Matrix Group International

Tag: Branding

  • 5 Reasons NOT to Rebrand Your Organization

    5 Reasons NOT to Rebrand Your Organization

    In my last blog post, I discussed the 7 good reasons to rebrand your organization. But when does it NOT make sense to rebrand?

    Here’s what my friend Jane Barwis, CEO of BRG Communications, and I have to say about this topic. We recently did a webinar on rebranding because many of our clients are rebranding or thinking about rebranding.

    • Significant brand equity – If your name, logo and other corporate identity pieces are so well known and have really positive brand recognition, we recommend not rebranding. The money you’ll spend updating your brand and then marketing it to your stakeholders may be cost-prohibitive and you may never achieve the same level of brand equity again. Imagine if Coca-Cola changed its name, or changed Coke to something else, or started using blue as its color. How much brand equity would be lost?
    • Celebrating a significant anniversary – We see this a lot. Organizations are coming up on their 50th or 100th anniversary and they decide to rebrand. In our mind, celebrating an anniversary is not good enough reason to rebrand, unless other factors come into play, including the reasons we listed to rebrand, e.g., your audiences have changed, your industry has changed significantly. If this is the case, then it makes sense to use the anniversary as an opportune time to present a new brand.
    • Board feels it’s time to “shake things up” – Sometimes, Boards are unhappy with their organizations because membership is on the decline, meetings revenue is flat, members aren’t happy, yada, yada. Trouble is, a new brand will not fix those problems, which often have to do with poor leadership, strategy and/or execution. By all means rebrand if your organization is making strategic changes and needs to craft a new image, but don’t think that a new name or logo will fix your problems. When did a new logo alone ever fix declining revenues?
    • New leadership wants to “make their mark” – I love this reason. No, not really. Rebranding to make a mark is all about the people wanting to make a mark, and less about the strategic needs of the organization. If you go down this path, your new name, logo, or whatever, will reflect the tastes of your current leadership. What happens when that leadership is gone? Wouldn’t leadership rather be known as the regime, for example, that fixed the organization’s revenue problems, ushered in a new membership model, created a new incentive program for staff, made the decision to go international?
    • Other organizations are rebranding – If other organizations in your space are rebranding because of fundamental shifts in the industry or profession that you must address, then yeah, rebranding makes sense. But if those other organizations are rebranding for any of the reasons above, I say let them spend their money while you focus on increasing membership and revenues.

    Do any of these criteria apply to your organization? If so, I suggest finding ways to respectfully ask your leadership to rethink the reasons. Better yet, redirect them to address more pressing organizational issues, like membership, fine tuning your message for the upcoming election, etc., etc. Good luck!

    In the next blog post, I’ll talk about how to deepen brand equity and recognition. Stay tuned!

  • 7 Reasons to Rebrand Your Organization

    7 Reasons to Rebrand Your Organization

    A brand is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product. A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization. — Marty Neumeier, Author and speaker on all things brand

    I recently did a webinar on branding and rebranding with good friend Jane Barwis, CEO of BRG Communications. We decided to do the webinar because many of our clients are rebranding or thinking about rebranding.

    Before we go into when it’s time to rebrand, let me tell you that rebranding will not fix your organization, increase event registrations, or increase membership. Rebranding could be part of a larger initiative to address organizational challenges, but rebranding on its own will not fix your problems.

    So when IS it time to rebrand? Jane and I think it’s time rebrand or seriously consider a rebrand when any of these apply:

    • Acquisition and/or merger – You’ve merged with another organization, you’ve been bought, or you’ve bought another organization, and together, you want to create a larger, differentiated identity.
    • Industry/profession has evolved – Perhaps your field has undergone some major changes, and you want to demonstrate that your organization has changed with the times and continues to be highly relevant.
    • Audience has expanded or changed, or you want to reach a new audience – Some of our clients now want to communicate directly with the public, or students, or customers of their members. Or maybe they now want to reach Capitol Hill. Targeting new audiences often requires a redo of your core messages and overall brand identity.
    • Products and services have changed – If your organization offerings have changed significantly, you may need to show a new brand to explain the why behind the new offerings, to tie them all together.
    • Need to distance from a negative image – Some organizations rebrand to start over and make a clean break from a scandal, a large misstep, or bad leadership.
    • Need to differentiate from competition – If the competition is fierce and you’re all looking about the same, a rebrand can help you distance yourself from the pack. A rebranding effort will force you to hone in on your (new) core mission, values and benefits, allowing you to more clearly communicate why you are different and better.
    • Geography change (state to national, domestic to international – Going from a smaller to a larger audience often means transitioning from a local or hyperlocal image and mesaging to a broader one. It’s a tricky transition, for sure!

