Rebranding: The Aircall Story
All too often, I see the leaders of B2B companies diminish the value of branding.
Yet, in an era where there seems to be dozens of vendors to every problem, I believe branding to be the most important growth lever we have.
This is the Aircall journey to creating a brand identity that lives up to the company we love and lead our growth.
I’ve written it for the startups, marketers, and teams out there that dream working for a brand they love, but feel a gap between the current identity they present to the world and their desired ones.
Backstory
If you’re in the corporate world, you’ve likely used one of these before.
In 2009, I set up my first and last SIP phone system.
I didn’t have any telecommunications background, but I had a team of 50 with a high volume of daily support calls and outbound sales reps making 100–150 calls a day.
It needed to work.
The project took six weeks from start to finish, a week of fielding questions from my team post go-live (I felt like Ron Swanson in the swivel chair), and three weeks of fixing failures on the deployment, from start to finish.
At that point, I made the decision an IT telecom career wasn’t for me.
Now, let’s fast forward eight years to February 2017.
I first saw Aircall at SaaStr in San Francisco’s Bill Graham theater. I was checking out the exhibitor hall, and when I came across Aircall, my phone system nightmare came flashing back.
Intrigued, I went to the booth for a demo, and in a few minutes, I had set myself up with a Zimbabwe phone number (because, why not?), downloaded the app on my mobile, had invited teammates, and was making calls.
I couldn’t believe what took me months and a horrible experience earlier in my career was simply this easy.
This wasn’t just a product that I liked, it was a movement I felt connected to.
Soon after, I met our founder and CEO, Olivier Pailhes. There was something different about meeting him (and it wasn’t just that I’m a sucker for the French accent). There was ambition and humbleness running through him and his company; he didn’t just want to build a big company, he wanted to build a great company to work for and with.
In a world that seems to be ever-more homogenous, Aircall had an aura of authenticity that drew me in.
I knew it was something I could get behind.
Why Rebrand?
I give this background because without it, there is no foundation for a rebrand.
The same is true in your company. You can’t just be assigned the work; you have to be the brand (or what you believe the brand could be) before you can create the identity for it.
A brand is a representation of the actions, beliefs, and values that come together to form a market perception of your organization. And, in our era of saturated markets, authenticity is perhaps most important factor for attracting great customers, employees, and partners, while inspiring great work.
So, rebranding is a must when there’s a gap between your unique identity and how it is portrayed to the world.
How to Get Started
Our rebrand started 16-months before launch.
It’s a long time for a fast-growing company with no shortage of other work to be done.
The following is a glimpse into some of the key steps we made along the way.
Part I: What’s In A Brand? (The Brand Sprint)
In June 2018, we started feeling the brand identity itch. So, of course, we as a leadership team headed to Marrekech, Morocco, to meet for a 3-hour brand sprint, a la the Google Brand Sprint.
Seriously, we did that.
Amid the fun, we took to the whiteboard with the following goals:
1/ Draft a clear company roadmap.
It may seem obvious to you where your company is headed, but is it to your entire team? If it isn’t exactly, then you don’t have a consistent brand story.
We collaborated to identify exactly our achievements at specific points in the future (ie, 1-year, 3-year, 5-year).
The exercise is simple, but will bring about great alignment and insights.
2/ Define the Why, How, What
I won’t detail this too much, but check out the Simon Sinek video Starting With Why.
For employees to dedicate their all, it’s critical to have a mission beyond financials to accomplish the objectives set in exercise #1.
3/ Define Cultural Core Values
Next, we put our entire company together for two hours a room with the objective of answering the question: What makes a great Aircaller?
We used this question to identify the building-block values of our culture. .
For us, we narrowed this into four qualities: Ambition, Teamwork, Community, and Transparency.
4/ Narrow Your Audiences
You can’t build a brand for everyone.
Who is important to you? Customers? How about investors? What about the press? Does your sister’s friend’s aunt need to understand what you do?
We build Aircall for our (1) customers, (2) partners, and (3) employees. That’s who we want to be reflected in our brand.
