7 Simple (But Tough) Steps to Rebranding Your Company
Beyond sketches and designs, a company rebrand requires deep soul searching, strong company alignment, and the flexibility to roll with the punches as the rebranding process unfolds.
How do I know? Because Powtoon recently completed a rebranding process that’s been well over a year-in-the-making. We learned some amazing things throughout, including seven steps that defined our process, and some important things to remember the next time your company wants to reimagine their look.
When a Company Outgrows Its Brand
When Powtoon was starting out, we were attempting to service a very specific niche: helping entrepreneurs and SMBs create engaging pitch decks and animated explainer videos. Our original brand was all about playfulness and adding a touch of awesomeness to communications.
After a couple of years of work, gaining more users, and reaching a wider audience, we started to see more people using Powtoon, not only for “cartoon communication,” but for a variety of purposes.
People were uploading images, working with typography, trying to create more business-oriented content. We saw more videos created in enterprises for internal communications and training courses. We worked like madmen to build the technology to make these new features and capabilities a reality.
The videos we were beginning to see Powtoon users create were more sophisticated than we imagined while retaining that feeling of “awesomeness” that was the core of our brand.
We soon understood that, not only as a product but also as a company, Powtoon needed a visual brand that spoke to this new, more complex reality.
Rebranding Step 1: Visualizing Your Company’s Values
As Powtoon’s Head of Design & UI/UX, the most important outcome for me was to create a high-quality brand, something to communicate the high-quality experience we work to provide our customers.
It was also very important to me to bring out Powtoon’s professionalism and the cutting-edge technology and design elements we use in our product. It was important to bring this to the forefront, and let people see it even before they try our product. In other words, even when they’ve only seen our marketing materials, or our website, or even just our watermark — we wanted to send this message from the very beginning. The brand has to communicate all this, without sacrificing the fun and approachable “awesomeness” that has always set Powtoon apart.
Rebranding Step 2: Matching Values to Messaging
Our next step was to match these values to our brand messaging. We held workshops with stakeholders, and we tried to bring out all the main keywords that describe our brand. Not only from the conceptual side but also from the aesthetic or physical side.
We immediately centered on Powtoon’s original slogan, “Bring Awesomeness to Your Presentations.”
That’s how Powtoon started: as a cure for boring presentations. The goal was to bring humor and engagement into any presentation. But since our founding, with our customers always innovating, and the product evolving in response, we understood that “the presentation space” was no longer an accurate description of what our customers wanted to do.
What was a rebranding multi-purpose-tech-company to do? That’s why we moved to this idea of a video. Not just a literal video, but the symbolism of an unplayed video. An unplayed video represents un-clicked potential and possibilities.
The visual is just a square with a small triangle inside, but the whole world can be tucked away inside of that space. You have to push the button in order to reveal this hidden world. A blank canvas. This awesomely captured the creative potential of our users and seemed flexible enough to encompass all of our potential future customers. Eureka! It was time to start drafting.
Rebranding Step 3: Let the Drafting Begin!
So we had this play button as a symbol of releasing the awesomeness. But we couldn’t just leave this play button to be the only hero, because a play button is very simple, and also — dare I say — kinda boring. What Powtoon does is bring something special, something unique and powerful to that play button. Everyone who uses Powtoon can release his creativity and his message to the world with that one click.
We thought about a lot of elements that could be this releasing trigger — what is the awesomeness? How do we show the awesomeness itself? We have this canvas, we have this play button. But those are more physical elements. Now we needed something conceptual that can frame the uniqueness of Powtoon.
Rebranding Step 4: Let the REdrafting Continue!
Thus began the process of redrafting. We went in different directions, exploring shapes and forms, even animals. During a company-wide hackathon, my team came up with an unrelated concept called “Project Unicorn.” When our CEO, Ilya, heard the name he had a crazy idea, “Why don’t we use the unicorn as part of our new logo?”
We were already looking for some kind of icon for our logo, and we were thinking about incorporating an animal. But we were thinking about regular animals. You know: monkeys, fish, elephants. But the more we thought about it, the more a unicorn began to make perfect sense.
Why a unicorn?
