We have refreshed our brand and identity in line with our fuller digital marketing offering and how much we have grown since we started up in 2010.

Changing our name was a big step, but there were a few reasons for it. I thought I would share our journey a little bit with you so you can understand why we changed…and also why we chose the name we did.

Reasons for a change

1. Diversification

In 2010, we started out as a social media specialist agency. We provided consultancy, training and management to small businesses seeking to understand how to use social media better in their businesses. In those days we had to spend a lot of time educating people, before they understood the concept…and then could be better placed to make decisions about their strategy.

Thankfully today – things have moved on, with a higher level of social adoption – but in the meantime technology and platforms have advanced significantly. With this advance has come the need to also diversify and modify what we deliver as a service. How we work alongside clients and what we do for them has shifted to the point that we cover WordPress support, social media, Facebook ads, email marketing and PR.

With ‘social’ baked into our founding name ‘Social Intelligence’ – this was an obvious prompter to look at a change.

2. Ownership

One of the assets for any business, is the ability to own your brand name from an Intellectual Property perspective. Unfortunately we couldn’t own Social Intelligence for a variety of reasons.  We could not own the perfect domain (socialintelligence.co.uk and socialintelligence.com) and the usernames across social media. This was annoying from a user search perspective and we ended up having to have annoying long URL to repeat from a customer service and marketing perspective (try spelling Social Intelligence…and getting it right every time on the phone!)

3. Misperception

When we first started up, one of our USP’s was bringing emotional intelligence into social media strategy. My co-founding business partner was a Master NLP Trainer and Coach and we were well placed to do this. With the word ‘intelligence’ in our name and people using ‘social’ as euphemism for ‘moral’ – we unfortunately had a lot of misperception of what we did.

We would often receive enquiries, questions and comments through our Facebook Page inbox about moral intelligence and trying to open discussions that had nothing to do with social or digital strategy. This became quite frustrating as we were not being found for what we do.

4. Future-proof

With the space that we work in being in a state of constant change and flux, we were looking to create a brand name that we could keep going forward. One that was modern, but also didn’t necessarily say what we did. This way – any time, money and momentum we invested into it would be propelling us forward and wouldn’t be a waste if we had to evolve again in a few years.

5. Group identity

Since our inception, our team has grown – out of demand for different services as well as because of the rate of change in the industry. We have hand selected some amazing individuals to join us to take us into the future. By creating a fresh new brand face that we can all resonate with and bring our values together as a team – our new name gives us the energy and exciting launchpad to do this as a team.

Why Harbour 32?

Have you ever tried to change your name? It is not easy! Coming up with some that is unique but still means something to you is HARD. We did various exercises to get to where we ended up. We made lists with lots of different columns – putting together words about what we do day to day, who we are, what means something to us, and also some personal elements of importance.

Then we went about mixing up the columns to come up with different combinations and then doing searches on anything that interested us.

Christian, (my husband and current business partner), and myself have always wanted to live by the ocean. I am a South African that spent my childhood holidays by the south coast in South Africa, and Christian was born in Gothenburg (lots of water) and lived in Stockholm after University for 12 years (also – lots of water).

We settled on Harbour fairly quickly – after researching terms that could relate to how we care for and love looking after our clients, who we treat as part of our family. Creating a safe (digital) harbour for businesses resonated nicely. After much mixing of two word combinations – we looked at using a number.

We really like the number 3, as we use it a lot in our methodology, but from an IP ownership perspective it was no good. Then – our lovely PR team member, Linzee, suggested the number 32. There are 32 points on a compass…a nautical instrument that captains would use on a ship. YES.

And that is how we got to Harbour 32. We help our clients to navigate the (sometimes) stormy seas to digital marketing. It may sound cliched – but we like it. You can’t be prefect all the time, right?