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Between executive coaching and marketing, a frequent topic of conversation is branding, and while we have plenty of customer references and projects, it's not often that you get to see the behind-the-scenes, internal, project of a growth agency like Avorit.  Let me share how we think.

First, comes the opportunity.

Lance Tanaka has held a variety of executive positions at global brands like Pepsi & Nike and now has in over 17,000 executive coaching hours for some of the leading brands in the world. I first met Lance almost 15 years ago in Hong Kong where he was in the full swing of coaching and growing his successful business, which has now evolved to be the "Lance Tanaka Group".  About a year ago we started working on a concept dubbed "Online Leadership Institute" as a way to take high-end executive coaching content, and make it even more accessible via technology.   Fast forward to this year's pandemic and worldwide shut-down, and suddenly online training is for executives is often far more preferable than in person, and many countries are now imposing 14-day quarantines after crossing borders, so even a one-hour coaching session in a different country effectively meant a 28-day trip.  Translation: not scaleable, or sustainable!

As we built out the concept with Lance, combining the vision of our disruptive growth agency, executive coaching, and Lance's leadership content, we realized that "Online Leadership Institute" was a bit of a mouthful and would be difficult to rank on any search engine.

After some work and brainstorming, our Chief Creative Officer, Ryan, discovered that "Odigo" means leadership in Greek and we started kicking it around, amongst a few other names too. 

Every client has their own preference, but most companies that I start, usually have something in common:

1. A meaningful name that represents something
2. Must pass a reasonable "spellable/pronounceable" test
3. Be slightly disruptive & unique
4. The brandmark should ideally contain the name of the company
5. A solid chance at uniqueness on Google / Bing search

After some quick searching, the only other brand using "Odigo" in anyway is a business in a completely different vertical so we decided to go for it, and also add in "Academy" so as to make sure we were unique & different.  Enter Odigo Academy and the purchase of www.Odigo.Academy

There's some more magic in the works, including the full website, which will be launched in the coming month, but it's encouraging that the brand is already ranked #2 on Google for "Odigo"!  Just a little bit of behind-the-scenes SEO and strategy, and Google's already aware.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this Making of a brand series, and we'll keep showing you the behind-the-scenes approach to launching what will (hopefully) be a worldwide, successful leadership training program.