Mercury Research
Verbal identity
The customer
Mercury Marketing and Research Consultants was set up in 1992 and represents one of the first market research companies in Romania. Its customer portfolio is impressive both in terms of professional expertise and geographical variety, including Romania, Bulgaria and Great Britain.
The challenge
Following the development of the range of services it provides, as well as management restructuring that occured at the end of the 90's, the company was split into two independent units: Mercury Promotions - which offered BTL services -, and Mercury Marketing and Research Consultants - which offered market research services.
The inefficient and unprofessional way of disseminating this change lead to confusion among the target audiences, so much more since it often was the case that the two units shared customers. Moreover, the name Mercury Marketing and Research Consultants had a number of inherent flaws which lead to difficulties in putting it across efficiently. Its original length resulted in a number of abbreviations - such as ‘Mercury’ or ‘Mercury MRC’ - which, if anything, actually increased the customers' confusion. The 'Marketing' component would also send out false signals regarding what the company's business interests were.
The solution
Grapefruit was chosen to identify a new name for Mercury as part of the first corporate rebranding projects in Romania.
The first step was to take into account creating a new name which would stand out from its sister company and would put an end to the confusion on the market. The over 150 names created by Grapefruit were evaluated internally by the customer according to the criteria drawn during the initial joint effort. The potential of the final set of candidate names was assessed in a series of focus groups that included representatives of the internal and external audiences.
The final decision reached together with Grapefruit was that the inherent message of the old 'Mercury' component was very important and represented a significant competitive advantage. Consequently, the final decision was choosing ‘Mercury Research’, a name already used as an informal abbreviation by certain members of the public. Although this solution appeared only to solve the issues of specificity of the abbreviations, the issue of insufficient differentiation between the two sister companies was addressed by increasing the phonetic contrast between their names.
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