“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
AllGo has just launched Amplify as the new brand name for our recognition, incentive and reward technology business. But why did we launch a new brand? And what was the journey like to develop a completely new brand from our longest established AllGo offering?
Why the New Brand Name?
AllGo has been the name of our company and the prefix for all our products since we launched our first corporate product, AllGo Points, in 2010.
The name AllGo was chosen to convey momentum, motivation, progress, as in “I’m all-go!”. We thought it was the perfect name for an incentive company, and fitted well with our existing consumer gift voucher website AllGifts.ie.
Between 2010 and 2015, AllGo served us well as a name with a homemade logo and a growing points-based incentive business, mostly doing sales incentives and channel or retailer incentives.
We signed up many great brand names for sales and channel incentives and grew a nice niche in API-integrated multi-retailer vouchers for reward market research survey participants. It was a “lumpy” business however, with clients spending large amounts on incentives for a year or two, and then changing strategy to spend on other types of promotion.
In 2015, we finally bit the bullet and paid for professional AllGo branding! We worked with Adam and Nik We Make Design (subsequently re-branded as Alkamee) to provide a full brand identity for the company under the AllGo name. We were delighted with the results and finally had a proper logo and set of branding guidelines to help push us forward into the corporate world.
Then in 2016, we launched our AllGo Mastercard gift card, the open loop gift card that businesses can buy in Ireland for their staff tax-free on the Small Benefit Scheme. Using the AllGo branding developed the year before, this product brought us into the mass B2B market. Whereas previously, we were a fairly niche software provider with maybe a couple of dozen clients, we now suddenly had 100s of businesses buying gift cards from us under the AllGo brand.
The Mastercard business grew rapidly, and exploded during Covid when the tax-limits were doubled in 2022 from €500 – €1,000. (I remember spending a lot of time delivering gift cards, office printers and consumables to employee homes across Leinster, but that’s another story….). By 2023, we were serving 8,000 business clients a year with AllGo Mastercard gift cards via the allgo.ie website.
While the Mastercard business took off in Ireland, our technology business continued to develop separately. We added our first UK-based employee recognition client in 2020, which was also the biggest programme on our platform at the time.
I’d been thinking for a while that all the effort over the years to develop reward, incentive and recognition technology had not really paid off. Reward clients tended to be Irish-based and relatively small. Incentive clients scaled quickly, but inevitably changed direction after a few years, leaving a hole in our revenues. Only recognition clients seemed to need us as long term strategic partners.
So I took the decision in 2022 to go all in on employee recognition and rebuild out technology platform to be a world-class software product in this area.
After 18 months of intense product development we finally had Recognition Hub 2.0, a massive upgrade on our previous offering.
After rolling out the new platform to existing clients in 2023, the focused turned to scale this business, not just in Ireland, but overseas.
It was then we realised that we would need a new website, as allgo.ie was now primarily being used by business clients to order AllGo Mastercard.
So I started working with ProfileTree in late 2023 to develop the new marketing website focused on our 3 main 3 B2B technology products – Recognition Hub, Incentive Hub, and Voucher Hub.
To begin with, I just assumed that the new website would eb a derivative of Allgo – “AllGo People” maybe or “AllGo Tech”. I knew there were some issues with the existing AllGo branding. Firstly, most clients associated AllGo with the gift card, which wasn’t what this new business was about. But also, people struggled with writing and pronunciation (AllGo, Allgo, all go, Al-Go (as in Al Gore!) – and that was just in Ireland!)
Brand Development Journey
So just before Christmas 2023, I thought I’d better reach out to Alkamee again and get them to tweak the name and branding for the new website. Alkamee got to work on a new brand positioning for the tech business and came up with a “Rewarding Work” branding concept in February 2024.
The concept was clever, but it didn’t quite hit the mark, and somehow I couldn’t see how it connected with AllGo. So at that stage, I decided to throw the shackles off and get them to develop a new brand name as well that would better reflect the final brand positioning.
That started the most difficult phase of the project. Using the “Rewarding Work” concept, Alkamee developed a short list of 6 possible new brand names in March 2023. None of them were 100% right.
So, it was back to the drawing board. Alkamee then challenged me to define EXACTLY what the business was about, something I had always struggled to articulate if I’m honest. So I went away and did a lot of research and a lot of soul-searching before finally deciding that we are in the business of producing business results for our clients though people.
From there, we nailed our Brand Positioning and Brand Purpose-
- Our Brand Positioning: We believe that proactively recognising people for their good work delivers astonishing business results.
- Our Brand Purpose: Delivery astonishing results through people
The next challenge was to find a new brand name that would embody our positioning and purpose. It needed to be something with positivity and momentum, reflecting serious business purpose, and conveying the unleashing of people potential. Oh, and it had to have a suitable domain name and be trademarkable!
I actually had severe doubts whether a brand name could be found to deliver on the above requirements, so I told Alkamee that as a fall back, they could revert to AllGo People and just do their best to craft the new brand around that existing name.
To my surprise and delight, at our next brand name shortlist meeting on 17th May 2024, I immediately felt that one of the 6 options presented – Amplify – was perfect. To me, Amplify means taking what is good in companies – culture, people, success – and making it even better! Which is exactly what our technology aims to do.
It took one more moth to nail the branding visuals and assets. So by the end of June 2024, we finally had our brand!
And so that was our 6 month branding journey from vague thought to full fledged new brand.
What did I learn? Well, firstly the hardest thing in branding is to actually, honestly and clearly understand and articulate what the business is about. And secondly, that new things are always harder and take longer than you think!
Was it worth it? Well, I feel we now have the right foundations to build our technology business to its full potential – internationally and at scale. And together with our new website (amplifysuccess.com), we have a great springboard to our target markets.
Only time will tell if we can succeed in building our business on these foundations, but I feel we’ve given ourselves the best possible chance…….
Gary Purcell, CEO. 22.09.2024
