The Berry Company has followed the footsteps of many of its peers in the Global Yellow Pages industry and has changed its name — seeking a new identify that is relevant today and reflects how the company has changed.
Berry will soon be no more. The company’s new name is “Vivial”, a corporate identify developed quietly over the past year, and unveiled to the Berry staff earlier this week.
For the past six months, Berry worked with a couple of leading branding agencies to develop the new name. The rebranding is reminiscent of similar moved by the companies now known as Dex, Eniro, hibu, Sensis, Solocal, Trudon and others that decided they needed to distance themselves from legacy branding in order to successfully transform their companies. The transformation results have been mixed among these companies, the lesson being that a name change without real change behind it is fairly meaningless.
Berry’s marketing VP Laura Cole acknowledged this, but pointed out that the adoption of Vivial followed rather than preceded substantial changes to the company’s mission and how it operates.
Cole said that the name change was necessary given how different the Berry business is compared with just two years ago. The company has moved away from a print focus toward becoming a provider of digital advertising and marketing automation tools to SMBs.
“For us this is much bigger than a name change,” Cole said. “Internally we have changed so much, in our go to market strategy and our sales structure. We needed a name that reflects these changes. The Berry name doesn’t fit us any more.”
Acquisitions have been a big part of the transition to a company that no longer makes sense as Berry.
Berry is part of TBC Holdings, a technology company backed by the Blackstone Group and GSO Capital. TBC, not Berry, is the entity that acquired marketing automation player LocalVox in 2014, and mGage, a Los Angeles based company that provides a SaaS-based mobile messaging platform, including to some major brands. Vivial is now the brand that brings all of these advertising, marketing and technology elements under one roof.
Cole said the full transition to the Vivial branding will take several months, as the company transitions to new websites, email domain, new marketing materials and so on. In the meantime, each of the companies entities carries the tagline “A Vivial Company.”
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