First of all, for a long time, our CEO has described himself as the Chief Executive Unicorn.
The reason why Ilya picked up this name is because a unicorn stands in stark contrast to the idea of a Chief Executive, and he wanted to underscore the fact that he’s approachable and open to newness as opposed to a run-of-the-mill CEO. But of course, a unicorn is also a magical creature. It’s a creature that nobody has actually seen, but everyone wants to see and wants to find because it’s something pure, beautiful, powerful, and unique.
What would happen if we made this unseen unicorn visible?
A Valuable Detour: Why spending time exploring ideas is important to your task
We started working on the unicorn version of the logo. The thing is, when we moved forward with trying to implement the design, the unicorn proved to be too complicated.
If our task was to use the unicorn as the only element of the logo, we could definitely create something that really works. But the thing is, we didn’t want to abandon our initial frame of the play button and the blank canvas.
We had to combine a very visible unicorn (so from one side, you could immediately identify the unicorn) and a play button, clear as day. We had to mix these two elements. As we went forward with the process and created different versions. It was looking like it was working, but… something wasn’t quite right.
Rebranding Step 5: Gathering Opinions
Once we had drafted and redrafted, it was time to get input. We worked with our management team, as well as soliciting feedback from others outside the company. It felt like we were showing it to millions of people, trying to get some idea on how we were doing. And that’s where we started to understand what wasn’t working. People thought it was a horse and others couldn’t make out what it was at all, almost no one deciphered that the basis was a play button. Many people simply said, “Come on Peter, maybe it’s too much, yeah?”
And they weren’t wrong, a play button and a unicorn are very strong symbols. One of them is very basic, the other is complicated. And mixing them together didn’t work.
Rebranding Step 6: One Final Iteration
With everything we learned from this process: Defining our values, updating our messaging, drafting, redrafting, and gathering outside input; we were ready for our final iteration of the new logo.
We decided to clean the whole thing up, and to create something totally abstract. We had the idea that there is a unicorn, and there is a canvas that is waiting for someone to release its awesomeness to the world. So we took the unicorn, not as a visual asset, but as an idea, returning to the unicorn to its unseen roots. We wanted people to feel its presence, without literally showing the shape of a unicorn.
So we created two diagonal lines with a gradient changing its color. It appears from the play button. That’s the unseen awesomeness that is the unicorn. It has this power to unleash something from within its boundaries. From this closed shape of a play button, releasing outside two unicorns that are exploding and initiating the journey of your message.
Rebranding Step 7: The Rollout
Now, with the rollout of our new brand in full swing, we’re basically giddy with excitement. We kicked things off with an announcement from our very own Chief Executive Unicorn, Ilya Spitalnik:
It’s been a big job. Powtoon has a lot of visual materials that are still online for all of our users, and we’re continuously working to update all of them with our new look.
And now that the work is done, it feels like a new era for Powtoon. Not only because we’ve started to look a bit more dashing, but also because this new brand provides everyone who uses Powtoon a new level of ideas about the brand, the company, our relationship with users, and our product.
The Biggest Rebranding Pitfall and How to Stay True
I’d like to conclude by discussing the biggest pitfall you will face along the way, and how your company can navigate the complicated rebranding waters.
With Powtoon’s rebrand, we wanted to bring our look into alignment with our values and how our customers were using the software. Much research told us we needed to become more appealing to the corporate market. We thought it was a good idea. We had data and advisors who all told us we needed to be more grown-up.
But when we started to work in that direction, we realized that we were losing the awesomeness. This awesomeness we expect others to bring to their communication, we were losing it ourselves! We knew that it was a mistake to keep going in that direction, because our users are also expecting us to inspire them, not only with our product and features, but as a brand.
The biggest pitfall you will face will be the temptation to try to appeal so hard to a target market that you lose what makes your brand unique.
Maybe it sounds cliche, but to make it through this pitfall, here’s some very simple (but not easy) advice: you have to stay true to yourself. You have to know your audience. You have to know why people love you, and why they would choose you and not somebody else. You need to believe in yourself, and evolve to the right direction.
Everyone’s process will look a little different, but I hope Powtoon’s process inspires you. Let me know how your company approaches branding in the comments below.
