So, what is a brand relaunch? It’s the repositioning of who you are and what you stand for in the market, and often starts with changes to an organization’s goals, brand essence and corporate identity. It can vary from a simple refresh to a full-blown redesign. A relaunch provides great benefits for companies like a new/renewed interest from your target audience, aligning your brand elements with audience needs and presenting who you are more authentically. But, before you can reap the benefits of a successful rollout, you need to plan.

By following the six tips below, you can meet your long-term goals for a brand relaunch.

1. Determine Why

This is the time to take a step back and figure out why you want to relaunch. A few reasons that would spark a brand relaunch are mergers, acquisitions, outdated branding or business expansion.

While these are great catalysts to refresh your brand, the “why” is more about what you and your organization want to achieve. Are you hoping to gain larger market share, break away from the competition or release a new product successfully? By knowing what your “why” is, you’ll be able to measure—and celebrate—the final results because you know what success looks like.

2. Take a Look at the Big Picture

You and your team may view your brand in a specific light, but that may not coincide with the external perception of your brand. Be sure to connect with your employees, current and potential customers, and any other stakeholders that come in contact with your brand through interviews to capture a 360-picture of how your brand is perceived.

You can also gain the perspective of stakeholders through competitive research and surveys. How do people feel you stand out from competitors in look and feel? And how could you show what one thing your organization delivers that no one else can? Additionally, you should take a thoughtful look at your industry: Where is it now? Where is it headed? And how should your brand adapt in order to stay relevant in the minds of your audience as a result? By nailing down how your brand is perceived, you can better map out rollout goals that will achieve success.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• ADT Brand Transformation Brings Evolution and Innovation
• Five Ways to Use Data for Successful Product Launches
• CMO Roundtable: Visa, Personal Capital, AKT and Zoom Talk 2020 Marketing Trends

3. Get Internal Stakeholders on Board

It requires more than the support of your immediate team to execute a brand relaunch. Rollouts can get pricey and the scope can escalate quickly so it’s imperative that you have leadership on your side. In order to get them on board, you need to clearly communicate the reasons for and outcomes of a successful relaunch. This will help you save time, resources and talent throughout the rollout. Keeping everyone updated along with way will encourage excitement and manage expectations, too.

4. Embrace Emotions

Not all elements of your brand are physical. They’re emotional. To drive meaningful connections with your brand, you need to appeal to the emotions of your audience. Emotions drive purchasing decisions, build deeper relationships, and lead to brand loyalty.

Emotions are important to consider during the planning phase of your brand rollout, so be sure to test different versions of your brand messaging or content before sharing it with the world.

5. To Phase Out Or Flip the Switch?

You need to consider how you want to roll out your brand to the world, and that’s often dictated by the size of your relaunch. You can roll out a brand update in phases, which allows you to reveal new communications to the market quicker. It also means you’ll need to handle two brand presentations during the project. Or, you can wait until your brand update is final, then flip the switch and reveal. This could duplicate efforts while one brand is built and the other is maintained.

Most likely, this decision will be influenced by the resources you have available. Weigh the pros and cons of each rollout approach to find the one best for you. And be sure to communicate the plan to everyone involved to ensure they know what to expect.

6. Timing Is Everything

Change takes time. A rebrand shows that your organization is changing. You must set aside the time and resources to successfully pull off a rebrand and make sure that your audience notices. For example, a full rebrand—including visuals, values, messaging, guidelines and more—can take up to a year (and sometimes even longer!).

When you underestimate lead times for a project of this magnitude, you can miss out on other opportunities, overlook important brand details, burnout your team and yield poor results. That’s why you need to be realistic about timing, budget and executing your project in phases. This will keep things running smoothly for the greatest business results.

Brands are constantly evolving to keep up with change. Whether you’re looking to freshen your messaging or overhaul your entire brand this year, it’s essential you’re equipped with the best strategies for a successful relaunch.

Nina Brakel-Schutt is Director of Creative and Brand Strategy at Widen.

The post Brand Relaunch This Year? Here are Six Tips to Consider appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Creating modular email templates helped The Ohio State University improve branding consistency across the entire university system.

