Tips for Managing Your B2B Branding Project

Happy 3rd Birthday Quadient!

It’s hard to believe that 3 years have passed since we launched Quadient as a brand to market to reflect the SaaS-based company that we have become.?It was a pleasure to work on this project - from conception to delivery - with such a large and talented cast from across the organization.

Early in my career, the world of branding always seemed mysterious.?While I had worked on positioning many existing brands successfully in market, the process of how companies uncover and launch new brands seemed complex and challenging.

Over the past 8 years, I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to lead many business to business (B2B) rebranding projects of increasing complexity.?During this latest project, my team and I learned a lot working through this rebrand together - including the importance of managing organizational change, choosing where to focus, and when to accept no compromises.?Here are a couple of tips we learned along the way that may help you with your B2B rebranding project. Feel free to connect or comment if you have learnings of your own to share!

Managing Organization Change

A rebrand touches every part of the organization - including Sales, Marketing, Support, Corporate Social Responsibility / ESG, HR / Employer branding, Investor Relations, Internal Communications, Office Managers and more.?Each of these stakeholders have unique needs and it is important that they have a voice throughout the process.??

Building a work breakdown structure and project communication plan to ensure all decision makers inside the organization are engaged is key.?While every organization is unique, a really good resource for figuring out how to optimize your project plan is the book “Stacking the Deck: How to Lead Breakthrough Change Against Any Odds” by David S. Pottruck.

This book was very helpful for me in building an inclusive and collaborative approach while planing out the project phases.

In order for us to successfully build a brand foundation that would be well received, it was very important for us to have primary and secondary research to help inform our decisions - for brand name, tagline, and purpose / mission / vision / values.?We started by running internal workshops to hear feedback from our employees around the world - encapsulating the reason why our employees love working at Quadient.?These sessions were instrumental in helping our HR leadership guide us in the development of what become our EPIC values - Empowerment, Passion, Inspiration, and Community.?These values were pulled directly from feedback from our employees.

At the same time, we interviewed dozens of customers and potential customers.?We blindly tested mission / vision and values, along with company names, to see which options would work best in our key markets.?We then vetted this prospect and customer feedback with the analyst community.?All of this feedback was invaluable in helping to build a solid brand story that our entire global organization could get behind.

The work breakdown structure and communication plan were key - bringing in members of each of the core teams on a weekly and monthly basis to ensure their voices were heard throughout the process.??

Where to focus: What’s in a name?

How do you come up with a new name for a company??As we engaged our naming agency and worked our way through the first stage of the process, it became clear that it was going to be difficult to find and pick the “right” name.?This became a classic “chicken and egg” problem – it would be impossible to find the perfect name that would resonate with the history of the business and capture the imagination of our future customers.?What was more important was to create a strong “vessel” that we could infuse with our company values to develop a strong brand over time.

The effectiveness of a new name is going to be impacted by several forces.?At a minimum, your name will have to take into consideration the history of the organization, the current values of the organization and future markets that you are targeting:

Where to focus: Tier your content

When tackling any large scale project - the pareto rule is your best friend.?20% of your content accounts for 80% of your customer engagements.?So why do a good job of rebranding every item when you can do a great job of rebranding the items that have the biggest impact???

Our team identified the assets most downloaded and read by customers, and most leveraged by the sales organization.?The top 20%, along with any net NEW content, received completely new branding.?We called this type 1 content.

Any remaining content that was still for a current product or solution received a “light” rebranding - a new logo and new colours, but no new layouts.?We referred to this as tier 2 content.

The rest of the “long tail” of content received only a new logo, but no redesign.?Since this content would be “retired” in a 1-3 year time horizon, the light rebranding would not have a long-term impact on the business.?This tiered approach allowed the team to work more quickly in rebranding thousands of content pieces while being as effective and cost-efficient as possible.

Where not to compromise:?The commercialization of your new name

Can your new brand name be commercialized??That is, are you able to capture the trademark for the brand in the geographic markets where you currently and one day will do business??Some branding experts argue that the ability to commercialize a name isn’t important in the short run.?They often cite Tesla Inc. as an example of staged branding.?Tesla Inc. was unable to afford the costs associated with procuring the website Tesla.com and were forced to operate as Tesla Motors for 13 years before they were able to gather the resources required to purchase the Tesla Inc. name and trademarks.?

The reality is that the Tesla situation is fairly unique.?Car manufacturing is a very capital intensive industry, providing a natural barrier to entry for new entrants.?Due to the long time period required to develop a new vehicle, new entrants are able to develop new brands in a relatively uncrowded space.

The same situation is not true for B2B SaaS provider.?Look at the software market – could you effectively differentiate your new brand by adding words like “software” or “technology” to the end of your preferred company name??With SEO becoming an ever more important part of the marketing mix, not clearly owning your name represents a potential barrier to demand generation.

Creating a compound brand name by adding these words to a name that you truly like fundamentally changes its effectiveness.?Odds are, adding these words will only leave you lost in a crowd.?While it is difficult to find something truly new and unique that you can call your own, it is possible and well worth the time to research – so keep at it!

Where not to compromise:?Domain Name Availability

So you have a name you love, and you think you can capture the trademark for it.?What is your new B2B website URL going to be??Odds are that the .com, .net and .biz for your new name was registered a long time ago.?These are called top-level domains, and they are VERY difficult to come by.?

Every Domain name that has been registered must be purchased from the current owner, or via internet auction - even if it is not in active use.

Your top-level domain is one of the most important Search Engine Optimization tools you will ever have – so it is very important that you select a domain that you can own, and that differentiates you in your market.?Don’t settle for adding words like software, soft, inc, or other words to your Domain name.?Prospects WILL have a hard time finding your new domain in a crowded internet.?So how do you find a good domain name that isn’t taken?

Companies like Sedo offer excellent search engines for Domains that are free to register, as well as ones that are up for auction.?You can find them at https://sedo.com/us/

Sedo was a big help to me, as it offered a “starts with” and “ends with” Domain search option – and you can limit your searches to top-level domains.?Another element that is important is to look at the length of your domain name – the shorter you can keep it, the better.

Note that just because a domain is available for sale, it doesn’t mean that it will come cheap.?We contacted multiple sellers who were requesting six-figure sums in exchange for their top-level domains.?Be prepared to go back to the well several times if you are not able to come to an agreement on costs.

Where not to compromise: Fonts and colours

It’s critical not to look like everyone else in the market.?When I started my career, I worked for 3 companies in a row who all used the exact same font.?While it was a nice, clean look - it made it very difficult to differentiate ourselves in the market.?The same is true with the colour blue - while it is a very effective colour for B2B use, it is so overused that it becomes difficult for companies to carve out a space with a standard blue logo (think IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Dell).

The same is true for visuals - our design team did an amazing job of adding our own unique flair to stock images in order to create visuals that are uniquely our own, while still giving us the flexibility we need to build out new visual assets quickly.

Rebranding takes courage AND an amazing team

If you are working through your own rebranding project, I guarantee you that you won’t have all the answers.?You will never have all the data you wish you could have, and you will be forced to make decisions based on the information that is available to you.

That’s OK - because getting it perfect at launch isn’t the goal - making it right over time is.?For this project, I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by the strongest marketing team I have had the pleasure of working with in my career, and they trusted in the process.?Their dedication to the project was what determined its ultimate success.?In short, culture really does eat strategy for breakfast.

Looking back - I want to once again thank the amazing cross-functional team that helped bring the Quadient brand to life.?It has been an amazing journey so far - and I can’t wait to show the world where we will bring it from here!