    Do any of these criteria apply to your organization? If so, then you may be ready for a rebrand.

    In my next blog post, I’ll take about when it’s NOT time to rebrand and what you can do if your brand doesn’t need to change but your identity is looking a bit dated!

    What brand challenges is YOUR organization facing?

  • Your Member Journeys ARE Your Brand

    Your Member Journeys ARE Your Brand

    brand design on laptopI conduct a lot of branding and user experience workshops. And my design team works on a lot of corporate identity kits; we redevelop logos, templates, print collateral, email templates, yada, yada.

    While logo, font, and color are certainly important aspects of a brand, we believe that the user experience is the largest driver of the brand experience.

    Why? Because an organization can have the most beautiful logo and color palette in the world, but if the user experience is crappy, the brand will be crappy.

    And to us, the user experience is ALL the ways in which people can interact with the brand. What do you stand for and HOW do you make that known? What are your signature benefits and HOW do you deliver them? Why do people and companies join and HOW do they join? HOW do you answer the phone? HOW quickly and completely do you respond to emails? HOW easy is it to find information on the website and make a purchase? HOW does the brand respond to adversity?

    Of course, strong brands must have a strong visual identity. That’s where beautiful websites, social media pages, videos, meeting microsites and publications come in. These brand representations must be backed up by strong and consistent member journeys.

    If you have members and customers complaining about your store or membership join form, know that these experiences are hurting your brand. Resolve to fix them. Fast.

  • The Best Way to Develop an Elevator Speech for Your Organization

    The Best Way to Develop an Elevator Speech for Your Organization

    people holding speech bubblesI conduct a lot of branding and strategy workshops. My Creative Director Alex and I conduct them and we cover a lot of ground. We ask about the history of the organization, what they stand for, their signature benefits, why individuals and organizations join and why they remain, and so much more!

    My favorite part of the workshop comes when we ask clients how they describe their organizations to:

    • Their mom
    • Their neighbor at a BBQ
    • A 12th grader
    • A 5th grader
    • A legislator

    The discussions usually begin with talk of mission, vision, and values. We dissect a lot of industry jargon and we unravel a lot of acronyms.

    Inevitably, the best descriptions come when staff and members tell us how they describe their organizations to 5th graders. There’s something about stripping away the acronyms and the jargon that usually produces a succinct and compelling elevator speech.

    Some of my favorites from over the years:

    • A trade association: We help our members make money and stay out of trouble.
    • A union in the construction trades: We make the buildings in our city beautiful.
    • A company that manages a database of government RFPs: We help the federal government get the highest quality work, for the least amount of money.
    • A professional society in engineering: Our members make the world’s waterways safe for commerce and travel.

    The next time you’re struggling with a way to describe your organization, try talking to a 5th grader. Then capture the language that resonates best with said 5th grader, make it graceful, write it down, and train your staff and members to use that language.

    What’s the Matrix Group elevator speech? We help associations and nonprofits create amazing member journeys. We do it through web, mobile and social.

    What do you think of our elevator speech? What’s YOUR elevator speech? Please share!

  • What Employees Want From Office Space: Flexibility

    What Employees Want From Office Space: Flexibility

    About a year ago, I was facing a big office space decision. Do we stay in our current office or move? Keep the current space design or blow it out? Our landlord paid for a fancy architect to come up with new layouts and designs. In the end, we decided to stay in place, sign a short lease and use a modest budget to think about what the next generation Matrix Group office space should look like.

