When a small business owner in the automotive industry came to me through a word of mouth referral, I candidly told him, “This isn’t a project I would normally take on.” What I meant by that was that he needed the full service — new name, logo, brand strategy, seo strategy, new ecommerce website, crm integrations, and everything that goes with getting an online business up and running.

While those are all things I've done in the past, over the past four years I’ve stayed mostly in the strategy and copywriting space. However, due to the personal connection from a word of mouth referral, and the fact that I felt this business had a chance to be a real industry leader, I took on the project.

I knew I needed to staff a team for this one, so I brought in a designer, Daniel Ramer, and another smaller agency who could help with the seo strategy, website build, data upload, and crm integration, Clayton Pantano of Entrust Marketing.

To make things simple for the client, I managed the project and the billing, so that he didn’t have to worry about three invoices and three points of contact.

Creating a project schedule

Knowing this would be a multi-month project with several stakeholders involved, I started by building out a project plan. While we ended up deviating from this schedule as we got into the project, this still helped us to stay organized and aligned with client expectations.

Creatives can get a bad rap for their lack of structure, which is a shame and totally unnecessary. The right structure puts the needed guardrails in place for truly great creative work to happen.

Building the strategy

Next we moved into the strategy phase, knowing we needed to do some research to produce an effective name and website. We delivered two separate strategies — one for brand and one for site and search. Here were some of the areas we covered:

And then, as I like to share in these project breakdowns, here’s the Mural board showing more of the ground we covered. The section at the bottom is a review of the primary competitors.

Renaming the business

Previously the business had used a hyper-literal name — Washington Hybrid Battery Repair. This had worked well for them as a local repair shop that needed to be easily found in local search and remembered by people in a crisis moment.

However, with plans to expand to nationwide coverage and the shipping and selling of batteries online, the previous name had been outgrown.

The owner, David, prided himself on being a trustworthy business, with prompt communication. He wanted to make sure the name reflected these values.

What makes a naming project successful?

Any successful naming project requires building and keeping consensus from start to finish. You are bringing something very personal to life and choosing a permanent name is rarely an easy decision. Keep these things in mind:

Teach the client about naming. Show them categories. Give them examples of brand. Get them thinking about naming in a more strategic way.
Align around the naming criteria. What are the must-haves? This could be things like length, ownability, values, ease of understanding for a global audience…
Keep coming back to the strategy. Provide a rationale behind everything you put in front of them. Let them know you aren’t just pulling names out of a hat.
Push back when appropriate. Every naming project I’ve been on has had a renegade moment. This is usually after the first round of names has been presented, and in the moment, someone on the client team has a great idea. They throw out a name and it really does threaten to derail the project. It’s important to know when to go along with the renegade and when to push back.
Remind everyone to have fun. Unfortunately, most naming projects also find their way to a moment of stress. The pressure of the decision starts to weigh heavy. It’s your job to break that up and bring levity to the moment, while still communicating a reverence for the process.

Here are a couple screenshots from the project showing how we communicated naming categories and the rationale behind the name David ultimately chose.

Logo Design and Site Wireframes

With a solid strategy and new name in hand, we were ready to move into visual expression. Daniel, the designer, began to develop several logo concepts while I got to work on the wireframes for the website.

The Logo Process

Daniel did a great job jumping off from the strategy into the logo. For this scope we had two rounds of reviews built in:

7 concepts presented in round one
Refined into 3 for further development
Final logo chosen

Daniel found a way to really bring the hybrid and electric vehicle industry into the logo, colors, and illustration style. He also is a little old school, because he often starts with a pencil and paper rather than a computer screen. Here are a few snapshots from along the way.

The Wireframe Process

Because we were doing the site build ourselves, I knew I needed pretty accurate wireframes this time, rather than rough content models. So, I used Balsamiq, which is my go-to in these situations.

Start with the requirements. Using our site and search strategy, I started by building a site map and some general content notes of what I knew I wanted to go on each page and overall what I wanted the site to accomplish.
Move into the structure. From here, I began to build out the structure of each page. This included ways to navigate, functionality, interaction, length, general content blocks, and where we would integrate important things like reviews and contact details.
Fill in the gaps. Finally, I brought copy into the wireframes. I try to never write with lorem ipsum or placeholder copy in this stage because it just causes problems later with design and fit. In other words, it’s possible to fall in love with a design that doesn’t fit your content.

The wireframe document grew fairly large, since I built one for every page of the site. But here are a few examples of how it turned out.

Building the site and connecting all the pieces

The site is now mostly live, with just a few remaining images and products to be loaded and the finally integrations being made. This ended up being a much larger process than I anticipated, as the catalog of products grew by about 5x along the way.

On top of a larger inventory, the site also has several more complicated pieces of conditional logic. This included:

An ability to select your exact car from a series of dropdowns as opposed to needed to navigate to it through a 4-5 step navigation menu (this was one of the competitor flaws we picked up on)
The ability to add on products such as a a 12v battery and help with installation and then to have these choices trigger interactions through the CRM

Despite the challenges, we’re very happy with the final result and it truly does stand out from the industry competitors.

Here are a couple before and after comparisons for you.

Homepage

About Page

And then, here’s how the all-important e-commerce product page turned out

In Summary

If nothing else, this was a great project to put out of shape muscles to use. I do think it’s important to do this from time to time. Even if only to give you a great appreciation and compassion for your fellow creatives in other disciplines.
I learned a lot about proper scoping in this project as well. I could have done a better job defining the website portion of the scope, which would have kept us on time.
Certain industries that appear to be commodity-driven, like car batteries, are often ripe for brand disruption. When the products are nearly all comparable, many businesses then default to competing on price. An elevated brand, and user experience, present another path forward however — towards charging a premium on a commodity good.
Lastly, I can’t stress this enough, work with people you enjoy. I know this isn’t always possible, but do what you can to make it happen. Even if this means taking less pay or going outside your comfort zone on the role, it’s worth it.

If you enjoyed this breakdown, you may also be interested in the time I worked with Mayple Global to launch their new brand.

Looking for a strategic copywriter to assist your team? (Some people call this a Creative Director or Associate Creative Director)

My name is Derek and I write all kinds of things for businesses of all sizes in many different industries. Do you have a writing or strategy need? This is what I love to do.

Send me an email: derek@plain.run

Renaming and Relaunching an Automotive Ecommerce Brand