The big news last month was our identity change from Foodiebay to Zomato. While this was under consideration for a long time , there were a few things which triggered/encouraged the change:

1. We received funding from Infoedge in August 2010. This gave us some stability as a firm and we rethought where we wanted to be as a company in the longer term. An obvious answer was that we would like to venture into verticals adjacent to food. And sticking to the name Foodiebay was definitely not the best option to support this move.
2. When we had named ourselves Foodiebay, we didn’t notice that we had ‘ebay’ in our name. this didn’t necessarily mean trouble, but one should not build a business on a name which has a 5% chance of getting screwed in the future. On that note, if you are about to start your own business, it is highly recommended that you read this: Golden Rules – and DO NOT ignore the importance of any of the points mentioned here – they are there for a reason.
3. Post funding, we were investing a lot into marketing our brand. Most of this money would have to be spent again if we delayed rebranding ourselves. So we thought that if rebranding was inevitable, we’d rather do it sooner than later. Rebranding has been a great learning experience for each one of us at Zomato/Foodiebay. We used this as an excuse to fix so many things which were wrong in a single, it was scary and made a lot of us feel nervous. But once the dust settled down, everything became much more efficient and clear.

Some of the positives that we derived out of our re-branding were:

A new identity

We have been running our business for quite some time now (a few decades in startup time – 3 years chronologically ). Earlier, we were mostly experimenting with different business models and it is only recently that we saw the bigger picture (we think!). We also understood that we could potentially move into different industry verticals which didn’t ideally fit in well with our old brand identity. Rebranding gave us a perfect excuse to redefine our business objectives for the longer term.

A new startup

There are only a couple of founders for any startup (haven’t seen startups with more than 3-4 founders work). All the other people in the company are, for lack of a better word, employees. That’s because they didn’t build the organization from scratch – they weren’t there during the most difficult times. Here, rebranding changed all that. Our team is now 22 members strong and each one of us loves Zomato so much (just like a big founding team) because we all transformed into Zomato together by putting in numerous night-outs on a very tight schedule. Suddenly, we had much more energy in the office and had people taking so much more ownership for their work. A positive sign definitely – I can easily say that our productivity has gone up by 3-4 times. Of course this doesn’t mean that you should rebrand every couple of years when your organization grows (that would be disastrous), but if and when you do, try to involve as many people in the process as possible, because they will all end up becoming ‘founders’ in your team.

Excuse to redefine our culture

A lot of our people used to show up at work at different times making teamwork and collaboration difficult. While I am all for a no face-time policy and respect people who get the job done irrespective of where they are, it is sometimes necessary to be in office for being more productive in a team environment. At the switch, we put out a list of things we wanted to change at Zomato (which included starting hours for work) and everybody just nodded along. With a bigger identity change in the offing, such changes look small and do not stand out as troublesome and inconvenient.

New hires and layoffs

We also used rebranding as an excuse to let go of some people who were not ideal for a startup environment. We also hired new people who fit in better with our longer term strategy. This was a big change for an organization as well as our people. But fortunately, we handled it well.

Reinvigorated customers

I cannot explain this better than this comment that we received from an old customer on the blog post announcing the change in our name: “Like they say – everything changes except change. I like the new name and the idea behind, it speaks volumes about the plan and vision that you and your team has for foodiebay….errr… zomato! I see the company expanding and being the recommendation engine in the very near future, this is not just a website, it is a movement – best of luck guys” – Mrinalika

Excitement and publicity

It is very difficult to stay in the news all the time. You have to keep coming up with disruptive ideas and actions to keep feeding your PR agency regularly. Rebranding, if you are a decently well-known brand, can be a good excuse to get in touch with all your journalist/reporter contacts to write a story on you and the change. It brings in a lot of new customers to your business and could very well make up for a loss of customers due to the change in name. We did exactly that!

On that note, some of the key cons of rebranding in my opinion:

Hate mail and losing loyal customers

As a three year old startup, we had our fair share of loyal customers. Some of them didn’t like the change since they could no longer identify themselves with the new name. From some of these, we did get some hate mail. For most of the customers who emailed us, we got back to them promptly and won them back. But I am sure that not everyone emailed us and we lost the love of some customers in the process.

Confused employees

The rebranding put our sales team in utter confusion. It was hard for them to explain the change to their clients. Moreover, since we had been planning this change for around the month, they always questioned if they should talk to new client prospects as Foodiebay or Zomato. It took a lot of perseverance and phone calls to the team to ensure that no one came to know about Zomato before its time.

Complicated process

Rebranding has to be done in a single shot. You can’t take too many days to do it. Once you start creating a list of things which would need to change, it easily seems to run into a couple of dozen pages. Paying attention to the smallest details is important. But what is more important is that all of these changes have to made overnight, without breaking down any of your essential services. This means a lot of preparation and testing to make sure everything is right. In this, there is no room for getting anything wrong at all.