How We named our Business
I have, over the years, had friends that have started their own businesses, and they have always seemed to agonise over what they should call their new company. They’ve wanted it to be catchy and maybe suggest what it is they do. We are told a brand is very important, which of course it is, however it is very difficult in the beginning to know what your brand is or might be. Myself and Chris didn’t have this issue as we had started unofficially referring to our work as Crannog Media productions before we had even imagined starting the business together. Let me explain why.
Chris and I first met when we both started working in the Heritage Park in Wexford. The park is an open air museum with several reconstructed buildings from throughout Irish history. It was our job to promote the park through the newly formed media department. We recognised early on that video was key. Video gets most engagement across all social media channels. Our challenge was to make great content that would grow organically online, the park is a charity and had a very small marketing budget. We created all sorts of videos from educational to vlog and funny sketches. We had great success with this strategy, one of our series was used by RTE online, Creative Ireland commissioned our work along with making a short film for Failte Ireland. Online we had a couple of viral hits with impressions over 200,000.
All the while we are creating this content, right outside our office window is a huge replica Crannóg. For those of you who don't know, a Crannóg is an artificial island found here in Ireland as well as Scotland and Wales. They are dotted all over the Irish landscape and the first ones were built over a thousand years ago. The name Crannóg comes from the Irish crann-óg meaning young tree. Chris having studied forestry has an affinity with trees and I think it was him who first referred to one of our videos as a Crannóg Media production. The name then kinda stuck, fast forward to last year when we had both finished up in the park and decided to set up our partnership there really was only one name for it and so Crannóg Media came to be. We are still focused on making great content videos along with The HedgeRadio Podcast. There is a story as to how HedgeRadio got its name too, maybe you could hazard a guess?