Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands and my guest today is David Skinner, CEO at KCA; so Davis, welcome to Brandonomics.

David: Thank you, great to be here.

Robin: Well David you’re at KCA but I mention that name only because that wasn’t the name of the company when you started there. So tell us a little bit – why did y’all change the name of the company?

David: That’s a good question. So KCA was originally K Carpenter Associates, Kevin was at my previous company my COO – now I work for him, that’s kind of a funny little twist of fate. But anyway, when he started the company he named it after himself and I said that’s great if it’s you and 2 or 3 people and you want a little small consulting firm, but if you really want to grow it into something that’s large and very marketable you kind of need to change the name. And after a few bouts and consternations and other things late night he finally kind of gave in and where we ended up with was shortening it to KCA – basically the initials – and we saw a lot of positive feedback from that starting with the employees. Because now we had a new URL and a new email address and so everybody was tired of like their full name @kcarpenterassociates.

Robin: It’s an awkward name, yeah.

David: Yeah, it was a little confusing and it’s a long URL.

Robin: Well so from a practical side it helped quite a bit but you also mentioned that the kind of origin of this was because you wanted to grow as a company; you didn’t want to stay as this small startup company and that name change kind of helped facilitate that.

David: Correct. There are plenty of companies out there that are somebody’s name and some of those are of course large companies – you’ve got J.C. Penny, McKenzie and others – but most of the time when you see a consulting firm and it’s a person’s name you think it’s sort of a guy and 2 or 3 minions and so I didn’t want that to be the perception. We’re already larger than that and the goal is to be kind of a 100 million dollar consulting firm in the next 5 years. So to do that we needed a name that kind of reflected it.

Robin: Yeah, thank you. Matching the brand name with the company that you know you’re going to grow to be, it’s perfect advice.

David: Right.

Robin: This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.