“It was challenging trying to maintain consistency sending email,” notes Bri Loesch, associate director of email marketing for the university. “We had tens of hundreds of looks and feels.”

There were numerous challenges.  The messaging had varying levels of mobile responsiveness, and there were numerous issues with emails rendering properly across different devices.

“They weren’t user friendly for our email pracitioners, and our audience was left wondering if these emails were all coming from the same university,” says Loesch, who spoke at Litmus Live in Boston recently.

The university wanted to create one visual identity, and make sure that no matter where in the organization the message originated, it had a consistent look and feel.

Loesch wanted the email templating initiative to be collaborative, and driven by the  Ohio State email community. Users across different departments were surveyed, to discover what their challenges were and uncover why brand standards weren’t being followed. “We wanted to make sure we could provide support,” she says.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Four Tips for Getting Email Marketing Feedback
• Surviving the Blacklist: Email Tips for Getting Your Domain Unblocked
• Email Personalization Boosts Bernie 2020 Donations

Then, focus groups were created to take a deeper dive into the best ways to address core issues. Past emails were also audited, to identify which of the existing templates were used the most often, and see what types of messaging and modules were the most commonly deployed.

The team wanted the new modules and templates to be easy to modify, with numerous possible combinations. And, at same time, Ohio State was also transitioning to a new marketing automation tool, so an easy transition to dynamic content that could be plugged in without the risk of broken code was also a consideration.

“We wanted to allow for flexibility, but wanted to have some requirements in place, for consistent look and feel,” Loesch notes.

Two basic requirements were that every message had to have the same masthead and footer designs, with the primary university logo at the top. The footer could include the unit’s secondary logo if desired, and had to include typical required footer information, such as the address and a preference management link.

An email toolkit was created to assist departments in using the new templates, including brand guidelines, a quick start guide and a landing page explaining the modular design.

“Because of various skill levels, we wanted to provide every module configuration they might need, in regards to text and image placement,” she says. “We also wanted to make sure people understood the why behind what we were doing and why brand consistency and accessibility are important to our email marketing efforts.”

The university adapted to the new system quickly: in four months, there was 96 percent compliance with the new templates.

The post Email Templates Help Ohio State Create Consistent Branding appeared first on Chief Marketer.

FocusVision and InnerView recently conducted a survey of 250 marketing and customer experience professionals in mid- to large-size companies. Interestingly, the most surprising results didn’t come from what these professionals were doing—it came from what they weren’t doing.

One-fifth of companies indicated that they either hadn’t tried or weren’t aware of any company efforts to align their external marketing story among internal teams. Put differently, their product developers, salespeople and customer service reps have no clear idea of the brand story marketing wants them to tell.

That should be cause for alarm.

Every single person in a company represents the brand, especially the frontline teams that talk to customers about it each day. If those people don’t feel confident in the story they’re sharing, it can be detrimental.

You May Also Enjoy:

• UL Builds Brand Platform Based on Trust
• In a Troubled Time, Boeing Looks at Brand
• Renaming Helps Relation Insurance Refocus Brand

If your internal teams are getting several versions of your brand story, you don’t have a brand story at all.

Even Amazon isn’t immune to this phenomenon. The retail giant recently shut down Amazon Spark, its attempt at a social networking feature on its site that never took off. Why didn’t it succeed? A lack of internal communication, for starters. Teams weren’t talking about it, and the group in charge of promoting it simply wasn’t doing that work. In the end, it just fizzled out.

Without a consistent story, success is impossible.

Customers have to be able to rely on the brands they engage with. They want their expectations to be met—or exceeded—in every interaction. Without consistency, customers won’t feel like they can bank on you or your promises, and that does lasting damage to your brand.

So how do you make sure your story stays as powerful and consistent as it was meant to be? Put in the work to make sure your customer-facing teams are just as confident in sharing that story as the team that created it.

These five steps will help all of your teams start speaking with a single voice and telling a single story:

1. Align on external messaging.

What are you telling your customers? What are the key messages, themes and promises you’re delivering with your marketing and advertising?

