Why Rebranding During a Pandemic Made Sense
Explaining the strategy behind Talentsoft’s shiny new look and feel
When I mention to colleagues that the entire team at Talentsoft has been busy working through a massive rebranding effort over the last 12 months—much less, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic—I’m pretty certain they all thought I was crazy. After all, why try to reinvent ourselves at a time when the entire world already had so many other unexpected hurdles to overcome?
Truth be told, I asked myself the same question many times over. But ultimately, since we had already kicked off this effort before the pandemic turned everything upside down, there was no point in losing the momentum we had already built up. So in my mind, nothing was going to stop us from moving forward with this initiative, pandemic or otherwise.
While some might see this as a bold move, for me, the decision to power through made complete business sense. Talentsoft, now in its 13th year in operation, is at a unique inflection point. Since joining the company seven years ago, I’ve seen it transform from a techy startup to an undeniable heavyweight in the fast-growing global HR tech space.
For our team, this rebranding effort was not simply an opportunity to modernize the look and feel of our brand. Quite frankly, it was a moment for us to stop and think about the unique value Talentsoft brings to its customers as well as solidify our position within the market. This required us to add much more sophistication and consistency around how we communicate as a brand, a business, a thought leader, and an innovator to all of our stakeholders. In other words, our business had grown up, so it was time for our brand to grow up, too.
Not our first rebranding rodeo
This is the second time I’ve led a rebranding effort at Talentsoft in the past seven years. What’s interesting this time around is seeing how this process has changed as our business has grown.
Admittedly, the first time going about this had some hits and misses—what I like to call “learning experiences.” Our company was a lot different back then. It was quite a bit smaller, too. As such, we decided to take a top-down approach for rolling out our brand strategy. While this may have seemed to be, at the time, the most efficient way to go about this work, in hindsight, it left us exposed to our own blind spots. Within the executive team, we had our own ideas about what the brand should be—and we didn’t always see eye-to-eye. In fact, being so close to the brand meant we didn’t have an objective lens to evaluate this strategy holistically.
So in the end, we focused most of our attention on updating the look and feel of the brand instead of doing what we really needed to do: defining a unified set of key messages to propel our brand story forward—consistently.
A brand is much more than just a logo, tagline, and anything else you find in a brand guidelines document. In many ways, it’s the soul of a business. It’s equally the expression of a company’s culture and its vision for the future just as much as it’s a powerful way to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is who we are, and this is why we’re so unique” in the market.
But we weren’t ready to go there quite yet. At the time, our fast-growing business was focused squarely on generating awareness, revenue, and customer growth. We pulled out all the stops to make our brand known and visible across Europe. To accelerate this even further, we gave our sales team a tremendous amount of flexibility to talk about the business and its value proposition in ways that they knew would resonate with local market customers.
The strategy worked. Our team did an incredible job of making Talentsoft top-of-mind throughout Europe’s HR circles. But that, too, came with a trade-off: We were far from being unified in our approach to talking about the brand, its products, or its points of differentiation.
Driving change through a crisis
Fast-forward to the present day. Our entire approach to this rebranding effort couldn’t be more different than it was seven years ago. For starters, we hired a brand agency to support us.
This gave us an objective lens for understanding what makes our brand tick as well as how to reposition it in the market to ensure it continues to stay competitive for years to come. Even better, the agency went into the trenches to hear from our founders, executives, employees, customers, partners, and industry analysts —across all organizations and sectors—to get a deeper understanding of our brand’s ethos. While the worst fear in any effort like this is that you’ll end up with a lot of different perceptions that aren’t necessarily aligned, what we learned, once all of these conversations were done, is that we were far more aligned on our vision than we assumed.
This was a great sign because it showed that, even through our growing pains, we had never lost sight of what this brand means to us or to the customers we serve.
Even more interesting, because much of the synthesis of this information happened during the height of the pandemic, we got all stakeholders involved to stay committed and engaged throughout the entire process. In fact, we quickly learned that doing this exercise during a crisis broke down barriers and made everyone less attached to their old ways of thinking. Not to mention, now that everyone was basically sequestered at home for months on end, it was a lot easier to get people to stay focused, provide input, and make decisions to keep moving forward.
