If your company is considering a corporate name change, your first step should be to clarify the company's positioning, and determine what it is that, most essentially, must be understood about your brand, and by whom. Most companies have several audiences that need to be considered. Identify and characterize your audiences, prioritize them, then select the most important. You will want to list for each audience what, specifically, that audience needs to know and understand about the brand for your company to succeed.

"What the audience needs to know and understand" begins with a global purpose, or high-level brand message (we are/we provide), and specific benefit messages, both functional (our technology works cross-platform) and emotional (you won't feel hampered by your hardware). Stand back and evaluate the separate lists you've created as objectively as possible. Note what messages are common to all key audiences, then identify the most important messages to be communicated overall. These will become your key brand messages.

It is also important at this point to consider what kind of image you want to associate with your brand, in order to give your audiences a reason to prefer your offering to other similar offerings. Strategically, is it key that the company be perceived to be visionary -- leading the way in an emerging field -- or a tried and true expert, building on success?

Clarification of the most desirable image attributes will allow you not only to suggest an advantage over competitors, but will also enable you to establish parameters for how key messages should be expressed verbally and visually, and help you set a standard for corporate behavior.

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