Don’t put the focus on reconstructing your entire brand. You’ve likely spent plenty of money on that already. Instead, take the strategy you already have and activate it internally. Constantly reinventing your brand won’t serve you. Committing to the brand you’ve already established and making it excellent will.

2. Measure attitudes and opinions.

Ninety-four percent of respondents to the FocusVision study said they currently commit both time and money to gathering customer research. This makes sense. If you’re a marketer, you care what customers think of your brand.

A key question to consider here is “What does the person talking to those customers think about your brand? Do they think you deliver on the promises you’re making?”

Think about the customer experience frontline teams are likely to deliver if they aren’t invested in your product or story. Invest in them and benchmark how they view your brand so you can identify where gaps exist and then fill them.

3. Plan for change.

You can’t train people to love your company. They have to feel it and experience it for that to be the case. While changing the perception of your brand internally can be a challenge, it’s certainly possible. Identify champions or ambassadors at each level of your company to help nurture your brand story and act as a group that supports and guides peers in understanding it.

Change isn’t a top-down exercise—it’s a grassroots process. Having passionate brand advocates internally can help your story stay strong and spread throughout the organization in an organic way.

4. Tell the story differently.

Training is necessary, but it isn’t inspiring. Email is efficient, but it’s not always effective. If companies want team members to tell their stories in a compelling, consistent way, they need to deliver it to those people in a convincing fashion. Email and training are often the automatic ways to introduce messaging initiatives, but when it comes to generating enthusiasm, they leave a lot to be desired. And while they give employees information, they don’t often inspire them to truly believe in the story they’re telling.

Make it easy for employees to experience your brand. Ditch the tired sales tactics, and create team-based awards that incentivize your employees to tell the story consistently. By using more than just training webinars and instead gathering teams for live events or rallies where they can interact with and learn from their peers, you make the brand tangible, which makes getting behind it a lot easier for those representing it.

5. Measure again.

Remember, though, that asking employees for their input as a one-time tactic won’t cut it. Instead, there should be an established mechanism in place to gather feedback from frontline teams on a regular basis.

Opening that dialogue with your teams makes them more agile, allowing them to adapt and learn as the brand story shifts into place. Best of all, those shifts will be directly informed by their input as they report when customer preferences change.

Your team members are the lifeblood of your brand. Bring them together under a singular story to watch it—and your brand—become stronger than ever before.

Chris Wallace is president and co-founder of InnerView.

The post 5 Steps for Building a Consistent Brand Story appeared first on Chief Marketer.

SAP is a B2B pure play, but changing buying patterns have led the company to adapt B2C marketing practices to connect with decision makers.

“There has been a very significant evolution in the way B2B buyers expect to interact and what they want to hear from the brands they partner with,” says Alicia Tillman, global CMO of SAP.

A new TV spot released last week, “The Future of Business has Feelings,” showcases how brands need to get more in touch with their customers’ emotions. English actor Clive Owens asks viewers how they’re feeling on a scale of one to five. He then immediately notes that it’s a silly question, because everyone feels way more emotions than that on daily basis. To succeed, businesses need to understand all those feelings, and turn problems into opportunities.

“We want to show experiences that people have with brands, and make the important point that every day, an experience can be different,” says Tillman of the video, which will be showed on broadcast TV as well as across SAP’s social media channels. “Businesses can take control and understand customers more than ever before if they want to win in the experience economy.”

In the past, buyers were purely interested in the capabilities of the products themselves. Today, what decision makers are looking for is a bit more nuanced, and marketers need to keep up, she says.

“Those capabilities are still relevant, but what has become more relevant is the personalization of technology, and how it caters to the individual needs of the users interacting with technology,” Tillman notes. “We’ve transitioned from selling products to selling brands, and anticipating needs at an end-user level.”

Just as consumers expect relevant and contextualized marketing offers, so too do B2B customers, agrees Alison Biggan, president of corporate marketing at SAP.

“There’s an expectation that you know the things I care about and where I’m spending my time, and my history with your company,” she says. “It’s important that we’re connecting all the systems in the background, so whether you are hearing from sales or marketing or support, everyone understands [the history] of engagement.”