    I held meetings with staff, we visited other offices, and we scoured design magazines and blogs. After a year of discussions and moving furniture around, here is what we’ve learned:

    It’s not about offices, workstations or open space. It’s about flexibility. Turns out most of my staff like being in an open, airy area. BUT, on a regular basis, they want the option to work from home, be isolated so they can concentrate without interruption, or crash on a project with 2-3 other team members. It’s not unusual to find the IT team huddled in one of our huddle spaces during a launch. Or the new biz team meeting in Tatooine (one of our conference rooms) when crashing on a proposal.

    Small meeting rooms can meet a lot of needs. Previously, we had two small meeting rooms and one large one. The large room is used infrequently – a few times a month when we have staff meetings and for large meetings. We replaced the finicky projectors with large TVs and Chromecasts and never looked back. We use the small conference rooms for group calls with clients, troubleshooting teams, and as isolation rooms for people who need quiet time.

    Good design and lack of clutter are inspiring. Over time, office space just degrades. We accumulate junk, the walls get dinged, and stuff gets dingy. It’s so important to step back and give the office a fresh look. In our case, we didn’t have budget for a complete overhaul, so we cleaned the carpets, repainted some walls, bought some new lobby furniture and came up with new artwork for the walls. We also encouraged the staff to declutter their spaces; it’s amazing how much stuff I tossed just from my own office! When I walk around the office, I can feel the breathing room we created just by tossing a lot of junk we had stopped noticing!

    Rethinking how we communicate. On any given day, I have staff working from home or working in a location other than their desk. So how does the poor receptionist find people when they get a call? How do I find someone I need to consult on a project? In our case, Slack has been a godsend and a game changer. Using Slack, we can communicate directly with other staff. Even better, we have Slack channels for each client and each team (e.g., the MatrixMaxx team or the new biz team) so we can easily collaborate, share, and keep each other updated. The expectation is that all staff stay on Slack if they’re working. So it doesn’t matter if you’re working in the kitchen or Tatooine; you will respond if you get a Slack message. Most of us have Slack on our phones as well, so it’s easy to respond to quick questions. Yes, Slack has reduced the amount of in-staff email we send out.

    I’m almost done with the my office redo and the new wall stickers and artwork are coming next week. So stay tuned for a blog post with before and after photos. I’m loving our office and loving the conversations we continue to have about next generation office space.

    How about you? Do you love your office space? What’s working? What do you wish you could have and do?

  • What’s Your Membership Experience?

    I’ve blogged in the past about Vistage, the CEO membership organization that I’ve been a member of for five years. I was talking with a Vistage VP a few weeks ago and he summed up the Vistage experience quite succinctly: strong peer advisory group with well-run meetings, effective coaching and world-class speakers. In other words, the entire Vistage organization is focused on creating a membership experience that includes these 3 elements.

    I got to thinking. How many organizations have eloquently and succinctly described their ideal member or customer experience? Indeed, how many of us have architected how our customers interact with us and experience our services in an intentional way?  Alex Pineda, the Matrix Group Creative Director, talks often about how every interaction with a company IS the user experience, from the way the phones are answered, to how emails are responded to, how products are delivered, how invoices are sent, how conference calls are run, and how disputes are handled. As CEO, part of my job is to make sure that for every type of potential customer interaction, we’ve defined how we will respond.

    Here’s an example of a situation where the staff expectations were not well defined, so we kept falling down on the job. A couple of clients complained that after approving a proposal, we weren’t responding fast enough to kick off the project. Turns out that we hadn’t defined the turnaround time for creating the project in our system and kicking off the work. Depending on how busy a project manager was in any given week, it took between 1 – 7 days just to get a project entered into the system. So the project managers sat down and crafted a better process. Today, when a proposal is approved by a client, an email goes out the same day from the new business team to announce the project to the project manager and assigned team members. The admin team creates the project in the intranet within 24 hours of the approval, sends the link to the client and schedules the kickoff call. Doesn’t this sounds like a much better, more user-friendly, and more intentional customer experience?

    I think about how pleasant it is to call American Express. I’m never on hold for very long, I’m always referred to by name, I’m always thanked for being a cardmember for over 20 years, and if I’ve called the wrong number, I’m transferred directly and the person I’m speaking with stays on the phone until the next person come on. I have to believe that every little part of this whole experience has been carefully architected and tweaked over time.

