light. Plus, whilst we now act for more firms than ever before as their marketing department (the ‘outsourced’ reference), this is now only part of what we do. So, we felt we needed to change the name.

Why TOMD?

We’ve always known that most clients don’t call us The Outsourced Marketing Department, they refer to us as TOMD. Therefore, it felt logical to call ourselves TOMD.

When we were developing the branding, we spoke to a few clients and they validated our thoughts about the name change. One client said, “of course it’s a good idea, I always call you TOMD anyway!”.

There’s an important message here, however hard you work to develop and maintain your brand (we were called The Outsourced Marketing Department for nearly 20 years), your audiences – and especially clients – ultimately decide what they want to call you. In our case it’s TOMD, probably partly because it’s easier to say than The Outsourced Marketing Department.

Designing the logo

Once we’d decided to call ourselves TOMD, we needed to design the new logo. On the one hand, having a very experienced head of design and design team made the job easier, on the other, having a group of colleagues with years of marketing experience made it potentially more difficult, as we all had strong and very valid views.

In the end it was straightforward. The lower case font in the logo creates a softer, contemporary and friendly feel and the red dot provides a link with our past dating back to the original logo in 1999. Black and red have always been ‘our colours’, so this also maintained some consistency.

Asking for views

Speaking to staff and professional connections can certainly help when you’re developing a brand. One of the things we found very useful was asking clients to tell us the words they’d use to describe us and our services. We collated these and fed them into the design process. As a matter of interest, the top ten words were: professional, friendly, responsive, approachable, knowledgeable, efficient, reliable, dependable, helpful and flexible. We like to think that these are reflected in the new logo.

If you’re going to rebrand, we’ll be delighted to help – we have quite a lot of experience!

By Mike Johnstone.