What I Learned by Leading a Company Re-Branding Initiative

As a technology consultant, my exposure to Marketing starts and ends with enabling Marketing Automation Technology. I have always worked for large organizations where Marketing was something I took for granted. A year ago, Solving IT leadership began having conversations around our brand. We identified that we were evolving, and we needed to think critically about who we were, and step into who we wanted to become. The question then became, HOW?

Agency or Freelance?

As leaders at a growing company, we are no strangers to wearing multiple hats and looking for ways we can push our dollar further. When looking at who we wanted to partner with for our re-branding, we went in many directions. First, we posted an ad on Upwork for a Brand Strategist to help us with our brand story. We interviewed 15+ people all over the world, all who brought a unique POV on re-branding Solving IT. Additionally, we interviewed 4 agencies who brought a plethora of knowledge and a team of resources who would streamline the experience. Initially, we went with a traditional agency. After all, multiple brains working on our brand was better than one! Additionally, being Marketing novices, we wanted someone who could guide us through the process, so being local to Chicago was a plus!

Our experience with our agency was overall OK. In the end, we learned a lot about the re-branding process, but decided to not move forward with the agency after their initial Brand Story Pitch. For our actual re-brand, we were able to partner with a talented Freelance resource who had connections to a Designer and a Web Developer. This provided a streamlined agency experience, but as a leadership team, we were able to be more collaborative in the re-branding process.

Here are my lessons learned working with different types of Marketing Partners:

1. Be specific and detailed in your expectations – People aren’t mind readers! This includes details like the tone of your brand and ongoing budget (time and $) for maintaining the brand in the marketplace.
2. Take the time to explain your business – If you have a hunch your partner isn’t understanding something about your business, you are usually correct. Take time to simplify and explain the details of your business. Plan to take more time than you originally anticipated for this step.
3. Understand their process – Many Marketing Agencies are known for in depth research on Competitors, Customers, and the Market. While this sounds good in theory, ask HOW they are getting this information. Is it through interviews, through their own whitepapers, do they have an analytics teams in house, etc…
4. Style Matters – Agencies do this all of the time, so for them, their process is second nature. For us, this was overwhelming. We felt we were at the mercy of their process and didn’t feel we were partnering with them on the deliverable. When we went with a Freelance option, we had more freedom to set the tone of the relationship and speed of the project.
5. Have the right people in the room – This one might seem obvious, but the “right” people might mean different things to different companies. For Solving IT, 3 of the 4 people who sit on our Leadership Team had been with the company for <2 years when starting this initiative. While this is great for generating outside ideas, we didn’t have a solid consensus of what the Solving IT brand meant historically. Tap into senior resources who have seen your company through multiple seasons to help articulate the brand story.

2 Brands or 1?

Solving IT has two distinct business lines: Technology Recruitment and Salesforce Consulting. Technology Recruitment is the foundation of Solving IT, serving several Fortune 500 companies and providing an unparalleled level of service when it comes to finding the right (difficult to find) candidates for roles. Salesforce Consulting is a quickly growing business unit focusing on helping mid-sized organizations get the most out of their investment with Salesforce. With 2 different business units going after seemingly different markets, the questions became, do we need 2 brands, or 1?

While there is no right answer, it became clear to us that there were many opinions on “best practices.” Some marketers we worked with highlighted that if the target audience of the 2 business units had little to no overlap, we should consider 2 brands. This seemed like the right approach, after all, our Recruitment Practice was targeting enterprise businesses’ HR or procurement teams, while our Salesforce Practice was often working with IT or sales leadership at mid-size companies. We went through the process of working with our agency to articulate our people, customers, market position, and offerings. 3 weeks later, we were presented with 2 distinct brand stories. While we were happy with the brands and the stories they told, we were quickly overwhelmed with what came next. We now needed to take 2 brand stories, and work with the agency to create logos, messaging, style guides, collateral, and websites x 2!

As a team, we took a step back to think through our business units. Looking at things through a fresh lens (thanks to our new Freelance Partner), we started to quickly draw parallels between Recruitment and Salesforce Consulting. While the end service we provide is different, we found commonalities in our methodology and customer experience.

In the end, our decision was to re-vamp the Solving IT Parent Brand and break out our Recruitment and Salesforce Consulting Practice into unique sub-brands. This decision allows us to keep consistent branding, while also empowering each of our business units to have their own identity and unique personality!

Our journey to re-launching the Solving IT Brand was not a straight line. It included multiple partners (Upwork, traditional agencies, personal relationships) and countless internal debates, but in the end, I am proud where we landed and can’t wait for the reveal on 10/16/2020!

WRITTEN BY AMY BURROWS