Behind the Scenes of a Company Rebrand Through the rebranding process, I learned the importance of concepts like company UX.
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Forrester estimates that every dollar invested in user experience (UX) brings in $100 in return. To maximize this ROI, tech firms tend to invest heavily in the art and science of how customers interact with their products and services.
But how do technical firms approach their overall company UX, specifically as it relates to their own brands?
Many technical firms falter when telling their own stories and overlook investment in a positive brand experience. The Big Five tech firms prefer to rely on their reputations over branding or compelling messaging, while smaller firms often don't have the time or money to prioritize these expenditures. Plus, marketing initiatives like branding often don't get executive buy-in since it's difficult to translate the amount of money and work invested in rebranding to tangible ROI.
Until recently, my own company, Windward Consulting, fell into the same pattern. Throughout the company's 25-year history, we relied on in-house branding and messaging that led with our processes — the nitty-gritty of what we offered. But that didn't differentiate us in the marketplace, nor did it accurately explain who we were as a company. In fact, if you had asked ten employees what we did, you would have gotten ten different answers. And if our internal audience lacked alignment with our messaging, imagine the experience for our customers and prospects.
As a tech company, we also made a common mistake: thinking too narrowly about our brand. We identified our branding as just our logo and color palette when it's actually much broader. Branding is led by a clear and cohesive story, and the logo and the colors exist to help tell that story.
While our old approach worked for a while, it would be an understatement to say that the tech industry has transformed and expanded since I founded the company 25 years ago. The industry is growing 5-6% each year and will exceed $5.3 trillion in 2022. With this incredible growth comes incredible competition — both for clients and talent.
To thrive in this landscape, tech firms need to incorporate UX into every aspect of their businesses, not just in their technology, products and services. In my company's case, we needed a strong brand that looked different, felt different and sounded different because we are different. That's why we sought out a dedicated agency to invest in a strategic rebrand.
Here's a peek behind the scenes at our process.
Get real with yourself
Does your brand tell your company's story in a user-friendly way?
Most IT companies are either strategists or technologists. A company hiring one of the Big Five tech firms, like Accenture or PwC, will get a strategy and then need a whole different set of partners to implement the plan. Windward's unique value proposition is that it focuses on both strategy and technology, offering a long-term, holistic partnership. But, like many tech firms in the market, our unique story was buried under lists of services and technical talk.
Looking at our aggressive growth plan against our assets, it became clear that we needed outside brand experts to help us tell a compelling story. And because our competitors hadn't prioritized branding, we saw this as an opportunity to invest and stand out in the marketplace.
Related: What's Behind Facebook's Rebranding? It Depends Who You Ask.
Secure early buy-in
How will you engage internal stakeholders?
When entering this project, I didn't know what our branding would look like or how our message would be delivered. In fact, the executive team and I actively prevented ourselves from envisioning the end product as we wanted the branding agency to drive the project.
Here's what we did know: Windward's brand should represent the people who make up the company and reflect the value they provide. To deliver on this promise, we decided that no single function would own this rebranding project. Instead of marketing taking the lead, we engaged employees across departments right from the beginning.
Our branding partner met with employees from across every company function to understand its culture and inherent value and start piecing together Windward's personality. This approach signaled that the entire company was not only reflected in the new brand, but each employee was also a holder of the brand.
Related: 5 Traditional Strategies That Will Effectively Grow Your Personal Brand
Evaluate your brand
Is your brand accessible and informative?
After spending months getting to know the company and the tech marketplace, our brand partner surfaced Windward's rebrand theme. The brand's new user-friendly, people-focused logo, slogan, tagline and messaging rallied our prospects, customers and employees around a singular message. It also informs the talent we're recruiting.
Optimize the UX
Are you meeting and exceeding your users' needs?
As part of our rebranding exercise, we examined exactly why people come to the company's website. While some want to know what's innovative in the space, most are trying to answer the simple question, is Windward the right fit for me?
While the Windward of old listed our vast services and tried to wow prospective customers with our depth of AIOps knowledge, we realized that this approach doesn't help answer the user's primary question. We needed to tell a broader story about who we are and how we transcend strategic consultants and tactical coders to become true partners that deliver business results.
To support our accessible brand, we cut the highly technical language and acronyms found on most firms' websites. We are proud that anyone — from the sales team to the C-suite — can read our website and understand what we do.
Providing this kind of UX at all levels of our business will shrink our path to conversion, retain customers, align employees and attract the best minds. Essentially, it will help us stay competitive in a changing market.
