Brand updates put a lot on the line. If done without the proper research, they can have long-lasting repercussions on your brand loyalty, customer recognition and more. But a strong, well-received brand update can drive positive press, reinvigorate your marketing and grab your audience’s attention.
Need some inspiration for an upcoming brand adjustment? Learn from these recent and successful B2B brand updates by Salesforce and Intuit.
In 2014, Salesforce brought what had previously been a mish-mash of acquired brands under one umbrella, creating a new website and new logo to mark the change. Previously, Salesforce had offered a sales solution and separate marketing solutions, with confusing messaging explaining the connection between them.
With the brand update, Salesforce embraced the ethos of marketing-sales alignment. The new branding emphasizes how all Salesforce tools work together across a customer’s journey. While a few of the best-known brand names, including Pardot, remained, the new presentation emphasized Salesforce’s overarching presence and created both external and internal cohesion.
In 2015, Salesforce continued their redesign by reworking the look and feel of their software. They revamped the old look of salesforce.com—previously described by Fast Company as “easily the ugliest app in the [CRM] space”—to streamline the look and feel of their main products. But this was more than a superficial redesign: they relied on thousands of customer interviews, site visits and usability studies to render the site more usable, clean and navigable.
Like Salesforce, Intuit had several products under one umbrella. Their products, Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax were each highly successful and had plenty of name recognition of their own. But Intuit lacked a strong overarching brand identity, which hindered the launch of new products that did not benefit from the Quicken, QuickBooks or TurboTax names.
To solve this problem, Intuit embraced a new set of visual design guidelines to tie its products together. This included a refreshed logo. At the same time, the company launched a new product naming architecture that also served to emphasize the products’ connections to Intuit.
In both of these brand updates, the companies strengthened their overall brands by considering how they could better unify their existing offerings. Each approached the problem in the way that made the most sense for their products, with Salesforce eliminating brand names that had little recognition, and Intuit tying the company name to those of top-performing products. Both, having thoughtfully addressed their central problem of a lack of brand unity, were successful and well-received.
Does your organization have similar branding problems you’re looking to fix? Give us a call.
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