It’s not a huge surprise that TruGreen LandCare dropped the first part of its name earlier this week, rebranding to LandCare. But some of the things CEO Mike Bogan shared with LM about the company’s rebranding process were unexpected.

First, the trucks and trailers will be orange. The company refers to the new hue as “tangerine.” Rather, the new truck introductions will be orange and the current fleet of white trucks will be re-logoed and designed to match the new vehicles.

“There are a few iconic truck-and-trailer combinations in the industry,” said Bogan, who joined LandCare in November after a year of consulting and two decades at Brickman. “If it’s that brown and tan truck or the red trucks and trailers, you don’t have to see the logos to know who those companies are. I liked the idea of having something that was that bold.”

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HZDG, the marketing firm LandCare worked with on rebranding, analyzed the market and determined orange was an underused color. Additionally, this choice appealed to LandCare for its safety tie-in.

Regarding timing of the rebranding, there was an expiration date on how long the company could use the TruGreen name, following Aurora Capital’s 2011 purchase of the company from ServiceMaster.

Bogan says he considered it an opportunity when he first came on board, but it wasn’t the first item on his list. Once he got started, he quickly realized the absence of a shared company purpose and set of core values, so he made those a top priority.

“Going back to the early days of TruGreen LandCare, it was a big soup of a bunch of companies put into one giant pot,” he said. “I don’t think they ever really crystallized a culture or purpose around LandCare. If they did, that definition was lost over time.”

Bogan scheduled tours of each of LandCare’s 50 branches to “engage the team members on what’s important to them, why they’re in this business, what they believe they should be doing for our customers and what makes them get out of bed every day.”

From there, the company developed core values and, in turn, determined the starting point for the new brand.

HZDG led LandCare leaders through rebranding exercises, including considering a new name.

“We didn’t feel that wiping the slate clean was important,” Bogan said. “LandCare was already part of our name and was one of the two companies merged back in 1999 to create TruGreen LandCare. It felt like we’d do ourselves a service by keeping that name.”

Additionally, the marketing firm agreed LandCare was a good name because it’s self explanatory and has brand recognition. Plus, there were logistical bonuses to keeping part of the name, such as owning the domain.

“We didn’t spend a lot of time looking at other options,” he said.

With the rebranding underway, Bogan said the rest of 2015 will be about strengthening LandCare’s reputation in its current markets.

“We’re going to do what we’re doing really well, and then we’ll think about doing it on another scale,” he said. “Systems improvement will be the focus for the balance of the year, and then early next year we’ll start to think about how we use acquisitions to enter new marketplaces.”