    Turns out that architecting an amazing customer experience is really hard and requires paying attention to the big picture as well as the littlest of details. For me, the most important thing is realizing that every client interaction is part of the customer experience and we can, and should be, intentional about every single one of these interactions.

  • Why Rebranding Is Really Hard and Takes a Really Long Time

    Why Rebranding Is Really Hard and Takes a Really Long Time

    new-brandA couple of days ago, a Matrix Group client, a major trade association was quoted in a a major news story. The news organization quoted a statistic that the association promotes through its website, about the benefits of working with its members. The trouble was this: the name of the organization was wrong in the news story. You see, the organization had rebranded with a new name five years ago, but the news story still used the old name. This, despite a major effort to educate the industry, the press, trade publications, yada, yada. Ugh.

    For many years, I chaired a benefit auction for a local non-profit. The benefit was successful and well-known but one year, we were close to panic when ticket sales were much lower than anticipated. We quickly organized a phone campaign and found out something startling: many longtime benefit attendees did not recognize the name of the organization on the envelope. You see, the organization had rebranded with a new name three years earlier and we figured it was time to use the new name (on its own, without the “formerly” name) on the return address. Guess we were wrong.

    These stories point to the difficulties and challenges associated with rebranding campaigns, especially campaigns that involve a name change. Most organizations do a fine job communicating the changes via their websites, letters, postcards, emails, email signatures, voice on hold messages, advertisements in trade publications, and on and on. Trouble is, people aren’t necessarily paying attention. The letter, ad or postcard doesn’t register until your customer, partners and prospects decide they want to interact with your organization, on their terms, on their timeline.

    So what are the lessons here?

    • Know that rebranding is a long-term effort, it’s going to require constant and intense communications, and some people are still going to miss the message.
    • Use every communications vehicle possible to communicate the changes: website, email, letter, postcard, magazine article, magazine ad, banner ads, voice on hold message, email signature, video, news stories, etc.
    • Renew the old domain name and point it to the new site for as long as you can bear.
    • Make sure there are plenty of references to the old name on your website so that search engines will associate your new name with the old one.
    • Keep reminding your audiences of the reasons for the rebranding and reinforce the new name and images.

    How about you? Has your organization rebranded? What communications challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?

  • What’s In a Brand?

    Many of my clients are rebranding. I think there’s something in the air. Clients are changing their names, updating logos, creating new palettes, and revisiting collateral styles.

    But what does it mean to rebrand? Matrix Group Alex Pineda is obsessed with branding. He spends a lot of time thinking about logos, colors, typography, imagery, and user experience. Alex says that the sum of your customers’ experiences, over time, with your company, represent your brand and your brand promise. In the end, your name, logo and collateral may represent the design component of your brand but it’s the customer experience that helps you win, lose or retain customers.

    Every time your customer visits your website, receives an invoice, and reads an e-mail from you, that’s your brand. How your organization answers the phone, completes a project, resolves a problems, sends a useful e-mail, or ignores a complaint, that’s your brand.

    Alex also maintains that the design aspect of your brand should be consistent with the user experience. Think about the Apple brand. Apple promises a clean, simple, user-friendly experience. The logo is simple and spare. The website is simple and sleek. The language on the website and e-mails is friendly, free of tech jargon. When you visit an Apple store, the employees are friendly and it’s easy to get in and out of the store. All of that represents the Apple brand. Everything is consistent – by design.

    Changing your logo and colors doesn’t mean you’ve rebranded. What was it about the old brand that wasn’t working and that you now want to change? What are you doing to change the customer experience and your internal staff culture so that they match the promise of the new brand?

    Want to learn more? Alex recently did a Matrix Minute with me on branding. Check it out.

  • Social Media Gives Each Of Us Our Own Reality Show

    Social Media Gives Each Of Us Our Own Reality Show

    Remember The Truman Show, released in 1998? Truman Burbank thought he was an ordinary guy, but in reality, his whole life was one big reality show. It was a great story but a ridiculous premise.

    In 2003, MySpace was launched. All of a sudden, teenagers had a way to create personal web pages to share their profiles, photos, videos, artistic creations.

    In 2004, Facebook gave college students a way to broadcast their status so that their friends knew how to find them and know what they were up to. Over time, Facebook would open up, allow anyone to create an account, and allow us all to share status updates, photos, videos, interests, and our location.

