When we started to think about scaling our product from Switzerland to an international level, one main question became quite obvious:
How do we want to be known? Under what brand should we communicate ourselves? What’s a smart way to transit from politik.ch to the new brand SAVOIRR?
We started with politik.ch in early 2017, as Thomas approached Clemens with a simple question: You are always full of ideas, by chance, I got this nice domain politik.ch (and, btw, this will be another interesting blog post, stay tuned) – what do you imagine was happening there? We were crafting politik.ch as a public affairs, monitoring, and policy knowledge management platform. We have enabled with our nifty tool any experts in politics, lobbying, government relations, compliance, communications, campaigns, media, and science to receive better results for their stakes in politics.
But still, would anyone in Europe understand this German word “Politik”? Should we go for the available domain “politik.eu” or something more generic like “politics.com”. Both would have been available for purchase, and yet, 2023 there is this kind of shady domain grabbing / reselling business model still in place. Rejecting their 6-digits-offers, we first thought that going with our company name should make it. “Polit Analytics” – call it like it is.
But actually this alleged precision was also a bit of a self deception. Our platform is evidently way more than just “analytics”. It is monitoring, knowledge management, collaboration, but also predictive expectations – guesstimation of probabilities and likelihoods – of certain policy developments.
Following our own principles, we asked agencies specialised in branding with digital start-ups. Of course, a lot of playing around with names including ‘pol’, as we try to maintain continuity from our Swiss brand name. We ditched any misspelled word suggestions, from ‘politiq ’, ‘politiqs ’ to ‘politiX ’ but got lost at politXXX . Hey, even Master Genius Elon Musk wasn’t able to finally implement his x.com domain bought in the early nineties.
With a lot of (soul) searching, SAVOIRR was born.
The name SAVOIRR has and hopefully will have a lot of all these characteristics, elements, hints, thoughts we wanted to be associated with our product. We moved from purely politics, data, and analytics into knowledge, knowing, understanding, appreciating, and being able to do something. We moved from having the wits and clues, to proficiency, know-how and expertise. And finally, there are quite some fairly positive aspects of appreciating life, prefering premium before average, and being committed to high standards. In short: because of "voir ", "avoir " and "savoir ", to see, to have, and to know.
That is what SAVOIRR stands for. We are so proud of our new brand (and its name), we even registered it at the European Union Intellectual Property Office, the EU agency responsible for managing the EU trade mark and the registered community design.
We designed SAVOIRR as public affairs professionals – who know, who understand, who have all the above mentioned characteristics – for public affairs professionals. We understand your needs for well-organised and reliable information to carry out a successful public affairs strategy. Therefore, we developed SAVOIRR – because you deserve it, and because you should have known!