You May Also Enjoy:

• Oracle Increases Sales Enablement With Refined Content Creation Process
• UL Builds Brand Platform Based on Trust
• Rockwell Automation Launches Maker Challenge

This is especially crucial in today’s environment, Biggan says, because it is easier than ever before for customers to switch loyalties if they have a bad experience.

“If you are not differentiating based on experience, and doing everything you can to meet your customer’s expectations,” she says,  “you’re opening it up for a competitor.”

Last year, SAP developed its first brand narrative, to create a clear focus for how the tech company goes to market.

“We have a lot of campaigns, messages and themes and they can be confusing,” notes Tillman. “We needed an anchor that told the value story of SAP, and how SAP technology helps to drive companies and help the world become a better place.”

Tillman is also very conscious of the fact that SAP has several different constituencies that it needs to communicate with, all of whom have different needs and interests.

“How we deliver and drive campaigns has become a great priority for us, and the story we’re telling has evolved,” she says. “The way in which I deliver a story to an IT professional may be different from how I’m going mass market from the way I talk to a body of end users who interact with the product on a day to day basis.”

The post It’s All About Feelings in New SAP TV Spot appeared first on Chief Marketer.

It’s crucial that sellers have the tools they need to close deals, and a big part of that is being able to find the right content, says Eric Andrews, VP, demand operations, cloud infrastructure group at Oracle. “Buyers are delaying talking to sellers until later in the process, and we’re trying to create conversations with prospects,” he says.

The 35,000+ sellers on Oracle’s cloud business sales team had become overwhelmed with both the volume and complexity of content available to them, says Andrews. Messaging across the plethora of content was inconsistent, and it was difficult to find high impact, relevant customer references. Content was in many cases outdated, or not geared to the right prospects.

Different content hierarchies with different taxonomies in multiple content management systems was also an issue, meaning reps often didn’t know how or where to find the content they needed. Oracle had 57 different asset types, all with different creative designs and elements. “Even when things were called the same thing, the actual asset might have had a different look and feel,” he says.

A lack of content was not the answer, he says. An inventory found 10,000+ assets across three different seller portals. Only about 20 percent of the pieces were driving conversions; the vast majority of pieces had little or no usage.

“Marketing was also frustrated,” notes Andrews, who spoke at the recent ANA Masters of B2B event in Chicago. “There was a spray and pray approach. Content was being put everywhere, in the hope that someone would use it, and there was no insight on what was being used.”

You May Also Enjoy:

• UL Builds Brand Platform Based on Trust
• Wells Fargo Steps Out of Its B2B Comfort Zone
• Caterpillar Digs Into Emotional Side of B2B Marketing

A new approach was needed, so Oracle set out to develop a system to optimize seller enablement to drive integrated learning experiences for both customers and prospects, he says.

Marketing needed to understand the buying stages where content would be utilized, and think about the medium and channel the content would be used in. “What is the value exchange we’re trying to create?” Andrews says. “What are we trying to accomplish?”

The key was to create a “system of systems,” with content living at the center, and establish a clear plan on how to create, use and distribute those assets. Around that, new sales enablement experiences including interactive digital assets, dashboards, a closed feedback loop mobile responsive designed and productivity tools were also implemented. An analytics driven management system offers real-time data access to track what sellers are consuming, and a self-service dashboard helps product marketers proactively manage content.

Content creation was refined to make sure all assets were created with the right Oracle tone and brand messaging, and that they aligned the conversation to the sales strategy. The new Sales Central content portal now logs close to 2.2 million engagements annually, says Andrews.

Users of the portal can choose their role—such as field or digital sales—as well as the product lines and industries they sell into to find the content best suited for their needs. Content can be shared easily from the portal to social, or via customizable newsletters. A recently launched presentation builder is also helping sellers tailor presentations for client meetings with relevant slides and video.

The post Oracle Increases Sales Enablement with Refined Content Creation Process appeared first on Chief Marketer.

