Okay, so, I have “two jobs”, so to speak. One of my jobs is my day job, where I do marketing full time, and have various clients throughout North America. Actually, these days it’s throughout the world. I have clients in UK and Australia, and I am currently on-boarding a client from Dubai (and desperately trying to convince them they need to pay for me to come and visit!). My second “job” is offering consulting services to small businesses.

As a part of that second job, I offer 3-5 hours per week to a company that provides interactive seismic attribute interpretation software. While I’m not a geologist, geophysicist, petrophysicist or engineer, I’ve had moderate success in helping this company expand their global reach due to audience retargeting. Rather than targeting people based on their job titles, we started targeting individuals based on their education. Being able to interpret the layers of the earth is extremely valuable, not just in oil and gas, but in multiple other industries as well – industries we started to recognize when we retargeted based on education.

So, the software that we offer has a name that is all too common in its most predominant industry, and for about a year now, we’ve been looking to change the name. After some failed attempts at coming up with something on our own (myself and the CEO), she decided to engage a marketing firm to help us come up with a new name. This was in January of 2024.

Keep in mind, I do 3-5 hours per week for this company, that’s it.

Anyways.

We engaged this firm, who swore to us in January that we’d have a rename and rebrand completed by end of April.

$10,000. That’s what they bid. That’s what she accepted.

The past four months have been a series of failed attempts at explaining to them what seismic interpretation involves, and how the software essentially provides 3D imaging of the earth’s subsurface.

Last week they asked us to come to a meeting today. I don’t normally take meetings on Mondays, but they swore they’d come up with a software name that we were going to love, and they were excited to share it with us.

Today, they presented Dragonfly.

DRAGONFLY.

Cool.

What do Dragonflies have to do with seismic interpretation?

Nada.

Oh, the other option they presented? Nexus.

If you live in USA/Canada and you travel between, you know what Nexus is, and thus you know Nexus is a shit idea.

Circling back to Dragonfly, though…

Our software provides 3D (and soon to be 4D) imaging for seismic interpretation.

We need and want a new name for our software, and this external marketing company the CEO has hired, promised us they’ve been doing research into every name prior to presenting name options to us.

Cool.

Except they clearly didn’t look into Dragonfly. A 30 second google search while on the call with them to watch their presentation today and I found Dragonfly is an already existing software.

“Dragonfly delivers the features you need for quick meaningful results. Get quantitative answers for your most demanding 2D, 3D and 4D imaging studies”

Can you see why this would be a problem? I sure can.

The name already exists for a software that’s in our space.

Did they not do a single Google search when coming up with this? Or, did they do a Google search, and decide that it’s completely okay to rip off the name of an already existing software within the space? Either way, it’s not a good look for them.

I left them some poignant comments following today’s meeting. In a very professional manner, I explained that they wasted both my time, and the CEO’s time, and that it was entirely clear they’re not doing they due diligence in providing us with naming options.

I can forgive you missing the mark. Not everyone understands seismic interpretation and geologic conversions. I’m okay if you can’t grasp that, and you need some assistance, or your guesses might be little off because of it. What I’m not okay with? A marketing firm thinking it’s appropriate to rip-off the ideas of other businesses that already exist int he space.

I think the CEO is likely going to drop them next week.

She says she’s going to offer them one more opportunity to try and make it right. Personally, I think they’re going to be an epic failure. Their last suggestion was to try and ripoff “X” – Because, you know, associating with things related to Elon Musk is a great way to do business in 2024’s turbulent political landscape throughout the entire world.

This is shit marketing.

This is why I have such a hard time with everyone believing they can just… do marketing.

It takes time, effort, understanding, finesse, empathy, attention to detail, critical thinking… and so much much more to be successful in marketing.

It’s deeply maddening for a marketing firm to suggest that ripping off the name of an already existing software is an appropriate way to do business