Encana to Ovintiv ... What exactly does that change mean?
‘Heart and soul’ of Canadian oilpatch undergoing dramatic rebranding
In the immediate aftermath of the announcement that Encana Corp., one of Canada’s most venerable oil companies, would be moving its head offices to Denver and renaming itself Ovintiv Inc., two questions were raised: What exactly is an Ovintiv? And, how does such a well-known company stay relevant — or become relevant again — when its brand is being wiped out and rebuilt?
Rafi Tahmazian, Canoe Financial senior portfolio manager and director, said that Encana, which traces its roots back to the 1880s and the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, was among the two most recognizable brands in the Canadian oil and gas industry.
“Short of Petro Canada, that’s the DNA, that’s the heart and soul of what we were,” Tahmazian said, noting the domestic oil and gas industry is suffering from a larger branding crisis.
“Canada is no longer a place that’s associated with innovation, success in the energy industry,” Tahmazian said, adding that it’s sad because the country has better technology than what is available in the United States. When Canadian drilling rigs move south, he said, “they look like transformers.”
In briefing documents, the company says the new name “stands for our commitment to deliver unmatched value through continuous innovation, while our new logo symbolizes the human connection made possible by the safe, reliable and affordable energy we produce.”
“Adopting a new corporate name reflects the transformation we have experienced, while articulating our vision for the future.”
Encana now gets about 80 per cent of its production from U.S. plays and invests a roughly equal portion of its capital spending in them.
Plugging the new name into Google Translate, it’s recognized as Albanian. But, it doesn’t actually translate into anything in English. Online, some speculated it could be a mash-up of “Ova” (perhaps for rebirth) and “inventive” (meaning the obvious).
Youssef Youssef, a commerce professor at Humber College in Toronto, said there’s a substantial amount of work that goes into rebranding, especially for a company as old and significant as Encana and it has significant effects on the value and continued success of a company.
“(Encana) was a solid brand and it had resonance within the Canadian oil industry, and everybody knows the company, so to change the brand, it takes a lot of steps,” Youssef said.
There is all sorts of market research that must go into determining the brand value among shareholders and the business community, not to mention the messaging about reshaping the brand and the practical matter of overhauling social media, websites and so on.
“It’s not just by changing the name,” Youssef said. “You need to create everything.”
Dan Bergeron, managing partner of the Calgary-based marketing firm Everbrave, said there’s a large amount of work that must go into explaining to everyone why a name has been changed, especially for an operation the size of Encana, and that involves scads of advertising and exhaustive public relations outreach.
“You can’t just change and say ‘hey, guess what, we have a new name, you know, everybody,’ but you’ve got to be like ‘there’s a reason why we did this, and this is why it’s important to us and why it’s important to our customers’ and celebrate that as a good thing,” Bergeron said.
As of mid-day Thursday, Ovintiv had little presence online, other than a dedicated page on the Encana website explaining the changes, and a quick search of possible other web homes for the company revealed nothing, so far, with very little — if any — social media presence.
Ovintiv.com was registered to a New York-based branding company, Fross Zelnick Lehrman & Zissu, P.C.; @ovintiv, on Twitter, had but one follower, perhaps not even related to the company.
“I’m really very surprised they don’t have the domain registered so far, they don’t have the social media ... it’s not how do we do things in marketing,” Youssef said.
As for the name, Youssef said marketing students are taught there are some ways that you want to go about choosing an appropriate name: “They should be memorable, meaningful, likable, transferable, adaptable, protectable, these are the six steps that need to be taken when you choose the brand,” he said.
But they can be anything, really, whether it’s a surname, some sort of acronym or, plainly, something invented out of whole cloth that eventually comes synonymous with a product or service.
That, certainly, is what this looks like to Youssef, “like, Xerox, Kodak, Häagen-dazs or any other brands that make less sense, but it may stick,” Youssef said.