As Independence Day approaches, many brands are flying the red, white and blue. Is your brand patriotic? How does your company express patriotism with brand values?

After 9/11, many brands felt an obligation to climb on the patriotism bandwagon. Seventeen years later brands still face category challenges, but now they must also address socio-political challenges. Of course, “patriotism” isn’t just about ad campaigns surrounded by flags and fireworks. The challenge is to build brands where customers recognize a steady dedication to the value of patriotism.

In 1964, when Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was unsure how to define “obscenity,” he famously noted, “. . . I know it when I see it.” Patriotism is in much the same situation today. It’s highly emotional and more easily felt than measured—or articulated.  The 17^th annual Brand Keys survey of leading American brands has identified the brands their customers feel best embody the value of “patriotism.”

A nationally representative sample of consumers evaluated brands for their resonance on the value of “patriotism.” Based upon an psychologically-based, emotional engagement survey of how people “feel” about which the brands embody “patriotism,” here are some brands that lead the 2019 Patriotism Parade:

Jeep: The vehicle that won World War II and, apparently, every war since, to become an intrinsic part of every war movie produced. Jeep embodies the essence of victory. It radiates patriotism.

Walt Disney: Is there any brand more associated with the vision of patriotic small-town America, Main Street, the town square? With its Hall of Presidents Disney is patriotism personified.

Coca-Cola: The iconic bottle stands for the freedom to create and has become representative of the American way of life.

Levi Strauss: The brand (and man) who created the archetypical American blue jeans.

While the annual survey focuses on for-profit brands, assessments for the armed services— Coast Guard, Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy—are included. This year, again, consumers of all ages and political persuasions ranked the U.S. armed services #1.

Other leaders include Ford, Hershey, AT&T, Ralph Lauren, MSNBC, FOX, Instagram, Craftsmen Tools and Harley-Davidson.

You May Also Enjoy:

• 10 Trends for Managing Brand Reputation
• Marketing Structures Keeping Brands & Customers Apart: Report
• Renaming Helps Relation Insurance Refocus Brand

We live in an era of political polarization, consumer tribalism, and increasingly fervent social movements that challenge brands with constantly shifting sector landscapes. Not only are the basic tenets of consumer loyalty and brand engagement being upended, the need for brands to define themselves as patriotic becomes increasingly challenging as consumers’ patriotic self-perceptions have increased across all age groups. The percentages for top two-box ratings (“Extremely” or “Very” Patriotic) appear below and were consistent across genders and political affiliations:

Traditionalists         91% (+3)

Baby Boomers         90% (+5)

Gen X                         74% (+6)

Millennials               70% (+17)

Gen Z                         50% (+8)

The increased levels of consumers’ self-perceptions of patriotism correlates highly with the appearance of more media brands—right and left—on the list. A coincidence? Perhaps it’s evidence that people are paying more attention. Whatever the causality, brands had better pay more attention too.

What’s been independently validated over and over is when a brand can establish emotional connections with a value as powerful as “patriotism,” consumers will engage more strongly, be more willing to believe in the brand, and behave more positively toward it.

These brand rankings do not mean that other brands are not patriotic or don’t possess patriotic resonance. Rational values, like being an American company, “Made in the USA,” or having nationally directed corporate social responsibility, all play a part in brand perception. But politics is making itself felt more than ever in the brandscape.

Brands that can make meaningful emotional connections with consumers always have a strategic advantage when it comes to winning the hearts, minds, wallets, and loyalty of consumers. Do that and consumers will not only stand up and salute, they’ll queue up and buy.

Robert Passikoff is president of Brand Keys.

The post What Makes A Brand “Patriotic”? appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Some companies like to talk about what they do and that becomes their story, says CMO Kathy Seegebrecht.  “UL is a brand of consequence—we need to communicate not only what we do but why we do it and what the world would look like if there was no UL. What we provide is an increase in trust, to [help] consumers trust that products are safe.”

One issue for UL is the fact that many people—including those at companies in its customer base—don’t have a clear idea of what exactly the product certification company does.

