THE decision to settle on the name of the merged company of Flow and LIME was in the end not a difficult one.

FLOW prevailed at the tape, primarily based upon the feedback of industry customers in the Central American and Caribbean region.

FLOW’s Managing Director Garfield “Garry” Sinclair said that the overwhelming majority suggested that there were more positives to putting FLOW forward, ahead of the much older LIME, which had served Jamaica for over a century under different brand names.

“We polled customers region-wide and asked them which brand embodied the attributes that we thought important, with respect of a consumer brand going forward, and innovation, and which brand gave them a sense of innovation,” Sinclair said.

“We also asked from which entity they would get a sense of going the extra mile for customers and colleagues, a sense of customer centricity, customer focus, and simply which brand they thought was coolest, because in the telecoms business being cool is critical to your brand.

“When you put all of that in the pot, the overwhelming favourite on the consumer brand side was FLOW — it’s newer, shinier, a lot sexier brand, it really associated with high-speed Internet access, as well as advanced TV services, and its been around 10 or so years, so its natural for people to want to gravitate to the newer, sexier brand on the consumer side. FLOW was the hands-down winner,” Sinclair said.

On the business side, the company did the same thing and business people thought that C&W Business was related most to them because of the company’s “tried and true legacy and reliability over the years”, Sinclair said, hence C&W Business was chosen ahead of Columbus Business Solutions, a company that had direct relationship to FLOW.

Sinclair, who now manages a staff complement of around 850 resulting from the merged organisation, said that customers had responded “overwhelmingly positively” to the brand change, adding that the recent launch had gone “fantastically.”

“The ads are having the desired effect, although the actual integration is filled with challenges. We are looking to integrate and combine multiple IT platforms, networks and processes which have to be harmonised and streamlined.

“We are also having to get people from both cultures and businesses under one roof pulling in the same direction as quickly as you need them to, given that the competition is not sitting back and waiting for you to get this right.

“Integrating people has brought about the most challenge, but it has been happening and it’s happening positively,” Sinclair said.

— HG HELPS