What’s behind the name?
It was in every sense a rebirth and Gold Coast physiotherapist Brad Beer knew unearthing the right name and brand for his practice were non-negotiables.
It’s March 2014 and having recently dragged his business out of a four-and-a-half-year franchise arrangement that had turned sour, Brad took the time after a protracted legal battle to dust himself off, collect his thoughts and then turn his eye to the future.
“Through that period I did a lot of soul searching along the lines of ‘do I really want to do this any more’,” Brad recalls.
“But I would not have been happy if I’d left the physiotherapy industry and hadn’t actually tried to make a change for the better in terms of how we deliver services. And we certainly wouldn’t have the Finish Line programs we now operate if I’d decided to take another direction.
“We were literally No Name Physio for about four months. We were answering the phones ‘no name physio’ because we had put all our energies into surviving the mediation process and hadn’t really had time to look to the future.”
Brad made the decision to engage a branding agency to come up with a name, one with some life and vitality which aligned to his core values of excellence in delivery, valuing the service being provided and making the customer the hero.
And he wanted a fresh beginning, to make a 180-degree turn on the painful, recent past.
“We wanted to get the branding right, from the outset, rather than some Clipart thing we grabbed off the internet and say ‘let’s call it Mermaid Waters Physio’ or something like that,” he said.
“The key themes the branding agency learned from our clients were that we were about fun and activity. So that was nice because the customers were saying the same things that we knew and felt.”
Brad explains there were two main guidelines in the brief.
“We wanted a short name, something that couldn’t be abbreviated over time. And I wanted an ‘o’ in it, actually I wanted it to finish with ‘o’. What can I say, I like the letter ‘o’. Visually it’s round and something about a circle is really powerful.”
We wanted a short name, something that couldn’t be abbreviated over time. #performbetter @pogophysio Click To TweetBrad still laughs when he recalls the discussions which led to POGO becoming the name for the business.
“There were four of us sitting around a table brainstorming names. We were just chucking words out there that end in an ‘o’, ones we thought kind of fitted the brief. We had Mojo and Toto and Gogo and we even had PhysiGo at one point.
“I had Pogo in my head but I remember thinking ‘It’s too silly to even say. Pogo … that’s just ridiculous, it has nothing to do with anything’.
“But I put it out there … I said ‘Pogo’ and the reaction on the faces around the table was immediate.
“They said ‘that’s awesome’. I’m laughing and saying ‘you can’t call a practice that, it’s ridiculous’ and they’re saying ‘that’s why you need it to be that’.
“It has something loosely to do with movement and perpetual motion but without being so overt that we’d say ‘Pogo, bounce back’ which is a bit trite.
“It fitted the brief and we love it. So many people have asked what it stands for but it’s not an acronym for anything. It’s short, it’s memorable, and hopefully it’s engaging.
It fitted the brief and we love it. #performbetter @pogophysio Click To Tweet“It’s always the way, it’s that painful stuff that gives you the platform and here we are now, and the name was really a big part of that.
“So that’s the genesis of the POGO name.”
Neale Grundy
Journalist
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