In 2020, ARH took the plunge and changed its name to Adaptive Recognition. A name change is not a step to be taken lightly for a well-known company. CMO Gábor Józsa sheds light on the considerations and business dynamics that led to the decision and the challenges of rebranding an established international brand.

What Does ARH Stand For?

ARH stands for Adaptive Recognition Hungary. The company was founded 30 years ago in Budapest by three university students with a passion for computer vision and OCR (optical character recognition). They are still members of the board today, and the software they developed (Carmen®) is still at the core of many of our products.

What Were the Driving Forces Behind Changing the Name From ARH to Adaptive Recognition?

Over three decades, the organization has organically grown from a student research project into a globally recognized and appreciated company. Today, we have offices in North America, Denmark, Singapore, and a new outlet in UAE is now imminent. Besides, we are present on all continents through a network of representatives.

Our software and hardware solutions are highly adaptive to local needs across the globe, in all senses of the word, from weather conditions to special alphabets. There was also an intent to express this more emphatically.

But to cut a long story short, the company has outgrown its name. AR Hungary did not accurately represent our global quality any longer. That is why ARH has become Adaptive Recognition.

What were the creative processes behind the new logo and visual brand? How do they reflect on Adaptive Recognition’s identity?

Our former logo dates back to the 2000s, the old website design to the 2010s. Back in those days, most of our marketing efforts were focused on functional needs such as print material for tradeshows and other industry events. Since the beginning, we have been creating detailed, highly informative videos about our products, including installation and maintenance tutorials. We have kept up with this tradition – they are very popular with integrators and end-users alike, as they make their lives so much easier.

Since then, our entire life seems to have moved to the online space, so we have shifted our focus to online marketing activities. We quickly realized that even a B2B company with a niche market like ours needs top-notch online marketing and sales strategy.

However, we have not forgotten that online communication will never replace real-time discourse and community building entirely. With this in mind, we have launched the AR LIVE! initiative, a series of fully interactive, one-off events where professionals of the industry can meet and discuss a given problem or topic.

We have redesigned the website and our product user interfaces for a cleaner, leaner, and generally more pleasant user experience. This reflects on another broader trend that we as a company have embraced – making our sophisticated solutions as simple to use as possible. For this, we continuously build on feedback from our users. 

What Are the Challenges of Changing a Brand Name?

The simple answer to that is getting the message across.

ARH was a well-known market leader in several market segments, such as ANPR software. We still get clients asking whether we are the same company. Our online search data suggests many customers still find us by looking for ARH on their search engine.

Aside from that, practical details like changing all materials such as product manuals, technical documentation, etc., come to mind.

Overall, long-term benefits far outweigh these challenges, and we are confident that our new brand accurately represents who we have become over the past three decades: global players with market-leading solutions.

About Adaptive Recognition

Adaptive Recognition is a group of creative minds, developing and manufacturing AI-based image processing technology, for the traffic, security, and identity industries. 

Adaptive Recognition's first major successes came with our globally market-leading Carmen® ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) product, which is capable of automatically recognizing and reading images of car license plates. This was followed by introducing various standardized codes, which are used, among other things, in shipping or printed on ID documents like passports.

The small startup transformed into a professional international company with locations in Denmark, the USA, Asia-Pacific, Central-Europe, and Singapore, with 300+ employees and 30+ representative partners worldwide.