Most businesses need to re-brand on a fairly regular basis. The process can take months. It often involves a whole host of people – internal and external – brand strategists, marketers, creatives, probably the board up to the CEO.
Briefs will be written, agencies shortlisted and appointed, designs will be produced, presented, tweaked and re-tweaked. Customer opinion sought and fed back into the loop. Ultimately, a decision will be made. Brand Guidelines will be produced. Fonts and colours defined, logo rules, tone of voice established. Then comes the rollout. Signage, stationery, digital assets will all need to be changed.
And at the very last minute someone, somewhere will think to mention this to the people who actually manage the Customer portal. That was the call I received last week.
“I don’t know whether I have mentioned it before but we’re re-branding !” said my client.
“OK. That’s exciting. When do you envisage needing to roll out the new branding ?”
“err … well ….. today ?”
“Today…. You mean….this day that we are currently enjoying and which began at midnight about 14 hours ago ?”
“Spot on!” confirmed the client. “I guess it is all a bit ‘lastminute.com’”
“Yeesssss” I hoped I sounded like Jeremy Paxman. ”OK – send me everything you’ve got and we’ll see what we can do”.
If you’ve read any of my other blogs about the Hub you’ll know what’s coming.
We used Hub Themes and Communities to create a whole new branded look and feel for their Customer Portal and later that same afternoon we were able to switch the clients’ personal settings so she alone would experience how their Hub would look and behave given the new logo and colours.
After she’d showed a couple of colleagues, rolling the changes out to 2,500 customers the next morning took our client three clicks.