    After a few years, critics, predicted that privacy would be the downfall of Facebook. Why would people want to share so much of their lives?

    Today, nearly 900 million people share the most intimate details of their lives on Facebook. Millions of people check-in from their current location every hour on Foursquare and other location-based networks. Over 100 million people tweet the details of their lives from Twitter: what they’re thinking, doing, eating, reading. The reality genre is the single, hottest genre on television.

    Just like Truman Burbank, social media has given each of us our very own reality show.

    Think about it. If you subscribe to a friend’s account on FriendFeed, you can see EVERYTHING she’s doing on the Web: what she’s tweeting, what she’s posting to Facebook, her blog posts, her photos on Flickr, her videos on YouTube. It’s sort of like stalking, only we encourage it and we admire those with the largest followers.

    We even title our social media reality shows. On most social networks, I’m jmpineda. I’m not a very big star. I only have 1,591 followers on Twitter, 302 connections on LinkedIn and 233 friends on Faceook. Meanwhile, a good friend has over 1,200 LinkedIn connections, over 10,000 Twitter followers, and nearly 800 Facebook friends. She’s got an amazing Klout score.

    The next time you pooh pooh the reality TV genre, ask yourself: Are you part of the craze with everything you’re posting and sharing on social media? What’s the name of YOUR social media show?

  • The Facebook Timeline is Coming on March 30 – Is Your Organization Ready?

    The Facebook Timeline is Coming on March 30 – Is Your Organization Ready?

    The much awaited Facebook timeline for brands is coming. On March 30, whether you like it or not, your organization’s Facebook page will convert to the new timeline format. Here’s what’s new:

    • It’s All About the Timeline. Facebook says the big, huge deal is the timeline. Facebook will automatically show a timeline on the right side of your page that shows previous months and years. Your fans will be able to click on a month or year and see updates and posts from that time period. Here’s the HUGE DEAL: you can customize the timeline to show events in your organization’s history pre-Facebook. For example, the New York Times’ timeline goes all the way to the 1800s!
    • Brand Image. Your new brand page will have a large cover photo at the top of the page. Instead of a tiny logo and a few photos, your brand page can and will feature a large branding image that you can design yourself. Coca-Cola’s brand image has images from their current advertising campaign, showing happy people of course.
    • Posts and Conversations. The rest of the page is divided into 2 columns to represent the passage of time AND separate your posts from conversations and messages. In the right column, you’ll see messages to your company, posts about you, etc.
    • No More Left Navigation. Many brand pages had multiple tabs along the left rail for their various apps like photos, videos, donation, yada, yada. In the new timeline page, your top 4 tabs will be visible; visitors will have to click to see all of your apps.
    • Messages Between Brands and Users. Finally! Brands and their fans can now have private conversations!
    • Featured Content. The old Facebook pages displayed all posts equally – you had an image, a title and a blurb. The new timeline page lets you feature content at the top of the page. Featured content is bigger and takes up 2 columns for added impact.

    Screen shot of the new Matrix Group Facebook Timeline Page

    So how can you prepare for the new Facebook timeline? Here are our recommendations:

    • Preview your new Facebook page NOW. Don’t wait until March 29 to figure out what your new page will look like. Start looking at it now and making adjustments.
    • Create a cover photo that communicates your brand.  Use the period between now and March 30 to create the image and test it. You may need to make some adjustments. You can test how your cover photo looks by clicking the preview tab at the top of your page. BTW, only admins can see the preview.
    • Review your Facebook strategy. What kinds of posts will you feature? Which apps will be prominent? How will you communicate with your fans?
    • Start featuring posts. Highlight recent posts by hovering over the right hand corner of the post and clicking on the star. You can also remove it by clicking on the star.  If you want to promote a past post, you can actually move it up by hovering on the right hand corner of the post, clicking on the pencil tab in and selecting pin to top.
    • Check your insights page regularly. As a marketer, the Facebook insights leave me wanting for more, but there is more and better data now available, including who recently “liked” the page and recent comments.

    Are you ready for the new Facebook timeline pages? What’s your strategy for taking advantage of the new format and features?