Assure to narrow this so you don’t dilute your message.
5/ Move The Personality Sliders
Next, we challenged ourselves to identify our personality. In the actual branding work, we leveraged this to determine how we communicated the brand (demonstrated through color palettes, font, voice, etc).
To accomplish this, we put a list of opposing characteristics on a board and moved them along the spectrum.
In the end, we identified our core attitude to be modern & simple.
Recapping the Brand Sprint
The sprint the foundation — do not do any brand work before you can create actual alignment on what the brand represents.
Part II: External Views (Customers, Partners, and The Market)
What’s important to recognize is that a re-brand isn’t a silo’d activity completed in a Milten-like basement workspace.
And, given the immense work involved in recreating every asset, pitch, and spoken word you have it is easy to work this way. But you can’t.
For critical external perspective, we interviewed our customers and partners, and logged hundreds of feedback points to narrow in on a few questions:
- Why do customers/partners choose Aircall?
- Why do customers/partners stay with Aircall?
- Why did good-fit churned customers leave Aircall?
The results left us with clear direction on how to message our brand across every point of communication.
We combined this feedback with competitor research to identify consistencies & distinctions.
Ultimately, our brand had to best represent the perceived values of our best customers, partners, and employees, as well as establish a first-impression that differentiated us in the market.
Part III: Getting To Work
Alright, now we’ve got our start!
But, how do you start a process where you must rebrand every asset in the organization?
We broke the work into the following main components.
The Logo & Icon
One of the first elements of the work was the logo, since much else builds off this.
The considerations for a great logo were to represent the work completed in our Brand Sprint. But that’s just a start — many iterations came and went…
In the end, we agreed on the following concept:
Additionally, of the most important elements is its versatility across our website, white papers, online ads, trade show booths, etc. The symmetry we ended on provided this flexibility.
Main point: the preliminary work was critical. We made sure the attitudes, audience research, and team values were distinctly represented in the brand, and done so in a way that produced high utility and flexibility.
The Asset Review (The Final 3-Weeks)
It always comes down to the final push. No matter how much you try to get ahead, we all fall victim to Parkinson’s Law.
Three weeks prior to launch, all our marketing leaders joined for an all-week review of everything.
- On the about us page, should we be highlighting XYZ? Is that important to potential customers?
- On the sales page, we heard from our customers that ease of setup is critical. Why isn’t that reinforced in our primary customer story?
- Let’s call a few more customers to see if we can validate this further.
Every detail matters. And we reviewed every single one, multiple times. Into the wee hours of the night, on many nights. Leave no stones unturned.
(Note: You can’t ask this of your team. They have to desire to put great work in because they find it meaningful and are intrinsically inspired by the brand to do so.)
Part III: The Communications Plan
You can’t launch a brand without effective internal and external communications. Let’s touch on each.
Internal Comms Plan
I’ll only touch on one (of many) points on internal comms, because it can make or break your work: key internal influencers.
Realize that in a rebrand, people will always question certain aspects and decisions. Assuring key influencers are involved can get ahead of a launch-day disaster.
This meant including our company managers to help make certain decisions, see early work, and understand their importance in the branding effort.
If they were onboard, their teams would be as well.
Do not overlook this. If you launch without buy-in, even the best of work is doomed.
External Comms Plan
Keep the launch simple.
The reason for the rebrand is to build an identity for your company. Let your community know about the changes via email, chat, or blog, give them a glimpse into what it means, and then live it.
If you’ve done a good job, your community will think: Yea, that fits.
You don’t need anything more.
Wrapping It All Up: Living It Post Launch
You can push your company forward with a great rebrand. But, the design, logo, words, and palette is only as valid as the actions of your organization on a daily basis.
Remember, the brand leads your identity; it doesn’t create it. So, the work is never really complete — after launch it’s time to double down on how your organization lives it, evolves it, and represents it every day and in every interaction. Do that well, and you’ll attract the best and pave the way for building something that lasts.
