BioAdvanced

Situation

A little-known French holding company, SBM, acquired the lawn and garden division of science powerhouse Bayer. That division's brand, Bayer Advanced, was well-established, with positive associations with scientific expertise and a history of performance.

The SBM team wanted to keep as much consistency as they could—but they were required to replace the Bayer name as a result of the acquisition. That was their challenge: how to retain as much brand equity as possible while shedding the name that anchored so much of it?

Creative Approach

I managed their renaming process as part of a team at Interbrand, where we developed over 2,500 options attempting to re-bottle the magic Bayer had built up over a century and a half.

• Could an eco-friendly coin like Sciosphere or Olecule replicate Bayer's reputation for trusted, science-based products?
• Could something like Actifend balance the product's ability to activate your garden's potential, and defend it from pests?
• Could a metaphor like Handshake more directly evoke a trusted relationship?

But ultimately, all of these names ran into a core strategic issue: they'd make people think. Any coinage, any metaphor, would ask people to interpret the name they were seeing, and thereby notice that the name wasn't Bayer.

So, in the end, we landed in a simple place. Instead of trying to one-up Bayer, what if we tried to imitate it instead? What if we used a name that was so simple and similar that nobody even noticed the change?

Outcome

The team landed on

BioAdvanced

This unassuming name perfectly filled the complex niche that Bayer left:

• Bio indicates scientific expertise, in a way that's immediately relevant to lawncare.
• It's two syllables long, starts with a B, and retains Advanced, maximizing continuity with the existing product.
• It's short enough to fits inside the former brand's distinctive red shield logo, and included a circular O that could mirror Bayer's circular logo.




In 2018, Bayer Advanced became BioAdvanced, and nobody noticed—which, in this instance, was exactly what the client wanted.