How to build a global experience brand

In three short years, Everise has grown to be an almost $300M global experience company, with over 12,000 Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered employees powering over ½ a million customer service interactions on a daily basis.

This growth has come off the back of a series of amazing acquisitions and partnerships, including a global partnership with Microsoft, acquisitions of US-based C3|CustomerContactChannels and Trusource Labs, a joint venture with Korean BPO giant, U BASE in Malaysia and the acquisition of the company I co-founded, Hyperlab. Most of these events have happened in the past 12 month.

“From the outset, we have been focusing on bringing together the best people and technology to build an augmented workforce that is able to offer our visionary clients the transformative services they need to continue growing.” ~ Sudhir Agarwal, CEO of Everise & C3.

With a goal of becoming a $500M global experience company by 2022, Everise has acquired the pieces to the puzzle, but we were faced with the challenge of assembling them into a single brand strategy.

Here’s what we ultimately came up with…

Now, let’s dig in to how we got here.

Firstly, brand architecture matters

Planning on how your brand will be structured for the long term is always difficult because it is incredibly hard to forecast where your company will be in the next four or six years. But putting together a proper structure, and including brand architecture discussions in the initial stages, can help avoid numerous headaches.

Brand architecture refers to how a company establishes its brand in relation to its products and sub-brands. A badly designed brand architecture can create confusion among consumers and damage the brand’s equity.

Essentially, you have 3 main options to work with:

1. Master brand (aka, branded house)

Some examples of this model include Hewlett-Packard (before it split into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc) and Google (before they created Alphabet). In this model, all sub-companies, products, and services come under the master brand and share the same market position, customers, and budget.

It creates consistency and, at the same time, limits companies as to the customer base they can reach. Their brand positioning is now dictated by the master brand.

2. Endorsed brand (aka, house of brands)

In this model, each brand under the parent company retains its distinctive positioning and character and is allowed to target specific markets.

While the parent brand may endorse the sub-brand (e.g. DoubleTree by Hilton), it often has no prominence. Consumers usually have no idea what the parent brand is. For example, very few people know that Essilor owns the majority of sunglasses brands, or that Match Group owns most dating platforms.

But this model is quite flexible because you can take advantage of the parent brand’s positive image and credibility while being able to target specific markets.

3. Hybrid

An obvious example for this is Coca-Cola, which has a number of unified sub-brands (Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, etc.) under the master brand, as well as separate brands (Dasani, Fanta, Sprite). But this model is much harder to pull off than the first two.

The hybrid model is a mix of different brand architectures and usually comes after a number of M&A activities. It allows for older, more established brands to continue existing while giving space for newer ones to grow and carve out their niche.

Creating a united company

First, we had to decide which model to pick. We quickly discarded the hybrid model because we did not have the range of disparate companies and services that it requires.

We considered going for the master brand route, but we rejected this option too, knowing that it wouldn’t allow us to leverage our diversity. Each company under our parent company has its own unique positioning and target markets.

So we settled with the endorsed brand model for a couple of reasons. First, each sub-brand was growing and was already strong in their respective markets, so it made more sense not to disturb this. Changing the brand names and positioning may have also created confusion among our customers.

This model also brought many benefits. While we retained our brand independence, we were able to leverage the parent brand’s global presence and strength, given its size. We were also able to integrate our marketing and sales activities, allowing us to better target customers at lower costs. Lastly, we could cross-sell services and offer more solutions.

Giving ourselves a unified purpose

In the end, our goal of becoming a $500M global experience brand isn’t what drives us — it’s our purpose and responsibility to our customers. Ultimately, we are in the business of Elevating Relationships. This is the driving force of our brand and how we operate .

After deciding on the brand model and our purpose, we took on the difficult task of creating a united brand. We developed a three-pronged strategy for this.

1. Focus on our breadth and diversity

The whole point of the endorsed brand model is that it highlights a company’s diversity while reaffirming a single structure. On the ground, this means that our sales teams have a wider range of services to offer. We ensured that each brand was aligned with the parent company’s mission.

2. Articulate our unity

We wanted to embed a sense of unity that could be felt throughout the company — from customer service employees in the Philippines to Trusource Labs teams in the US and Hyperlab’s technicians in Malaysia.

We made the letter “V” in the logo a visual representation of this change and added “we are” above it to symbolize our being a global community. We also updated our website to reflect this — weareeverise.com

3. Tell a single story

While diversity and flexibility in services is our strength, we needed to ensure we told a single story to the outside world. This meant creating one website and redesigning our marketing materials such as business cards, sales kits, brochures, and adverts. It also meant defining our story as a company and articulating how each sub-brand fits into the overarching narrative.

And this is just the beginning, as Everise and our group of companies continue to innovate, elevate relationships and build a $500M global experience brand.

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This was adapted as a guest post for Tech In Asia, which you can read here.