What goes into defining one’s image. What word or string of words best represents the vision, the strategy, the audience, the ins and outs of everything about the company, its essence. I am here to tell you it’s not a simple task to take lightly.
When I became a wedding DJ I knew off the bat I needed a program to run the day to day aspects of my company. What I found was a hodge-poge of solutions that didn’t fit the bill
Some years ago I started to envision the nuts and bolts of what a better event management platform could be. As those ideas started to become solidified I started to think of a name that would go with it. The very first thing that came to mind was gigly, but that was quickly shot down. Soon, after some serious banter of ideas, eCUEity was born of a few ideas; the merging of acuity and working in the “cue” aspect of my DJing life.
As I started to make more people aware of the program I would get a mixed responses from it. Some liked it, but some people had difficulty spelling it, saying it, remembering it. After going through an intense startup program called Accel7 I knew that the growth that I experienced professionally and with my company needed a relook at my brand. What name would best fit my aspirations of my company.
And those aspirations are grand. I desire to dominate the marketplace with unmatched tools to manage many aspects of their business all at competitive prices. If my goals are reach where I have a lot of market share of this space, the real value of these tools set in; being able to mine the data about events, and states, about regions. To be able to predict trends in the market, to save businesses time, money, and effort managing all this chaos. And ultimately to become a brand leader beyond just the event professional side with expanding into more event types, to offer discovery services for clients. The foundation is already there to start this exciting journey.
Thanks to a number of very good friends in different walks in life I started to parse some ideas. I started to field some ideas from others. Ultimately I whittled the field down to six choices from people to choose from. The poll results showed some incredible clarity in the winning name. It also showed some interesting feedback in other possible names.
A couple of the choices used the word “gig” in their titles. GigSync (which honestly was my personal favorite) had this great simplicity of two syllables, very descriptive, and even the logo could bare some additional identity of motion in it. Another name that was suggested was ReadyGig which had the sense of motion, of “being always ready” for your next gig. GigBee was a clever flip adding a brand mascot to the mix. And while GigSync came in second, I got quite a bit of negative feedback for the name “gig”. For some, gig cheapens the idea of the types of events they run. I do understand the premise of their argument but I also thought some of the feedback was a little overblown on a toolset that they use and it’s not the direct identity of their own brands.
The other choices had the word “cue” in their titles. eCUEity, cueplanner, and cue. As I started to think of this branding strategy I was able to retcon the word cue to an acronym to mean something specific to the business; “Collaborative Unified Events”
As the dust settled there was a clear winner. cue took a sizable lead over the others. I think there are a few reasons why it dominated the results. First the legacy name of eCUEity now had a simple sibling to think about… cue. I had always highlighted cue in the title since it’s inception. And even for people that are not musically inclined cue had some attachment to the product. Even those that were not in the industry and did not know about eCUEity found value in the name
Now some may wonder why did I choose the domain name cueplatform.com instead of say cueplanner.com which is a bit more explanatory of what it is. Well cueplanner.com does describe some of the functionality of cue, to a point. What I have envisioned is far more encompassing than just a planner. This is a platform to help manage not only the events you support, but your financials, communications, social, and the list goes on. Platform was the real key tie-in to what the this product is, and what the company mission is.
So as of January 1, 2020 the brand is now known as cue, the mission is clearer than it has ever been, and I am more convinced than ever that cue is on the right path to provide real solutions to event professionals.