While safety is still a core theme for the brand, security and sustainability, as well as research on issues like indoor air quality, are a part of its offerings today. The company has a broad customer base that includes businesses, associations, government and regulatory authorities. It markets to 12 different industry verticals, including automotive, healthcare, life sciences, retail and electronics.

For marketing done at the corporate level, the c-suite and brand owner are typically the target audience, while marketing in different divisions reaches professionals down in the trenches, such as safety engineers.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Wells Fargo Steps Out of Its B2B Comfort Zone
• Rockwell Automation Launches Maker Challenge
• B2B Marketing Transformation Shaped by Metrics and Agility

“UL is an independent third party, so trust is a primary value that we offer,” Seegebrecht says. “Because of how we are structured, when we make money, the money funnels back into the research group.”

As with many B2B companies, the sales cycle is complicated and often lengthy. UL is working on creating new dashboards with the help of a Marketo marketing automation system, and moving towards winnowing down multiple CRM systems into one solution over the next nine to 12 months. The multiple CRMs are a consequence of acquiring different companies with different solutions in place.

UL also does a lot of content marketing, and over the next year is working to create a corporate wide content calendar, to see what content can be used across divisions for more efficiency. “We want to build out strategic solutions in a meaningful way,” she says.

The company also recently revamped UL.com, which will serve as the framework for a multilevel activation that will extend into 2020 with the “World Runs on Trust” messaging. The theme will extend to live events, sponsorships such as the LPGA UL  International Crown and possibly TV and out of home advertising next year.

Stein IAS worked on the campaign with UL, which rolled out the new “Empowering Trust” tagline last year. Social media is an important channel because of its cost efficiency and reach.

“We have good engagement with regulatory organizations and associations,” she says. “When we can go viral with new videos, we can get people to say ‘wow, I didn’t know UL did that.’”

The post UL Builds Brand Platform Based on Trust appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Think buying a bulldozer is a completely analytical, emotion free purchase? Think again, says Victoria Morrissey, global marketing and brand director of Caterpillar.

Emotion is sometimes seen as the enemy of logic, but no decisions are completely rational, whether you’re buying a roll of toilet paper or signing off on a fleet of construction equipment , notes Morrissey. In B2B in particular, the power of emotion is deeply connected to risk.

“When you think about what excavator you’re going to use to dig a building, the risk is massive,” she says. “Your credibility, your reputation, safety, the ability to deliver on time—all are at risk. And with high risk, emotion spikes.”

The power of emotion can drive more effective marketing. Emotion and logic should be considered equally when crafting B2B marketing strategies, she says. At the recent ANA Masters of B2B conference in Chicago, Morrissey shared key principles of emotion marketers need to keep in mind.

Think story first. The story behind your product matters, she says. If you buy a ring at Tiffany’s, you’ll pay $7,000 for a diamond that you could have gotten for $1,000 in the diamond district. The $6,000 difference is what you pay for the story—the cost of the iconic blue box, the lighting, the sales people, the architecture of the store and the feeling you get from being able to say you bought a ring at Tiffany’s.

You May Also Enjoy:

• In a Troubled Time, Boeing Looks at Brand
• AT&T Business Speeds to the Future With 5G
• B2B Marketing Transformation Shaped by Metrics and Agility

Of course, marketers must consider the metrics behind their campaigns, she says. But, the story is what will drive recommendations and brand loyalty. To craft Caterpillar’s story, Morrissey looked at the dozens of industries it serves around the world.

While these customers come from diverse cultures, there was something that bonded them together as a community: They are do-ers. “They go to work every day and make stuff,” she says. “They do work that matters.”

Then, Caterpillar looked at the brand and identified what defined the company’s “best self” to stand by the corporate missions of standing for progress and helping customers build a better world.

It also needed to identify what gets in the way of progress. “We live in an increasingly intangible world where ‘saying’ has become a substitute for actually doing something,” says Morrissey. “Our enemy is inaction. Caterpillar exists to triumph over inaction so our do-ers can make work happen.”

The whole is greater than its parts. Understand the individual parts of your brand story, but don’t overlook the power and elegance of the whole, she says. “In B2B, there’s a tendency to get super-granular, super-fast, because of the abundance of data,” she says.

