Taking the 'van' out of Gogovan?

Gogovan has rebranded as Gogox, reflecting the growth of the business well beyond the humble van-hailing roots it established starting in Hong Kong seven years ago. 

The brand now positions itself as an app-based logistics platform with a wider range of delivery services that includes not only Gogovan but also express delivery and business services. The company serves more than 300 cities, with 8 million registered drivers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Vietnam and Mainland China.

The rebranding conveys the company's long-term development strategy, it says, adding that the new name reflects a "diligence to provide eXtraordinary eXperience with its eXpertise to drive eXponential growth for enterprises". 

“The birth of Gogox is a remarkable milestone for us," Steven Lam, co-founder and CEO, said in a release. "The support and trust from our customers and logistics partners drive us forward to establish logistics offerings that are more scalable, efficient and innovative."

The company has debuted two services recently, dubbed Gogobusiness and Gogodelivery. The former is dedicated to providing logistics services to "micro-enterprises", SMEs and e-commerce customers. The latter offers instant, four-hour and same-day delivery, for both individual users and businesses.

“The new brand enables us to further develop in Asia," Lam said. "I look forward to bringing our Hong Kong branding, business solutions, delivery services and value-added offerings to each and every corner of Asia to satisfy every consumer’s logistics needs on one single platform."

Campaign's take: It's natural for every brand that grows beyond its original scope to want to alter its brand to be more all-encompassing. And to be clear, Gogox is not getting rid of 'Gogovan'; that will still be the name of its van service. But even subsuming a well-known brand under a new umbrella carries risks. After all, Gogovan is basically an informal category name in Hong Kong.

And 'Gogox' just doesn't roll off the tongue, nor does it communicate what the company is really about. It could be literally anything, from an adtech startup to the name of a Dr Suess character. (We actually had to Google to make sure it wasn't the name of a Dr Suess character.)

Making things more confusing, 'Gogox' simply doesn't work in text, whether you style it in title case as we have done or, as the company would prefer, in all caps (see note below). On the vehicles in the picture above and in the logo below, you can see that the 'X' is meant to suggest a variable, meaning that the name translates to something like "Gogo...whatever you need'. That makes more sense, but we believe the company needs to render the name as "GogoX' in text in order to make this clear when colour is not in play.   

The company also has to be careful to avoid muddling its message across touchpoints. For example, we've found that although a spokesperson confirmed that that the van service will continue to be known as 'Gogovan', the Gogovan app has been renamed as "Gogox (formerly Gogovan)" on Google Play and as "Gogox (Gogovan)" on the Apple App Store.

Your take: What do you think of this rebranding? Let us know using the popup survey on this page.

Editor's Note: The company styled all of its brand names in all caps in its press materials ("GOGOX", "GOGOBUSINESS", etc). For clarity and ease of reading, Campaign Asia-Pacific only uses all-caps style for true initialisms ("KFC" for example), and uses title case even for initialisms that are commonly pronounced as words ("Asean" for example). 

Update, July 22: The popup survey mentioned above has ended. The results, based on 25 responses, are as follows:

This post is filed under... Rebranding exercises