Branding the biggest technology company you’ve never heard of
Despite years of investment in traditional advertising, PR and high-profile sponsorships like Ferrari F1, and hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in new technology, customers and talent through corporate acquisitions, the brand was struggling to build a name for itself. Its CEO Charles Phillips (former President of Oracle) was far more famous than the company, and the companies it acquired were much better known in their respective sectors. Infor represented a lot of value and even more potential — to investors, employees, partners, customers and prospects. But that value wasn’t resonating in a big way with the general public or IT decision makers. And despite some wins around the edges, competitors like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Workday, Salesforce, Sage and Epicor continued to have greater familiarity and were seen as more innovative. Infor was still largely known as an ERP graveyard and an anonymous holding company — if it was known at all.
The situation
Infor was claiming to be something for everyone:
Big and a start-up
Global and New York
Rooted in design and science and data and open standards
Industry-focused and best of breed
All-in on cloud and on-premise and hybrid
Complete suites and a-la-carte applications
For large enterprises and for small/medium businesses
But it wasn’t taking a firm stand on any one of these ideas and using it to build a cohesive, memorable story. My creative team and I set out to help change that.
A clarifying idea
We knew the brand needed to focus on one message.
So we set out to define an authentic brand platform that would work for the company as a whole, and effectively trickle down to individual business units (industries and solution areas each had unique markets, products, marketing budgets and sales organizations).
And we needed to sell the idea internally, first to the CEO, and then to other vital stakeholders who would be crucial to a successful execution inside and outside the company.
We immediately collected the most prominent messages Infor had deployed into the market over the previous 5 years. This showed where the company had been, and what some in the market might recall.
The new brand platform would have to live comfortably in the context of all these recent messages. But because there was already so much in the air, we knew we wanted to keep it simple.
And we wanted to tell Infor’s story in a way that had value and meaning for customers, prospects, partners and employees.
What could we say that was own-able, authentic and uniquely Infor?
How could we capture Infor’s commitment to innovation, collaboration, user experience, and digital transformation—without saying innovation, collaboration, user experience, and digital transformation? (the same words everyone else in the industry was using)
We knew we needed to address Infor’s broad portfolio, which included:
- Verticals and micro-verticals
- Best-in-breed horizontal and point solutions
- Legacy applications and names
- Unique tech like Infor Ming.le and ION
- Infor CloudSuites
- Talent Science
- Dynamic Science Labs
- Hook & Loop + UX
- Infor Services
- Recent acquisitions like GT Nexus and Predictix
And we wanted to be able to talk about co-innovation, without being overshadowed by Infor’s better known partners.
We needed a simple message that would quickly convey what Infor does and more importantly how and why Infor does it. A message that was direct and meaningful but still intriguing enough to motivate people to learn more about the company.
We declared:
The Infor story is not about enterprise software.
It’s about understanding customers and what they need.
It’s about new ways of getting work done and embracing the future with courage.
It’s about businesses moving forward. And staying ahead. Always.
We searched for a phrase that could express these complex thoughts in just a few words. And we pitched a few ideas to the CEO before finally getting approval on one that really resonated.
We said that Infor was enterprise software — and a company — designed to help every customer move forward with its own definition of progress whether it be deploying point solutions so they can catch up, or orchestrating giant organizational leaps to the cloud so they can stay ahead.
It was an authentic position that referenced the concept of design at its most significant, and was true to the fact that Infor served organizations of all kinds in many different ways — but they had one thing in common, an drive toward not just change but real progress.
Our pitch deck fleshed out the meaning and rationale behind this statement which would go on to become the company’s tagline and form the seed of marketing campaigns and a wide range of communications internal and external for years to come.
After the CEO and Infor’s full executive team signed off on the idea we pivoted to preparing creative concepts for a global campaign. We drafted a creative brief along with Infor’s marketing department to set the work up for maximum success. It outlined the brand challenges we planned to tackle, the audiences we were trying to reach, KPI’s and more.
