Branding Hedgeo

I was looking at our blog posts and reviewing comments from last week’s post when I noticed something special. This week’s update is post number 299. That seems like another Milestone to me. Of course 312 posts will make six years of weekly updates, and the business won’t officially be six years old until October 1, 2015, but 299 feels like rolling over a big number on the odometer.

When I decided to write this week’s update about another logo project we finished for a client I thought it might be interesting to go back and count how many brands Milestone has designed over the years. I came up with a total of twelve for an average of two logo projects per year.

Our latest creation is for a local financial services company that was referred to Milestone by our friends at Lendacy, another brand in our portfolio that has since become a retainer account. When we finished our strategic marketing planning meetings with First Sarasota Capital Advisors several weeks ago we knew one thing they definitely wanted to do was change their company name.

Much like Lendacy, formerly known as Capital Solution Services, their name suffered from a terrible sameness that reinforced their lack of differentiation in the competitive market of financial management for high net worth investors. Furthermore, their new strategic partnership with Lendacy would form the cornerstone of their new product offering. As a result they were ready to abandon their company name and embrace a new identity for their business.

Anticipating their rebranding project I spent some time thinking about possible company names in between planning meetings. One of the names I suggested was a combination of two ideas – hedge funds and geography. The hedge fund part is associated with the product they’re selling, and the geography part is connected to their target market.

The end result was a new word, Hedgeo, which was not only nice and short, but also available as a domain name for their company website. They liked the suggestion, and when it came time for their rebranding project the new company name had stuck.

Since Hedgeo is a made-up word, the key challenge with this project was to design a company logo that would not be mispronounced. We didn’t want people saying “hedge-o” because that sounds like a toy or a late-night TV infomercial product. We needed to make sure people say “hed-geo” when they read the name because that reinforces the attributes we liked about the name in the first place.

After reviewing several logo designs that included a variety of different fonts, layouts, and color combinations, I am pleased to introduce the final solution:

As you can see the order of the letters in the stacked word create an interesting little visual puzzle that captures the viewer’s attention. The effect is a simple, scalable, professional company logo design that looks and feels like a brand. And their tagline, which we suggested towards the end of our strategic planning sessions, does a great job of defining who they are and what they do.

We welcome your comments as always…

Until next week,

Matthew Anderson, President
Milestone Marketing Associates, Inc.