Challenge
A New Identity Fit For A Business’ Next Step The leadership team at Syslink Xandria knew the business was ready to evolve. But it also knew that some previous decisions had effectively erected roadblocks that needed to be removed if the company was going to take the steps necessary to elevate its business to new heights. The company’s very name — the same name it used for its flagship product — didn’t communicate well who Syslink Xandria was or what it did. Its web site was dark, hard to update, and felt dated to visitors. The website content no longer reflected the modern image and message the company wants to convey, not even how its products operated and solved the needs of its customers, SAP-centric enterprises and SAP managed service providers. Overall, Syslink Xandria had branding issues that were holding it back. We had a solution.
Solution
A New Name. A New Look. A New Direction. Concerns about Syslink Xandria’s name started with its own employees. Customers, they said, were confused about Syslink’s product offering and didn’t understand why the company and its product shared the same name. The solution to that confusion was easy: Find a new name. A truly memorable name needs to connote meaning without clutter or verbosity. To understand what Syslink Xandria’s new name should communicate, we started the renaming process with a brand personality exercise to help identify those most-important brand traits. But identifying those traits and selecting a name that somehow conveys them is only the beginning of the process. Due diligence must be completed to make sure the domain name is available and, just as importantly for a global company, those language translation issues aren’t going to cause a public relations nightmare somewhere down the road. With those issues addressed and a new name in place — Avantra — it was time to start giving the company a new look. Those brand personality traits and brand benefits identified in the naming process — confidence and peace of mind, strong and stable, insightful — would also be critical in establishing the company’s new logo and new branding elements — colors, fonts, and how those elements are treated. Even with a new name, logo, and branding selected, Avantra needed a new story to tell to its market, and that’s where we turned next. We worked with Avantra’s leaders to define their new messaging and a new way to tell their story to a world of potential customers. A compelling story that highlights that the company’s comprehensive AIOps and automation platform was a powerful tool that provided its users with SAP landscape management, automation, self-healing, and visibility into their IT infrastructure they can’t get anywhere else.
Results
A New Website And A New Approach To The Market This foundational branding work culminated in a fresh, intuitive, and uncluttered website for Avantra — one focused on getting this new message out to the market. The initial plan was to launch a fully redesigned site, but time and resource constraints meant those plans had to change. However, we didn't let that constrain our enthusiasm or creativity. Instead, we dug into the data and created a phased, iterative approach, batching the pages based on their visitor traffic and importance to the site. We then relaunched the most important pages first, followed by batches of less-visited pages. Now that the leaders at Avantra have a new story to tell and a new way to tell it, they have taken on new energy and run with it—incorporating that new look and new messaging into new brand videos, new tradeshow booths, digital campaigns, and even social media graphics.
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