One of the mandates of the brief was that Infor’s new campaign be rooted in real Infor customer success stories. So we worked to envision different ways these could be brought to life. Because Infor had customers in so many industries, in order to make the campaign as relevant to the largest and most diverse audience, we knew the approach needed to be extensible and affordable to execute at a scale of potentially dozens of customer stories.
We narrowed in on three final execution ideas and presented each in similar formats to give the decision makers a clear picture of how the approved campaign concept would live in Infor’s most utilized channels.
To help cast this clear vision across as many of Infor’s communications channels as possible, we mapped how the channels would work with each other to build a deeper story and ultimately lead audiences to the company’s website for current information on products, services, corporate news, company information and contact options.
The final selected concept used playful illustrated elements, bright colors, and put a spotlight on evocative customer successes to grab attention and showcase how Infor is connected to stories of human progress. We helped pitch the idea to customers and successfully recruited a handful to take part in the first wave of the campaign. These stories set the foundation for creative execution across all channels and venues.
We executed the campaign across all media Infor uses to advertise and interact with its audiences. Placements included international airports like JFK and Heathrow, massive indoor and outdoor digital displays at sports venues like Madison Square Garden and the Barclays Center, outdoor kiosks, print advertising, social media posts, banner ads, trade-show booths and more.
Expanding the design system
After the successful and widespread launch of the corporate campaign, my team turned its attention to unifying other aspects of Infor’s communications. Because Infor markets its products by industry and solution, each business unit required its own suite of campaign assets. We developed a system with increased visual depth, flexibility, and quality to help every department and business unit put its best foot forward and use its assets to not just communicate its own message but also accrue to greater awareness and equity for the Infor master brand.
Making it easy to use
We authored and maintained a living style guide using the Frontify platform in order to catalogue everything from methodology to color palettes to visual examples of campaign deliverables. We created a sizable library on the Lingo asset management platform to democratize instant access to icons and other campaign visuals for use in marketing communications.
These tools and extensions of the brand campaign from a visual and messaging standpoint unified Infor’s communications in a clearly recognizable way that hadn’t been achieved in years.
TV
Then we broadened the reach with yet another significant addition to the campaign and an Infor first: a TV commercial. With an incredibly short window to produce creative, no budget and a mandate to be blunt with the message about what Infor offers, Peter Gagnon, Hook & Loop’s Creative Director of Film & Video, and I set out to make an ad that would cut through the clutter of other business ads on TV. Because TV commercials are by nature interruptive, we wanted to ensure that Infor’s TVC gave the audience something in exchange for time and attention — that principally came in the form of a catchy song that most anyone could enjoy whether or not they cared about business software and even whether or not they were looking at the TV.
During all my time at Infor I’d kept a record of songs that could be used for various purposes at the company — in online videos or pre-show music during events, for walk-ons by presenters, or opening films for our annual customer conference. I had discovered and bookmarked a track by a relatively unknown artist, Bazanji, that I thought could do the trick for us in this commercial. The song was ludicrously upbeat, and modern without being too out there for Infor’s business-minded target audience. We cut a commercial to the track using 99% original footage that our video team had shot over the past couple years.
After the concept was approved by Infor’s CEO, we negotiated the contract for music, finalized the edit, and it ran for six months internationally across the channels of NBC including and included multiple airings on on Meet the Press.
Final thoughts
This campaign concept and brand platform is only about a year and a half old. Infor’s demand centers are nearly all up to speed with the messaging and graphic framework, providing an unprecedented level of unity and cohesion across the company’s external and internal communications. The process has already yielded greater efficiency in the creation and production of assets across departments with fewer, more modern and increasingly flexible templates. Success will be ultimately measured by Infor’s annual brand study which shows how the brand is rated by IT decision makers in multiple markets. The Infor brand was already showing gains in awareness and equity year over year, and this work will hopefully help to accelerate that progress.
You can learn more about Infor on the company website.
Thanks to an incredible team: Chuck, Josh D, Peter G, Dani, Nan, Dan S, Anne Marie, Alicia, Peter H, Kim, Manisha, Nancy, Deb and Dan B.
My role: creative director & project sponsor
You can learn more about me on my website.
