I sat down with Theo Reichgelt a few weeks ago on ‘The eMobility Marketing Podcast’. Theo runs Nexxt Industry out of Arnhem and has been working with charge point operators across Europe for nearly a decade. He has seen the naming question handled well and handled badly more times than almost anyone in this industry. We spent a chapter of the conversation on a small piece of it: the moment we decided to drop “Energy” from the public-facing version of our brand.
That decision sounds minor. It is not.
The reason we dropped “Energy” from everything the driver sees is straightforward. We are a hospitality company that sells electrons, not an energy company that adds amenities. The identity comes first. A brand called Rangeway Energy promises a utility. A brand called Rangeway leaves room for something else.
The word itself was chosen to evoke an open road, a route to somewhere, the act of traveling. It is the kind of word a hotel brand might use, or a travel company, or an outdoor outfitter. The legal entity is Rangeway Energy, Inc., because every company has to be incorporated somewhere. The thing the driver sees is Rangeway. The “Energy” stays on the paperwork, where it belongs.
That decision set up everything that came after.
When we started defining the network, we ran into the same naming question at every level. What do we call a small location with a few chargers. What do we call a mid-sized location with a driver’s lounge. What do we call a flagship destination. What do we call the staff. What do we call the lodging at a Summit.
The industry has defaults for most of these: sites, stations, hubs, terminals, pods, stalls, attendants, cabins, rooms. Every one of those words is borrowed from somewhere else, mostly from the gas station, the airport, or the budget hotel. None of them are evocative. None of them are promising the driver anything. They are inventory categories dressed up as customer-facing language.
We picked a different vocabulary. The whole brand sits inside one extended metaphor: the trail. A Trailhead is where every Rangeway journey starts. It is the entry point, the first step, the beginning of something. A Waystation is the streamlined stop along the way. A Basecamp is the full-service destination where you can settle in. A Summit is the place you stop because the stop itself is the reason for the trip. Four names, one vocabulary, and every one of them tells the driver something specific about what to expect.
That last point matters more than it might appear. A name is a promise. When a driver reads “Trailhead,” they should be able to form a roughly accurate mental picture of what they will find when they arrive. Same goes for Waystation, Basecamp, and Summit. If the names did not do that work, we would be wasting them.
Some of these names also do work that the industry typically leaves undone. Trailhead is the clearest example. The hardest naming problem in our network is what to call the smallest format, the location with chargers, a covered canopy, and clean restrooms nearby. The driver’s lounge does not arrive until the Waystation. The lazy version of naming the smallest format would be to position it as a budget tier with a generic-sounding name. The driver reads that and assumes they are getting a lesser version of the real thing. They are correct to think so, because the framing tells them exactly that.
Trailhead does the opposite. It positions the smallest format as the start of something, not the budget version of something. “Where every Rangeway journey starts.” “Built to become more.” The same physical location that another network might have given a stripped-down name, we named the beginning of the trail. Same chargers, different promise. The name does the work.
The staff get the same treatment. We call them Trailkeepers, not attendants. Attendant is a word borrowed from gas stations, and it carries every association you would expect. It implies someone who is there to operate a machine. Trailkeeper implies someone whose job is to take care of the people on the trail. We hire and train accordingly. The name is not decoration. It is a description of the job, written in the language we want the job to live in.
The Summit lodging units are called Lookouts. They are not cabins, not rooms, not units. A cabin is a thing in the woods. A room is a thing in a hotel. A Lookout is a place you go to see something. The word is doing the same job as Trailhead and Trailkeeper: setting an expectation about what the guest will find there.
Even the driver’s lounge gets considered. We keep it lowercase, deliberately. It is not a proper noun. It is a description. The fact that it is described as a lounge at all, in an industry where the equivalent space is usually called a waiting area or a rest area or a convenience store, is most of what the name is doing.
This is the thing that Theo gets, and that most of the industry does not. Naming is one of the cheapest tools any company has, and most CPOs do not use it. They name the network, default to the standard taxonomy for everything else, and then spend on advertising to try to differentiate a brand that uses the same words as everyone else. The cost of doing the naming work up front is zero. The leverage it gives you is enormous.
There is a version of this company that called its locations “stations,” its staff “attendants,” its lodging “cabins,” and its waiting areas “lounges.” That version would have been operationally identical to the one we built. It would have read entirely differently to every driver who walked in. The infrastructure is the same. The promise is not.
This is why we name everything. A name is the cheapest, fastest way to tell a driver what kind of company they are dealing with. We picked names that match the kind of company we are trying to be. We did the work because nobody else was going to do it for us.
The trail starts where you start. We named it.
Learn more about what we are building at rangeway.co.
