The importance of brand recognition

Starting point

When we started to create our first e-commerce startup in August 2022, our mission was clear: We want to help the great startups of our country & their innovative products to get more exposure and make them more easily accessible to the end customers. With the launch in November 2022 of “CxS – Customer meets Startup” we succeeded in parts, but as we analyzed our first two months in early 2023, the question that had been in the back of our minds for some time, whether our name was really meaningful enough, came more and more to the fore. We gathered feedback on our brand from experts, and the suspicion we had already had ourselves for a few weeks was solidified: the recognition value of our brand was insufficient and tended to lead to confusion among end customers. This was because our platform ran under the domain shopstartups.de, while we communicated our brand “CxS – Customer meets Startup”. Although we had also secured the domain customermeetsstartup.de and .com, this was admittedly not the easiest spelling for interested end customers.

Recognition value should not be underestimated

The importance of recognition in e-commerce is huge, as a strong brand gives shoppers confidence and instills trust in a company. Research shows that most customers can get used to a name change as long as the original idea is retained and better represented. For us, it was important not to let this happen too late to minimize the risk of losing customers. After some discussion and an exclusionary workshop with an agency, we concluded that it was time to find a new name – one that better reflected our mission and, in particular, showed potential customers more clearly what they could expect from us.

Approach and challenges

In order not to start completely from scratch again, we finally decided to use the brand name “shopstartups”, which was already known through the domain of our platform. Our approach consisted of a brand-typical rebranding strategy with new logo development, adaptation of the design, and social media accounts. In this way, we ensured that both new and existing customers alike understood the newly defined appearance. However, the rebranding was not just a name change. It also involved a complete redesign of our website. We invested a lot of time to ensure that all elements of the new brand identity fit together perfectly and conveyed our message in the best possible way: an innovative lifestyle that conveys the desire for new products. The decision to rebrand was certainly not an easy one and took a lot of time and effort. During almost four weeks, it was also difficult to continue to maintain the previous marketing activities in parallel: the new design was not yet fully developed and we did not want to continue with the old format in order not to create further confusion among end consumers. Therefore, we had to scale down the marketing activities a bit, which quickly became noticeable in terms of reach, especially on social media.

Conclusion

But in the end, we are convinced that this was the right step to make shopstartups more successful. We have now been shining in a new design for a few weeks, have received consistently positive feedback on it, and are looking forward to continuing to make startups known to end customers with our new brand and to collect valuable feedback on their products for them! After the rebranding, our brand has finally gained the visual power to reach its full potential. Now every customer – old and young – can immediately see what shopstartups is all about the exciting stories behind the startups and the innovative, new products from the startups that offer lifestyle, sustainability, and progress for everyone!