Most customer segmentation is designed to find the differences, but if marketers cling to what is different, they’ll lose the ability to see the overarching mindsets that will help them tell stories with greater sense of purpose and humanity.

“Perception can drive knowledge,” says Morrissey. “I’m not suggesting the parts don’t matter, but before you act on the differences, find the unifying principles of the parts. People and customer segments are more alike than you might think.”

The post Caterpillar Digs Into Emotional Side of B2B Marketing appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Most presentations on brand strategy don’t typically begin with an apology, but Boeing’s market position is anything but typical.

Jerry Verghese, VP of global brand management at the aerospace giant, started his session at ANA Masters of B2B today with a slide acknowledging Oct. 29, 2018, the day a Boeing 737 went down in Indonesia, and March 10, 2019, the day another 737 crashed in Ethiopia. Candidly, he told the audience that he debated whether or not to go through with the presentation, but decided it was best to be transparent with his peers.

“We fell short, and it is felt deeply across everyone who works at Boeing,” he said. “We’ve let people down, we let our customers down, we let the flying public down and quite frankly we let our teammates down. We need to rebuild trust and make sure this is the safest transportation system in the world.”

In the wake of the tragedies, the brand has paused all of its advertising, to reevaluate the future of the company and the brand platform it rolled out last year. Looking to the future, Verghese shared with the ANA audience the thinking behind the strategy, aligned to being purpose and human driven, with a focus on research and data.

Boeing needed to think about who its customer was, and how they made decisions. In 2016, a new business unit, Boeing Global Services, was launched, to focus on the plethora of new capabilities the company had to offer, many of which the public wouldn’t typically associate with the brand.

Many of these new capabilities came through acquisitions. These include Liquid Robotics, which produces a Wave Glider to gather ocean data, and Aurora Flight Sciences, which specializes in autonomous aerial vehicles.

More From ANA Masters of B2B 2019:

• AT&T Business Speeds to the Future With 5G
• B2B Brands Need to Produce More Content: Vaynerchuk

The company needed to create a marketing platform that would serve a number of purposes. It needed to be flexible and scalable, and increase the global footprint. It also needed to help attract new talent, and increase the focus on those newly acquired capabilities.

It talked a number of constituents—including customers, employees, prospective employees and company leaders—and reviewed the company’s competitive set and reputation, as well as the tone of its communications. These had often been engineering focused, and didn’t highlight the people behind the technology.

There were three clear objectives, said Verghese. Boeing wanted to paint a clear vision of the future, anchored in the brand’s purpose and values. It wanted to showcase the products and services. And, it wanted to shape the brand’s reputation and build trust with emerging leaders and talent.

Four pillars of Boeing’s aerospace innovation were identified—connecting, protecting, exploring and inspiring. These would extend across all touchpoints, from media and investor relations; to advertising, recruiting and employee engagement; to partner and supplier engagement; to sponsorships, experiential events, sales collateral and everything in between.

“We were on a journey to make sure this was translating across the enterprise,” he says.

In the work to refresh the brand identity, everything was considered, including the signature “Boeing Blue” color used across the company. That was updated to a lighter, more dynamic hue.

How the brand represented itself at industry events was also reevaluated. At the Paris Air Show—the aerospace equivalent of CES for the electronics world—exhibits and messaging focused not only on the aircraft, but the people behind them. Boeing has also been investing in VR mixed reality, to help tell the brand’s story at events in a more experiential way to attendees who might not actually get to physically go on board of the newest aircraft.

Boeing is also heavily investing in creating compelling content for social channels. This includes behind the scenes livestreams on Facebook, where mechanics and engineers are interviewed as planes are being built.

“Showcasing our employee voices and the people who work on our projects is important to show our human side going forward,” he said.

The post In a Troubled Time, Boeing Looks at Brand appeared first on Chief Marketer.

What’s in a name? A lot if you want to create a strong brand connection. Relation Insurance found this through a year-long renaming initiative that helped it engage customers in a variety of B2B verticals.

