Cooking Up a Rebrand (Round 1):

RelateIQ Becoming SalesforceIQ

I’ve been watching a massive amount of cooking shows lately. In fact, it is rare when the Food Network isn’t left on at home for 8 hours a day. Chopped in particular has dominated my queue. I hesitate to compare a rebranding journey to Chopped because the title implies a certain negativity and that’s not at all what happened with this rebrand — quite the opposite. What did happen was a refreshing and incredible experience that is comparable to what the winning contestant must feel at the end of a Chopped episode.

For those of you who do not know the show, four contestants (they can be amateur cooks, pro chefs, or even teen cooks), must provide three courses for a panel of judges. They have minimal time to create the dishes from a basket of pre-selected ingredients, which must all be used in the plates they create. The basket of ingredients always creates certain constraints and the contestants must elevate these constraints all while presenting well and tasting decent. If the dish does not meet up to the standards of the judges, one person is chopped at each round. Chopped’s set-up and its storyline seems to exactly align with the rebranding process that our team experienced.

Appetizer Round

RelateIQ was acquired by Salesforce the summer of 2014 and we knew it was a possibility that we would rebrand to better align with our new parent company. When that day came, we were given complete trust by our executive team to tackle the problem and take time to really research our new horizon. The only two constraints?

1. Keep the ‘Q’ in our original logo, which embodies the essence of our culture.
2. Our new name would be SalesforceIQ.

The first part of our research phase really was our appetizer round because it would set the tone for the entire identity look and feel and stimulate our appetite for what would be the main course of the rebrand. This first round would also have an extreme time constraint, just like in a Chopped episode, as it all had to be done in just a few weeks in time for Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, San Francisco’s largest yearly convention. We kicked off the rebrand challenge thinking of the personality traits we love about our internal culture and made a list of words that described how we wanted our customers to feel when using our product or viewing our marketing assets.

Word Ingredients

Our internal culture is one that I am extremely proud to be a part of and the environment we work in fuels creativity. So describing our broader team’s personality came easy. Those words were: Approachable, Witty, Thoughtful, Genuine, and Friendly.

We also had vocabulary to describe how we want our customers to see our product. Words like Intelligent, Calm, Authentic, Energizing, Simple, and Reliable came to mind. The traits that we chose gave us the bedrock for the type of styles we wanted to explore further during our research stage.

Visual Ingredients

We filtered through thousands of inspiration pieces that got us excited and most importantly, exemplified each word we chose to describe our personality and product. The chosen images were compiled onto many large-scaled vision boards that we printed and pinned to the walls of our rebranding war room. Each board was dedicated to our logo systems, illustration style, color palette, typography, and language.

Our branding system board was our most important board as it would inspire the final logo. We scrutinized our favorite logo systems that included sub products as we were aware that our product would continue to grow. So for example, the combination logo (utilizing both an icon and word mark) below had a fresh take utilizing its icon by taking its geometric components and changing its direction and color within each sub-brand. It was a perfect example, among many others, of being witty, energizing, simple, and intelligent while having a clear purpose for its sub-divisions.

Logo Umami

With any major change, it’s important to break something just to be sure that it has been working all along; since our icon, the “Q” would be a major part of our logo, we considered revisiting its style. A large amount of time was spent tweaking it, changing its position in relation to the word mark, editing the shape, forcing it to fit into a new world. Ultimately, we concluded that our original icon shape and style was the best option and was the most successful. In fact, it became clear during the rebrand, that it had become a symbol of RelateIQ’s culture and was an element that needed to live on.

What we did tweak was our color palette. RelateIQ’s teal had become part of our team identity as well, so we didn’t want to throw it out, but it was time to breath new life into the color. The legacy palette was made to compliment our older teal, which was a warmer and muddier pastel green. It often appeared too drab on marketing materials and a brighter, cooler turquoise could potentially punch up our site and social avenues. It would also serve us well to compliment Salesforce’s blue, which is similar to a cerulean, warmer blue.

So if we were to keep our original icon, but bring the two worlds together through color, the giant that is Salesforce and the startup that was RelateIQ, what would that union look like? Thoughts of how our team has blended with the Salesforce culture and how both could make something great together inspired the final icon below. Our new turquoise represents the bright future for SalesforceIQ, but also hints at the history of RelateIQ’s previous palette and ultimately its legacy. The new turquoise blends into Salesforce’s blue from left to right, symbolizing RelateIQ becoming SalesforceIQ.

The word mark also bridged the two worlds by leveraging Salesforce’s approachable font and utilizing the “IQ” part of our word mark to describe our personality and culture. We originally thought that the lowercase version of “IQ” seemed like a youthful and energizing option, but ultimately found that the word was difficult to read. Instead, using an edited Gotham capitalized “IQ” was easier for the eyes to separate from the rest of the word while still representing our personality traits.

Many iterations were explored during the “appetizer” round of our rebranding challenge. And yes, some of our suggestions were chopped, but it resulted in a better outcome to ultimately win this round. When I look at our new logo, it represents the RelateIQ past, it’s spunky early days when our team worked endless hours in a basement with the vision of building great products that people love. Our success is proven by joining our parent company, Salesforce to create intelligent and leading edge products.

In the next round (the entree round), we’ll explore how the design team built our brand guide in it’s entirety. You could say it’s the “meat” or “vegan meat” of the basket. Stay tuned…