Here in the UK the Sci-Fi channel are running ads to let us know they’ll becoming the SyFy channel. Of course, that’s already happened in the US and we’ve already had news of branding experts calling the channel’s risky tactic a success.
But what do branding experts know? Show me cold, hard stats or show me nothing.
One of the major companies in the online metrics game, comScore, has provided just that. In a blog post of search stats (people on Google, etc) they’ve logged a drop in broad-matched searches for the likes of “Scifi” and “Sci fi” but seen an increase, in the same time period, for “SyFy” searches.
Eli Goodman, author of the post and Battlestar Galactica fan, suggests that;
If we combine the two terms, the total search volume has effectively increased demand by about 40 percent per month. Even more importantly, there has been a significant net increase in clicks of more than 20 percent. Clearly, the rebrand is consistently paying dividends from the standpoint of search engagement and reach.
Syfy created demand in the marketplace for its new brand and became more relevant to its search audience, while also increasing its consumer reach substantially via search.