Come to think of it, had COVID-19 never happened, would we be ready to unveil our new brand today? That we can never know for sure; however, because people’s behaviors fundamentally changed during the lockdown period, we were able to move faster than we ever anticipated.
Also, and I supposed more anecdotally, with our entire team collaborating almost purely virtually for a good part of this year, it was easier for everyone to see where there were gaps, inconsistencies, and opportunities for refinement across various assets. This reassured us that the steps we were taking to modernize our brand wasn’t for the sake of marketing alone; the COVID-19 pandemic gave us the space to reevaluate and transform our brand—and, in reality, our entire organization—from the inside out.
It goes without saying that this year has been challenging in so many ways for everyone around the world. Oddly enough, it’s also those challenges that fueled our motivation to raise the stakes. This was our golden opportunity to own a unique, differentiated, and well-deserved position in the market. The world around us changed. Our business had to respond and adapt in real-time. The pandemic simply gave us new (and unexpected) insight into how to do just that.
Harnessing the value of every employee
One of the biggest moments of realization we had during the pandemic was around something that we always knew to be true: You can’t transform an organization if you don’t support, grow, and develop your talent. After all, your employees are your greatest asset for long-term success.
We saw this first-hand within our own team. During this unexpected time of crisis, each and every one of our employees stepped up to the plate and played an incredibly valuable role in keeping our business moving forward, in spite of all the uncertainty.
Our own experience taught us that we were onto something. So, we rooted our new brand strategy around a simple, yet powerful idea:
At Talentsoft, we aim to unlock the power of every single talent, transforming your organization in the process.
This thinking infuses every aspect of our new brand identity, from our key messaging to our more vibrant look and feel. More importantly, this strategy embodies an overtly “human” element. We knew it was time to create a more emotional connection with our customers. How we speak and present ourselves needed to be more consumer-friendly and less techy IT.
Although our company obviously exists to provide HR tech solutions to businesses of all shapes and sizes, “unlocking the power” of employees is a “cultural product,” so to speak. This essentially means we primarily exist to help businesses empower their people. Full stop.
This is powerful in so many ways. While we will always be a tech company at our very core, what makes us unique and different from other competitors out there is that we fuel business, HR, culture, and talent transformation from a variety of different angles. We offer full-scale solutions for change management by tapping into the incredible power of our team’s HR expertise to help your business and people thrive in ways you could have never imagined.
What we learned in 2020 is that “business transformation” is no longer just about “digital transformation” alone. It’s about cultural transformation. It’s about people transformation. It’s about approaching things just a bit differently in order to adapt to the many more fast-moving changes that still lie ahead. This is what Talentsoft is truly all about.
Will it be a success?
Personally, I love the work our team has achieved. The brand is not only beautiful and dynamic, but our story and promise to our customers is truly powerful.
That being said, I don’t own a crystal ball. The success of this rebranding effort will take time to unfold. Will the market respond to it? Will it resonate with our customers? Will it drive revenue? These are the questions we’ll continue to ask from here on out.
Similarly, and you all know this is half the battle, we’ll have to make sure that, internally, our teams embrace the new brand and messaging with open arms, too. That in itself is a form of change management that we’ll have to go through—without falling into the trap of becoming the “brand police” somewhere along the way.
The truth is, we put in the time and effort to do this right. We are a fast-moving company, but we made sure this rebranding effort was strategic and methodical every step of the way. It has been an amazing journey of transformation for us. Now, we’re excited to share this journey with all of you, too. Let’s get started!
CEO Lonsdale - Auteur de "Metamarque" aux éditions Débats Publics
4 年#teamworkmakesthedreamwork indeed !
?? Marketing and communications, CSR | ?? Community builder | ?? Co-founder of SHE Changes Climate France and Women in Tech Bordeaux | ?? TEDx, TEDx Countdown, CEC (Convention des Entreprises pour le Climat)
4 年What a ride! (no pun intended ??) - Thanks for your leadership and for trusting us with this ambitious project! And yes #teamworkmakesthedreamwork
CMO
4 年Great work!