Relation is an insurance brokerage that offers solutions for individuals and mid-size companies in industries such as agriculture, education, transportation and nonprofit. Founded in 2007, it has 485 employees and over 30 offices in nine states. Initially, the company was more of a holding company, formed through the acquisition of different firms. Five years ago, new corporate leadership wanted to brand the company—then known as Ascension Insurance—as  a more cohesive organization.

“We needed a name that represented a break from the past and showed the direction the company was going in,” says Natalie Zensius, senior vice president, marketing communications at Relation Insurance.

The search for a new name began in earnest in January 2017. It isn’t an easy process, says Zensius, particularly as time goes on and the number of new, viable names continues to dwindle. The name needed to not only be available in the financial space, but be protectable from a legal standpoint and truly convey the company’s value proposition. “We kept coming back to the idea of being partners with our clients, and being in their world,” she says. “[Relation] was at the core of what we are about.”

Once a name was chosen, Zensius notes that it was critical to get internal decision makers on board. A naming committee was created to facilitate the rollout process, comprised of folks from all facets of the business, including everyone from senior leaders to entry level employees in marketing, IT, legal and HR. Two naming agencies were also in the mix, as were several graphic designers, web developers, copy writers and a PR agency. (Zensius herself started working with Relation early in the renaming planning as a consultant, and joined the company full-time three months into the process.)

You May Also Enjoy:

• Hiscox Debuts Barcode Campaign to Target Small Businesses
• Direct Mail Helps EyeMed Get Seen By Prospects
• Aflac Highlights What it “Isn’t” to Showcase What It “Is”

A planning task force for the rebrand oversaw two phases of the rollout, a soft announcement and a hard launch. “We wanted to be super transparent and keep everyone in the loop, and we also needed to build momentum and excitement,” she says. “And, we wanted to buy ourselves some time to put all the pieces in place—we knew everything wouldn’t go to plan, so a phased rollout let us drip things out as they became available to keep people’s interest.”

Prior to the soft announcement, the task force identified two groups of people to shepherd internal buy-in, brand champions and brand ambassadors.

The “champions” were typically non-management types with influencer status in different departments, who worked to help sell the name to team members internally. They were given FAQs and messaging to share with team members in their respective groups. The “ambassadors” were people in each office who were responsible for helping out with the nuts and bolts aspects of the rollout, things like making sure everyone had business cards and signage with the new branding. The ambassadors’ identities were public knowledge, but names of the champions were kept on the down-low, as they worked more in a stealth mode to cheerlead the rebranding to fellow employees.

The official rollout of the Relation Insurance branding in January 2018 included not only a PR push and media placements online and off, but a content marketing campaign built around the pillars of people, process and technology, and how the new brand connected all three.

“We looked at the areas where we have credible expertise and where were the conversations that we could add value, and then tie it back to insurance,” she says.

The ROI of the rebrand was measured both internally and externally. Employee satisfaction surveys measured internal sentiment.

“The feedback internally was a sense of pride, but there were some detractors,” says Zensius. “One of the mistakes we made is that some folks who were influencer employees felt left out. We misread the tea leaves on that one. But over time, some of our hardcore detractors have come back and said their feelings have changed over time. To me, that speaks volumes, if we can win folks over.”

External measurements included looking at awareness in the insurance industries across different client segments. “Our production and account teams helped us communicate with clients,” she says. “It’s not uncommon for there to be multiple databases [in companies] in the insurance industry, because there is a lot of acquisition, but we were able to do a direct mail campaign to all of our clients, even though we didn’t have a central database.”

“Overall, the response was overwhelmingly positive,” says Zensius. “We tried to communicate that we were same company, the same people, with a better name.”

The next step is to continue building awareness of Relation Insurance in the marketplace. “We’ve seen spikes in visitations to our social channels, and we can overlay PR activities on those spikes,” she says. “As we move forward, we’ll use PR to get the word out and deepen our presence in conversations about how we are leveraging technology and data to provide solutions for clients, and tell stories about our processes in a compelling way.”

The post Renaming Helps Relation Insurance Refocus Brand appeared first on Chief Marketer.